Empty A Memoir Susan Burton by Susan Burton 9780679644040, 0679644040, B07YJZ7CWB instant download after payment.

Growing up, Susan Burton - an editor at This American Life - had never heard of binge eating. She just knew she felt her best when she was empty, "like a straw", as she says "something you could blow through." 

"Burton has sidestepped the clichés, and captured the enigma of attempting to sate, by gluttony and starvation, our human vulnerabilities.”  -  Jill Ciment, author of The Body in Question

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 she hadn't escaped unscathed, and in the fallout from her parents' breakup, an inherited fixation on thinness went from "peculiarity to pathology." 

She went from success to success — she went to Yale, scored a dream job at a magazine right out of college, and married her college boyfriend. But in college, the compulsive eating got worse — she'd binge, swear it would be the last time, and then, hours later, do it again — and after she graduated she descended into anorexia, her attempt to "quit food."

“Burton’s memoir is valuable because she goes beyond simply confessing her shame; she rakes herself over the coals, and in doing so she models how anger can be used to clarify a story. Her anger gives the book its considerable power, its substantial grace and even, in the end, its meaning... The force of it makes us not just appreciate but actually feel the force that drove her to commit her actions in the first place.”  -  Claire Dederer, The New York Times

In tart, soulful prose Susan Burton strikes a blow for the importance of this kind of narrative and tells an exhilarating story of longing, compulsion and hard-earned self-revelation.