Bailey Williams was 18 when signed up for the Marine Corps, in part, she says, to escape her strict Mormon upbringing. During her three years as a military linguist, she pushed her body to extremes to prove her strength. She began running four hours a day, starving herself and binging and purging. Later she learned that eating disorders are more prevalent in the Marine Corps than they are in any other branch of the military.

“There’s a significant overlap in values that you’ll see in someone who’s committed to an eating disorder and someone who’s committed to being a good Marine: a level of competition, a level of bodily self-denial, and the belief that self-mastery comes in the form of physical prowess,” Williams says. “Those values make really good Marines and pretty solid chances of developing an eating disorder as well.”

Williams’ new memoir, Hollow, offers a vivid and, at times, brutal account of being a woman in the Marine Corps while struggling with disordered eating. She says that one of the things that drew her to the military was the “promise of meritocracy that I would be judged on my character and my effort — what I could control — and not my gender.” But, in fact, the opposite was true.

“My gender was so aggressively [judged],” she says. “I was sexualized from the first day, and that never really ended until the last day I left the Marine Corps.”

After being honorably discharged from the Marines in 2011, Williams spent most of her 20s backpacking and writing, which helped her change her relationship with her body and overcome her disordered eating.

“The story in Hollow [is] I feel within my own body that I am inherently weak,” she says. “And over the years of writing it, I was actively working on cultivating this new story of my body, which is actually I’m really strong and I’m very much capable of holding this younger self that … didn’t have that sense of value and self-worth and strength.”

Interview highlights

On going from the Mormon community to the Marines

I really struggled with some components of Mormon culture that I experienced as a reprimand to be smaller, to be quieter, to be a follower and not a leader. I knew that I didn’t want that. But I still had the imprint of that incredibly patriarchal upbringing that made it very hard for me to even understand that there was another way to live. I assumed somebody needed to be in charge of me. I needed some structure, some leadership, some degree of something I could plug into, some organization where I could feel like I was a participant. And the Marine Corps, it was another religion for me.

On her eating disorder

An eating disorder weakens you, but you don’t see it that way when you’re in it. I knew that what I was doing was harming me. I could feel it, especially in the end when I was very sick. Like, I could feel these warning lights dimly going off in my body, like something is very wrong internally. And yet I always found this mental acrobatics to justify my eating disorder as the only thing that would fix it. …

Bingeing and purging, that felt awful. It was just a horrible experience. So obviously the answer was I needed to just not eat, like that’s going to fix it — which is not at all true. It was so inconceivable to me that to feed myself would actually strengthen me. I think this really speaks to how inherently unsustainable an eating disorder is, because effectively you are crippling your energetic force. Right? Like you’re taking your life force and you’re trying to constrict it and say, “I can live on less,” and then, “I can live on even less than that.”

On her concern for women in the military during the Trump administration 

Since the recent election, I kind of have felt this really familiar fire under my skin. Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, is saying that women are incompetent and that their presence in the military causes love triangles and drama. And the conversation about women in combat is a really charged one. And it distracts from the fact that ostensible leaders saying that kind of dismissive, reductionistic language is going to seep down through the ranks and it is going to affect women like me who are nowhere near combat, but are still going to be hearing this language of inherently: Your value within the Marine Corps, your value within the military is less than a man’s because you are not as mission critical. … And that kind of “othering” dismissed the heck out of the contributions of women who have been leaders in the military and have been smashing all these barriers as long as they’ve been in.

On the normalizing of inappropriate behavior and the silence around sexual assault

I was conditioned to understand that basically anything I heard that was inappropriate, the thing to do that would best convey that I wanted to be on this team was silence. So it starts there. And then there’s the casual touching, like the man who would just find an excuse to stand behind me and put their hands around my waist, or who would move me physically with their hands. …

And then you learn to not believe other women that you know. The first platoon I was in, there were women who had had a sexual violation, I don’t know the details fully, but I do know that the perpetrators were back in our platoon. [There had been] some slap on the wrist, some degree of being removed. And then they were back. … I learned to question when women said, “This thing happened to me,” because I was hearing, “Well, what were you wearing? Had you been drinking? Were you supposed to be there? What did you expect?”

On being sexually assaulted and deciding not to report it

I, at no point, seriously considered reporting that assault, in part because I lacked the language to name it, and secondly, because I knew it wouldn’t be taken seriously. Or, at least, I felt that it would not be taken seriously. I saw and heard for years how we spoke about women who did report sexual assault, and I knew that it would somehow be my fault. I was there, I hadn’t been drinking, but I was there. …

I just so absolutely anticipated that the response would be, But did he really? … It was violating and painful and sad and it was like, I don’t want to expose this to scrutiny and to doubt. … I knew it wouldn’t be taken seriously. And if it was taken seriously, it was going to be my life that got harder and not his.

On how she feels in her body now as a civilian and a yoga teacher

The years since leaving the Marine Corps have been so beautiful. I have been outrageously blessed and just have had a really great last decade or so. Yoga was very transformative. I’ve practiced and taught for almost a decade and just learned different perspectives of feeling like my body is an ally and not something to subjugate. I think of my body as a teacher and like a very good teacher and a profoundly wise and intuitive teacher. I know this book is quite dark. I know I worked with some really dark elements within it, but I also would name that I feel so much joy within my physical being and within my relationships and within my family. And I know in my heart that some of that joy I would not feel in quite the same way had I not known the alternative. So, yes, I feel great joy in my body and a gratitude that comes from recovery and knowing that there was a different way to live in my body that is no longer my story.

To find out more, or get help in dealing with an eating disorder, contact the National Eating Disorder Association or text “HOME” to 741741.

Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.