Susan: Empty tell the story of the eating disorders, both anorexia and binge eating disorder, that defined my adolescence and really my adulthood too, though I wasn't able to admit that until I was in my forties. What happened was, almost a decade ago I signed a contract to write a book that was meant to intertwine the story of my adolescence with a cultural history of teenage girlhood. I'd always been really drawn to mythology of the teenage years ever since I was a Seventeen magazine-obsessed middle schooler in 1980s Michigan. I started writing that book, marching along through the cultural history. Midway through the first draft, my eating disorders just took over the narrative. I was paralyzed. I'd never told anybody about the binge eating. It was a secret I'd been keeping since my adolescence. I'd kept it even from my husband. We met when we were seventeen. I didn't know what to do. For years, literally for years, I kept trying to write the book I'd committed to, the cultural history. I was too scared to write about eating disorders for a bunch of reasons, but in large part because to do honestly would force me to admit that they'd never really gone away, that my obsession with food still defined my life. I was no longer bingeing, but my life was definitely still organized around food. The thing was, I really wanted to write about them. It felt urgent and unresolved. There was part of me that knew it was the story that I needed to tell. Eventually, with the encouragement of my editor who's really wonderful, I was able to just embrace that desire and stop denying what I wanted and write the book I wanted to write, which in a way is like a metaphor for eating disorder recovery itself.