← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Struggling with an Eating Disorder in the Marines
00:17:21
Bailey Williams discusses her memoir about that period of her life, Hollow: A Memoir of My Body in the Marines.
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- [00:04]
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- [00:18]
Alison Stewart
This is all of it from wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Before we start, we want to let you know this conversation is about disordered eating. When Bailey Williams was a teenager, she struggled with bulimia and binge eating. She often ran 10 miles a day and ate nothing more than an apple for dinner. She became so hungry that grass and dirt started to look appetizing. She did all of this as a member of the United States Marine Corps. Bailey was up front about her history with disordered eating. When she joined the Marines. Her recruiter did not seem to be overly concerned. And once Bailey entered boot camp, she saw the way Marines treated female recruits who weren't deemed deemed fit or thin enough. She was determined never to be the kind of woman that male Marines snickered at behind her back. But her intense training distracted her from her real purpose. Learning Arabic to be deployed as a translator. She pushed through the injuries with life altering consequences and tried to brush off inappropriate behavior from men. But after a while, Bailey learned she couldn't outrun the insidious nature of her eating disorder. She was honorably discharged in 2011. She writes about the experience in her new memoir, A Memoir of My Body in the Marines. Bailey Williams, welcome to all of it.
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Bailey Williams
Good morning. Happy to be here.
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Alison Stewart
When did you know you were ready to write this book?
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Bailey Williams
Oh, what a lovely question. I think the creation of the memoir very much coincided with the proactive process of recovery. I wrote it over nine years, many revisions, many drafts. And at a certain point I just realized that, and this is always a craft question with memoir. How much of your perspective now do you put back into the story then? And just something I chose to do with this book is really keep it anchored in this almost hermetically sealed. It begins the day I walk into a recruiter's office. It ends the day I leave the Marine Corps and really try to just let that intense experience be its own self contained world. And I think that probably took, yeah, a couple of years, many five years after leaving the military, before I was, you know, stable and grounded enough to be able to just tell the story.
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Interviewer
What concerns or fears did you have about writing so candidly about your experience in the military?
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Bailey Williams
You know, the biggest one is, is kind of a grandiose fear and that is that a lot of military writing, there are certainly the brilliant novels and memoirs that question some of the internal policies and Kafkaesque bureaucracy. But there's also a lot of military memoirs lean towards hero worship or this protection of the military and uplifting the military for what it is. And I think I had this real fear that this would be seen as unpatriotic or un, I don't know, like dissent without, you know, I know what I was in the military just long enough to hear the kinds of ways we spoke about women who, women in particular who complained, who said, hey, the way this is happening is not actually fair. And what we generally said was, well, she just can't hack it. She shouldn't be here, Marine if she can't handle it. And it's not even personal. It's not about you. And so I think I had this fear of not participating in a solution based conversation. And it is a memoir, you know, it's just my personal experience. It's not a policy discourse, but it is my attempt to say, like, hey, there are things happening that we really need to address before we get to.
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Alison Stewart
Your time in the Marines. It would help to understand your history a little bit. When did you first start developing an eating disorder?
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Bailey Williams
You know, it's very insidious. I was raised Mormon and I started fasting when I was about 7. So I learned really early that to deny the body food was to release it from its animal grip and kind of move closer to the spiritual realm. And that always appealed to me. I was intrigued by that. So I started to not eat when I was seven. And then puberty just add in all the cultural messaging of being a young adolescent in the early aughts and there was a sense there was, you know, all this pervasive. And I'm happy to see that. I think this is beginning to change. I think it has changed in wonderful ways. But there's definitely a lot of cultural narrative that in order to be attractive or good, you have to be thin. And so around 11, I started getting a little bit more, less about the spiritual component. And like fasting is like this little tiny monk child and a little bit more I want to be seen a certain way that I equate with thinness.
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Alison Stewart
Why did the Marine seem like a good choice for you at that point in your life?
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Bailey Williams
Well, in part, I, you know, I first looked up hercular station when I was 17, so, you know, prefrontal cortex, not fully formed. There's a level of just like that youthful willingness to go for it, you know, that, that, that power of youth. I mean, as a, as a young woman, there's just that energy of like, I will, I will go for it. I'm, I'm willing to try something. So there, there Was a. There was a desire for something that would be hard and something that would be challenging and something where I could prove myself. I also. The other prong of that is I was raised extremely conservatively and had a lot of respect for the military. I really believed. I honestly believe that my service as a Marine would be humanitarian. I would be building schools in Iraq and talking to women and children and really uplifting this humanitarian vision. That was my only tiny little glimmer into what the military was like, because I just never heard any critique of the military. I didn't know there was any. And then finally I'd left the Mormon Church. I knew that I really objected to the language of gender roles that I experienced within that faith. I knew that wasn't right for me. And I wanted a meritocracy. I wanted to be somewhere where I could step into myself as not a girl, but, like, as a person. That wasn't my experience. The recruiting process, yeah, to say the least. In fact, I wrote a book to say that was not my experience. But the. The appeal of that was splattered over the rhetoric. You'll see. You'll still hear it, you know, people commenting on the military like, well, just so long as you have one standard, that's it. That's all we care about. We don't care. And it's like, that is not accurate on the ground.
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Interviewer
You know, it shocked me when I read your book that the recruiter did not seem that concerned when you brought up your history with the eating disorder. It just was like, okay, knowing now what you know, why do you think your recruiter did not seem particularly concerned with your mental health struggles and with your eating disorder?
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Bailey Williams
Oh, my Lord. There are so many amazing books on this subject. I'm thinking of the historical disenfranchisement of women and the. Especially in the medical space where there's an assumption that it's mostly hysterical, it's mostly in our feelings, it's mostly in our heads. And the statistics still show that women are less likely to receive care. You know, we're less likely to be prescribed towards a specialist or given painkillers, or more likely to be told, like, you're probably fine. And I think there was just this total lack of believing that an eating disorder was with anything other than, like, oh, you know, just a stage. And teenage girls, you know, they're weird with food, no big deal.
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Alison Stewart
And that's all. That's all you think it was?
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Bailey Williams
Well, that's all in the sense of there's, you know, institutionalized misogyny within all of it, all the systems involved here. But. And, you know, there's also the fact that I did enlist during the 2008 surge into Iraq, so enlistment quotas were really high. And I do feel like there are some things in my book that are reflective of that time period where there was pressure to pump out baby Marines. Like there. Like we were trying. They. There was a drive to get more bodies and boots. I do think. I wonder sometimes if my behavior would have been more questioned in peacetime.
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Alison Stewart
My guest is Bailey Williams. Her new book is called A Memoir of My Body in the Marines. It's about Bailey's experience struggling with disordered eating while a member of the Marine Corps. In the Marines, there seems to be a big focus on people being, quote, squared away. What does it mean to be squared away?
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Bailey Williams
Kind of the term that comes to mind is just really professional, sharp and professional bearing, a neatness, a precision, a. Sometimes we use the term frosty, just like a sense of being really good at your job and really unbothered by any kind of messy emotional fluctuation.
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Alison Stewart
Oh, I see. Okay. One thing I did want to point out before we get any further is that you really wanted to deploy. You didn't want to stay in the U.S. why did you want to deploy so badly?
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Bailey Williams
That's a really good question. I. It's especially because on this side of it, I have a really different perspective on military operations, and especially in Iraq and Afghanistan. You know, I. This is trying to remember at 17, why that was certain, 18, why that was so important to me. This is embarrassing to admit, but I think a lot of it was wanting to prove myself, wanting to see if I was brave. And there's something I've read in a number of other military memoirs and novels of just this. And this is. This is very, very egocentric. But it is a useful kind of egocentrism. The desire that war will show you who you really are. The desire that you will know yourself in a way that is so. So grand in scale and yet so intimate in perspective. And there was something about that grandiosity. You know, I wanted to be a warrior. I felt strongly identified as a fighter and wanted to do that, which is interesting to me, too, because a lot of the language about women in the service, there's. There's often language around, oh, you know, women just don't have it in them to be warriors. And it's like, I don't know what you're talking about. Like, yeah, some of us do.
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Alison Stewart
Like, yeah, it made me.
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Bailey Williams
A lot of us do.
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Interviewer
It made me wonder the way you were eating, or lack of eating, I should say. Did you have enough physical strength to get through it all by eating so little?
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Bailey Williams
You know, this is. This is the wild thing right there is incredible potency in a young body. Like, I enlisted when I was 18. I served until I was 21.
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Interviewer
You just.
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Bailey Williams
I just had a lot of resilience. And in fact, that's one of the big takeaways of the book, is that I spend so much of it hating my body for her perceived weakness, when it's really like, I was running 100 miles a week on a starvation diet and I was still scoring at the top of every physical fitness test. Like, that was actually a really strong body I had, you know, or you. I just tapped into something. Adrenaline also is worth noting, is a remarkable painkiller. And I, you know, in some lenses. The book is a discussion of adrenal fatigue, what it feels like to be living in this hyper urgency all the time. Because every meal I ate everything. Every way I presented myself, every word I spoke was under the lens of, we are training to go to war. Are you ready? Kind of, um, you know, artificial urgency, because we weren't in a combat deployed unit. I was at a school. Just created this sense of necessity internally that allowed me to override, you know. You know, when I was in treatment, I spoke to other women with eating disorders who'd had similar experiences where when you're on the other side, you look back at it and you're like, oh, my Lord, how did I run? You know, a marathon distance on an apple? Like, that is absurd. And I. It's. It's not sustainable. It's. It's definitely not sustainable.
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Interviewer
Yeah, you're right. In the book. I never once considered I wasn't eating enough in the book, which is. Yeah, yeah, amazing. Something else you write in the book. I thought this was interesting.
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Alison Stewart
You write, bulimia was a Grecian monster, one with two faces, one reserved, one howling. Could you explain that?
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Bailey Williams
You asked about the squared away thing. I think there's. And I spoke a little bit about the optics of thinness, the moral values that I assigned in a woman's body to present myself a certain way. And so there was this division of selfhood of how I was seen, how I was perceived, and then the actual experience that I was having inside. I think when I actually finally began to try to get help for my eating disorder again, the common response was, williams is fine. Like, she's she, she, she does well in, in her work. She's, she is, you know, physically, physically in shape, which is a whole other conversation. But there was just this perception of that because I had put on this face, I had been squared away. I kept my emotions locked down. But of course, that isn't real, right? Like the, the inner life, you know, I was, I was a bulimic teenager. There was a, there was a very emotive, angsty inner life going on there that I show in the book through the really emotionally volatile relationships I had with, with men and with friends and with my own family. Like, I was grieving, I was mourning. I was, I was an animal who was starving. And there was a grief that echoed through everything I did, though I didn't see it at the time.
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Interviewer
Well, how did the Marines treat women.
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Alison Stewart
They deemed who are overweight?
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Bailey Williams
Well, one, I think different. I'm really reluctant to speak to just the female experience in the Marine Corps because different units, different commands, different leadership, everyone has their own experience. I do feel, however, that there's a pretty pervasive narrative. Marines have the highest physical standards, and we're really proud of that. And there is a fairly cruel judgment of people who are overweight. And I've been informed, I can't swear on public radio, so I can't use the term that we would use. But it was not kind. It was very derogatory to anyone who didn't fit the height and weight standards. And it wasn't just women. I think that applied to men, too. My friend Ryan Lee D'Austi writes about this beautifully in her memoir Formation that, you know, with. I'll paraphrase, but within the military, there's no one who's really old. There's no one who's, who's physically disabled in the active Marine Corps. Of course, there are in medical facilities after the fact, but in youth and mandatory fitness, you have. We still find a way of judging each other. And so who becomes the one who's judged are those who are overweight. There's a really harsh, harsh narrative there. And I write in the book, you know, we'd have these weigh ins and men and women alike would be wearing sweats and doing calisthenics in the saunas and drinking salt water and doing all these, like, taking laxatives. Just kind of like. Yeah, yeah.
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Interviewer
Have you heard from former Marines who've read your book?
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Bailey Williams
A few. Yeah, especially, yeah, some friends.
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Interviewer
And what was their response?
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Bailey Williams
Thank you so much for asking that. I feel like there's, I just feel so much love and appreciation for the support of my friends. And it is frankly extraordinary, validating to have women who I served with, who I admired, who did really well, who deployed and did our job honorably, who, who went on to work and amazing fields like using their experience in military, like for them, like women I really saw as squared away for them to say, wow, me too. I mean, it's, it's not a fun thing, but it was a sense of validation and solidarity and a sense of wow, you know, these things that I'm describing, the sexual, the casual sexual, sexual harassment, we all just had to deal with it. And there is something very, there is something beautiful in taking the hardest, ugliest chapter of your life, turning it into a piece of literature and connecting with people over it like that has been one of the most extraordinary experiences.
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Interviewer
My guest has been Bailey Williams. The name of her memoir is A Memoir of My Body in the Marines. Bailey, thank you so much for sharing your story with us.
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Bailey Williams
Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.
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