Empty

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Diet

Cultural histories of eating disorders start with the saints. Personal histories start with first diets.

Diet is a strange word, one that describes both a deviation from the norm and the norm itself: the foods that make up a day, a week, a lifetime.

From the beginning, my diet was a big part of my story, even the one others told about me. All babies like rice cereal, my mother will say. But you didn t.

In the high chair, I would tighten my lips and turn away.

When I was two, I started preschool. At the first parent ­teacher conference, they told my mother, Susan never eats snack.

The information didn t surprise her. I refused so many foods that she d come up with novel ways to get them into me. In the morning I would sit at the kitchen table and she would crack an egg into a sippy cup and mix in cranberry juice. When she set the cup before me, I d peer down the hole at the thick drink. Beside the cup would be a colored vitamin, its surface rough like construction paper. My mother would be emptying the dishwasher, the radio going. Occasionally the voice of my father, the news director of a local station, would come through the speaker: This is W-­O-­O-­D WOOD Radio, and I m Bob Burton. I was so small that the white Tulip chair was big around me, like a throne. I d sneak the vitamin under the seat cushion ­grainy beneath there, with crumbs and small tan-­foam flecks and ignore the drink.

Recalling encounters with foods I disliked as a small child raises an old alarm in me. A sip of a soda at the zoo one afternoon, the prickling shock of the bubbles. It would be more than a decade before I would try something fizzy again. Melba toast at a white-­tablecloth restaurant in Chicago. The next day, I vomited. The bright yellow worm of mustard on a hot dog at a public beach. The jagged chopped nuts on a hot fudge sundae, even though I d asked for it plain. In any choice about food, I always preferred plain.

I went through primary school

Susan Burton s writing has appeared in Slate, Mother Jones, New York, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. She is a former editor of Harper s and a producer of This American Life. Her radio documentaries have won numerous awards. The film Unaccompanied Minors is based on one of her radio essays. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their two sons.

Her tale of compulsion and healing is candid and powerful. People

Susan Burton s Empty is a smart, brave gift to the world. She pulls back the curtain on an ailment all too many suffer with and often die from. Bravo! Mary Karr, author of The Art of Memoir and The Liars Club

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. Her fury is like a flashing light in a cave, or a portal. 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. The result is a book that wields a fearsome intimacy. Claire Dederer, The New York Times

Residing inside all of us is a secret so fraught that it becomes unspeakable, and for Susan Burton, that secret was food: How it controlled her and how she tried to control it. How it haunted and comforted, becoming at turns her fiercest adversary and comforting companion. Empty is a tour de force of both vulnerability and strength, a memoir so unflinching and brave that it forces us to peer into our own dark places with newfound honesty and compassion. By giving voice to her shame, Burton teaches herself and the rest of us how to find power and freedom in the telling. Lori Gottlieb, author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

Susan Burton s Empty is by turns touching, frightening, fiercely candid, and beautifully written.  In this story of a teenager s furtive eating disorders, 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