Book Review: "Empty" by Susan Burton
“Empty” by Susan Burton
Synopsis: 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 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.
Rating (out of 5): 4
Trigger Warnings: eating disorders (duh), emotional abuse, divorce
Review: I say this carefully, as I mean it in the psychological sense and not the way we use this word in common parlance, but eating disorders are necessarily egocentric. While people with eating disorders (yours truly included) are often compassionate, empathic, and high-achieving, the disorder demands a level of personal hyperfocus that can be shocking or alienating to the observer. Eating disorder memoirs are a tricky niche, as they are often triggering to those with a natural affinity toward the subject (and intentionally triggering oneself is an enormous element of disordered eating), and alienating to those who are less familiar.
At a rough point in my life, I read a number of eating disorder memoirs. As Burton discusses in '“Empty,” these books often served as how-tos, or as benchmarks to measure yourself as “not sick enough” against. Burton has written a book that is cognizant of the year in which it is published: she never divulges her weight or clothing size, intentionally avoiding the comparison game.
Burton’s focus on Binge Eating Disorder is important, as it is both the most common and most-ignored eating disorder. Anorexia and bulimia are often held on a sort of perverse pedestal, as they involve restriction and/or compensatory behaviors—atoning for the “shame” of over-consumption. Almost every eating disorder (including anorexia) involves at least intermittent binging behaviors, but it is rarely discussed. This allows binge eating to hide in the dark, when it is incredibly commonplace.
Burton is a producer on This American Life, and her storytelling power is as strong as you might expect. She is not a warm or effusive narrator, and the effect of this book can be searing. There is certainly no fluff coloring these pages, and quite a great deal of anger. However, I found this a much more effective and helpful exploration of a life obsessed with food than the vast majority of eating disorder memoir that currently exists. If you can handle the topic, I highly recommend reading this.
TL;DR: A worthy addition to the eating disorder memoir canon. Triggering as hell but compelling.
If you liked this; try (I’m including mostly articles. As I’ve mentioned, I find a lot of the eating disorder book canon harmful and counterproductive):
“There Once Was a Girl” by Katy Waldman (article)
“People are Starving” by Suzanne Riveca (article)
“Hunger” by Roxane Gay (Bookshop | Kindle)
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