Lost in the Stacks: Hollow - A Memoir of My Body in the Marines

In hindsight, it probably wasn’t the best idea to recruit a young girl with a history of anorexia, self-harm, suicidal ideation and trauma to the Marines. But the recruiter had a quota and Bailey had a plan. Only 18, she would remake herself into the perfect Marine: a bad-ass soldier who saw combat and happened to be thin, very, very thin. 

The Marine Corps had other plans in mind for Bailey. Female Marine recruits were routinely denigrated, harassed and derided as whores. A female Marine who did well? She must have slept with her higher-up. A female recruit who attracted male attention? Her own fault for even existing, the slut. A female recruit who reported sick? Weak, worthless, didn’t she know there were real soldiers fighting in combat? 

As nauseating as the sexism was, there was no fellow soldier, no Corporal or Sergeant or Master Gunnery Sergeant, who was as cruel and demanding as her eating disorder. You’re fat. You’re a whale her sickness told her. So at boot camp in Parrish Island, at combat training in North Carolina, and foreign language immersion in Monterey, Bailey learned not only how to be a Marine but how to consume the least number of calories without blacking out. Binging, purging, running and calorie-counting consumed her days and tortured her nights. 

Hollow: A Memoir of My Body in the Marines by Bailey Williams is a raw and powerful account of a young woman trying to find her place in the Marines while fighting her own war with her body.