Vivid and harrowing… the writing was unrelenting…

NPR’s Fresh Air

Poets and fascists know the value of words. They connect, transport, illuminate, and celebrate. They can also denigrate, other, and malign.

I spent my 20s backpacking and writing a book pondering language. Particularly how language underlined one specific subculture. I went to the Defense Language Institute and while I sort of learned Farsi and Dari, what I learned most fluently was lingua Marine: how we spoke of bodies, how we spoke of violence, how we spoke to and of women.

The story — as well as the sexual violence in the Marine Corps — kind of got stuck in my head, until it became the book Hollow: A Memoir of my Body in the Marines.

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Featured on NPR’s Fresh Air

Listen to my interview with the incredible Tonya Mosley on Fresh Air here.

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  • Illuminating and infuriating.... A staggering achievement.

    —Publisher’s Weekly Starred Review

  • Raw and powerful.

    —Julie Nelson, Librarian

  • I feel reading this is the closest you can get to feeling what it is like to struggle with mental illness if you haven’t gone through it personally.

    — Tiff Kay

  • Raw, unflinching, and necessary.

    — Tasha Lindbeck

  • This book is a masterpiece. It’s beautiful, brutal, heartbreaking, heartwarming, and a million other things, but at the end of the day, part of what makes this story so mesmerizing is the fact that it exists in such extremes. There’s a yin and yang to trauma: If you make it out, you’re awarded a new lease on life and a perspective not everyone has.

    — Chloe Anderson, photojournalist

  • This brutal, riveting, and wry gut-punch of a story transports readers deep inside the world of a young Marine with a dangerous eating disorder. I promise Hollow will expand readers’ understanding of ‘collateral damage’ and the will it takes to reclaim one’s own body and life.

    — Clare Frank, author of Burnt: A Memoir of Fighting Fire

  • Bailey Williams’s memoir adds an important and under-represented voice to the genre of military memoir: the unvarnished experience of a woman serving in uniform.


    — Ben Kesling, author of Bravo Company: An Afghanistan Deployment and Its Aftermath

  • [Hollow] will have you riveted to the page and leave you reeling with empathy. This is an astounding book about pain and the empowerment that rises out of it.

    — David Abrams, author of Brave Deeds and Fobbit

  • A visceral, powerful, and illuminating memoir of women, bodies, and the military. Bailey Williams writes hauntingly…. Hollow is a necessary and compelling book.

    — Kathleen Glasgow, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Pieces

I believe women.

That time I got to publicly denounce the Secretary of Defense, it was fantastic. Read my Op-Ed for The Los Angeles Times.

LATimes Op-Ed
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