Author: Susan Burton
Susan Burton’s Empty tells the story of her early struggles with anorexia and binge eating.
“The book, from beginning to end, is a document of anger,” said Claire Dederer in a review for The New York Times.
“There’s quiet fury at its center — a nuclear sun that radiates not out at the world, but back at the author herself. This is decidedly not the work of someone who’s worked through all her issues, as the jargon goes,” Dederer said of the memoir.
The author’s “anger gives the book its considerable power, its substantial grace and even, in the end, its meaning — which goes against every received idea of what good memoir is, and how it ought it to function,” added the review.
“Burton started dieting at 9 and then as a young teenager became anorexic. But it’s her adolescent bingeing that takes up most of the book’s pages — a secret she can’t stop telling,” Dederer said.
Dederer is the author, most recently, of the memoir Love and Trouble.