Hollow: A Memoir of My Body in the Marines

Bailey Williams

Nov. 2024 · Abrams

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A powerful, coming-of-age memoir of one girl’s struggle, adrift in warrior culture

At eighteen, Bailey Williams bolted from her strict Mormon upbringing to a Marine recruiting office to enlist as a 2600 — a military linguist. But the first language the Marine Corps taught her wasn’t Arabic, Farsi, or Dari. It was how Marines speak to, and about, women. There are only three kinds of women in the Marine Corps, she was told: you can be a bitch, a dyke, or a whore.

Determined to prove she’s not whatever it is the men around her believe a woman to be, Private Williams turned to an eating disorder, intending to show her discipline through the visible testament of bone. She ran endurance distances on an increasingly Spartan diet, shoving through her own body’s resistance. Pushed to the brink by a leadership and a culture that demands women shrink themselves, she finally looked to the girls around her, and began to wonder what else she’s losing. Quietly but inexorably, the power of other women’s stories whispered an alternative path to what it means to be a woman, and a warrior.

Hollow is a story for anyone whose identity has been prescribed to them— and has dared question if there is another way to live.

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Bailey Williams is a storyteller and yoga teacher. She served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 2008-2011 and attended university at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. When she’s not in the mountains with her very large dog, she can be found in her tiny cabin reading and baking scones. She is grateful to live in Alaska, specifically on Lingít Aaní, the beautiful homelands of the T’aaku Kwáan people.