Empty: A Memoir

An editor at This American Life reveals the searing story of the secret binge-eating that dominated her adolescence and shapes her still. "A smart, brave gift to the world. Bravo!"--Mary Karr, author of The Art of Memoir and The Liar's Club For almost thirty years, Susan Burton hid her obsession with food and the secret life of compulsive eating and starving that dominated her adolescence. This is the relentlessly honest, fiercely intelligent story of living with both anorexia and binge-eating disorder, moving past her shame, and learning to tell her secret. When Burton was thirteen, her stable life in suburban Michigan was turned upside down by her parents' abrupt divorce, and she moved to Colorado with her mother and sister. She seized on this move west as an adventure and an opportunity to reinvent herself from middle-school nerd to popular teenage girl. But in the fallout from her parents' breakup, an inherited fixation on thinness went from "peculiarity to pathology." Susan ent