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The SOV Book Club will meet at 6 p.m., Sunday, February 23 at Forbidden Peak to discuss the book "Hollow: A Memoir of My Body in the Marines," by Bailey Williams. 

Online description:

“Illuminating and infuriating . . . A staggering achievement.” (Publishers Weekly starred review)

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.