Empty: A Memoir

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Synopsis
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 ClubFor 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 entered into a painful cycle of anorexia and binge eating that formed a subterranean layer to her sunny life. 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.&” Binge eating is more prevalent than anorexia or bulimia, but there is less research and little storytelling to help us understand it. 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.
Copyright:
2020

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
Book Size:
320 Pages
ISBN-13:
9780679644040
Related ISBNs:
9780812982725
Publisher:
Random House Publishing Group
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Susan Burton
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
Nonfiction, Biographies and Memoirs, Parenting and Family, Psychology
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

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