Empty

Growing up, Susan Burton had never heard of binge-eating. She just knew she felt her best when she was empty, "like a straw", as she says "something you could blow through."

For almost thirty years, Susan Burton has hidden her obsession with food and the secret life of compulsive eating and starving that dominated her adolescence.

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 she hadn't escaped unscathed, and in the fallout from her parents' breakup, an inherited fixation on thinness went from "peculiarity to pathology." She 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."

This is the story of living with both anorexia and binge-eating disorder, moving past her shame, and learning to tell her secret.