Review: "Hollow" by Bailey Williams

Hollow by Bailey Williams
Published November 2024 via Abrams
★★★★

Williams was perhaps an odd candidate for the Marines: raised LDS, she had been taught that girls were less-than and that her purpose in life was to be a wife and mother—to support her husband to be the best LDS man he could be. She joined the Marines in part because it was a world away from her upbringing, because in the Marines a woman could be strong.

But in the Marines she learned something else: in the Marines, she learned, she could be a bitch, a dyke, or a whore—those were her only options. She could not be one of the boys (though that was a lesson learned much later), and she would never, ever be allowed to forget that she had a female body. And she learned that the eating disorder that she thought maybe she could rid herself of in the Marines was not ready to be rid of her.

Of all the scars I carried as I sat twitching at my desk over my Arabic, perhaps the most disorienting was this: I did not believe I had the same right as men to dissent. The aftershock of a male clergy, an absolute lack of female spiritual leadership: I'd learned to trust men more than women, including myself, including the discomfort of my own body. (loc. 1757*)

This is a 3.5-star read for me. I found the early parts of the book slow, perhaps because so much of her early time in the Marines was a rude awakening regarding how poorly women in the military were treated; it is—through no fault of Williams—unpleasant reading. It serves its purpose, though, as throughout the book Williams gradually gets desensitized to the insults and degradation and direct or indirect threats of violence...and then, finally, starts to understand that what she is hearing and experiencing just isn't right.

Males had their standard to prove. Be like Him.
Females had our standard to prove. Don't be like Her. (loc. 1321)

The Marines are not a good place to have an active eating disorder. I mean, no place is a particularly good place to have an active eating disorder, but it's so easy to see how the setting played into the worsening of Williams' bulimia—heavy emphasis on appearance, constant degradation of "females", constant sexual harassment, and absolutely zero understanding of what eating disorders are or how they should be addressed.

Because Williams was assigned to study languages, her trajectory in the Marines was different than one might assume; years passed spent in the States, struggling with Arabic and then being moved on to Farsi and beyond. It's hard not to wonder how her experience might have been different (better or, quite possibly, even worse) if she'd been on a different track; but then, it's hard also not to wonder how her experience might have been different if layer after layer of higher-ups had responded to her calls for help with "let's figure out how to get you the help you need" rather than "but if she's still showing up to work, why does it matter if she's throwing up X times a day?"

Mostly the ghost months blurred as my body quietly began shutting down. (loc. 3996)

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.