A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. And my guest today, Bailey Williams, has written a new book that gives a vivid and at times brutal look at being a woman in the Marine Corps while struggling with disordered eating. During her three years of service as a military linguist, Williams writes about how she pushed her body to extremes to prove her strength, running for hours a day, starving herself, binging and purging, which caused damage to her body, including her esophagus.

William signed up for the Marine Corps at 18, partly to escape her strict Mormon upbringing. But she'd come to realize the military was similar to her experiences growing up Mormon, a culture of secrecy, especially for enlisted women, who she writes were told to stay quiet about the sexual advances from superiors and fellow servicemen.

Williams' story is one that we don't hear often. Women only make up about 9% of the Marine Corps. And still, of the five military branches, it has the highest percentage of eating disorders, according to the National Institutes of Health. Bailey Williams is a writer and yoga instructor who lives in Alaska. And her book is called Hollow, a memoir of my body in the Marines. Bailey Williams, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you so much for having me.

Bailey, let's start off with this really staggering statistic. Why does the Marine Corps, from your view, over-index with people suffering from eating disorders? There's a significant overlap in values that you'll see in someone who's committed to an eating disorder and someone who's committed to being a good Marine. A level of competition, a level of bodily self-denial, and the belief that self-mastery comes in the form of physical prowess.

I think everyone's experience of an eating disorder is unique. I think we're all a confluence of a lot of different factors. But I do feel that some of the rhetoric that goes into the marine culture, especially in recruiting, might even appeal to people who have certain grand desires of themselves and the really embodied sensation of wanting to be good and wanting to succeed and wanting to challenge themselves differently.

And those values make really good Marines and pretty solid chances of developing an eating disorder as well.

I think it's so interesting you use the word values. Is there a difference between, say, the Marines and the Army and the Navy? Does each of these branches kind of have their own standard for women's bodies? Yes, and proudly so. Within the different services, there's different ways of perceiving ourselves, but Marines are very proud of our reputation. We are the few, we are the proud. We are the smallest branch, and we are fiercely proud of having the highest physical standards.

There were just so few of us women. There was a certain weight and expectation of needing to meet male standards. You grew up in West Virginia. When you turned 18, as I mentioned, you dialed up your local Marine Corps recruitment office and signed up basically on the spot. Why were you so eager to join the Marines in particular?

I enlisted as a Mormon girl and had a very particular perception of what the military was and what it was I would be doing. Growing up, we had a copy of an oil painting that I absolutely loved. It was a depiction of General George Washington kneeling in the snow at Valley Forge and praying.

And in Mormon culture, if not doctrine, there's this understanding that all of world history, all the affairs of human enterprise were divinely set up the way they were to ultimately accumulate in a 14-year-old boy named Joseph Smith being in Palmyra, New York, to receive these golden plates that were then translated into the Book of Mormon. And so in this conceptualization of

the cosmos, I understood the United States as the promised land. And that we spoke of it as the promised land. And it's sometimes referred to as the cradle of restoration. Now, that narrative has started to change within the Mormon church as that church has become much more global in nature. But it was certainly something I grew up with. So from that lens, joining the military was an act of safeguarding the promised land.

Very grandiose concept. And if I was going to do it, of course, I was going to go for the most stringent, most demanding, most, in my opinion, honorable branch. You know, this is really interesting because one of the things that also stood out to me, and I think a lot of people who come from a deeply religious background can understand this, is that you actually grew up trusting men more than you trusted women, including yourself. Yeah.

Yes. And that was such a powerful aftershock of an all-male clergy and the whole conversation of men having an inherent discernment that as a woman, it was my job to support and facilitate and follow, but not to question. And that definitely set me up to be very susceptible to some of the baser sexism that I encountered in the Marine Corps.

You, as a young person, in thinking about how you would leave your home, you grew up in West Virginia, you wanted to leave, you wanted to find your way, and you chose the military. You could see the similarities, even if it was unconscious. What did you know about the Marines before you enlisted? Like, did you have in pop culture or in movies or in your environment at home, like,

images of the military that really made you feel like this was the place that you would belong? I knew nothing. I somehow had picked up just in the social ether that the Marine Corps was like the hardest core or the most demanding. Um,

In line with being raised in a very conservative household, I never heard any criticism of the military. I was blithely unaware that there was any, actually. I was unaware that we'd been anything other than wildly successful in all of our affairs abroad and had only ever heard hero worship. I think it was a recruiter you met when you enlisted who said to you,

The thing about being a Marine is that we don't really care who you were before. Once you become a Marine, what is behind you is irrelevant. And I want to dig a little bit deeper into what you were trying to get away from, because what identity were you trying to shed, the thing that you were running from?

I knew that some of the stories, the narratives that I'd been told of what it meant to be a girl and what it meant to be a woman did not feel right in my body. I really struggled with some components of Mormon culture that I experienced as a reprimand to be smaller, to be quieter, to be a follower and not a leader. I knew that I didn't want that, but I still had these, you know, just like the imprint of that incredibly patriarchal upbringing there.

That made it very hard for me to even understand that there was another way to live. I assumed somebody needed to be in charge of me. I needed some structure, some leadership, some degree of something I could plug into some organization where I could feel like I was participant. And the Marine Corps was, you know, I just described it. It was another religion for me. When you enlisted, you went in having experienced issues with disordered eating. Is that correct? Yes.

Was that something that they asked you about when you signed up? Yes. Yeah. Well, actually, I openly disclosed it because I wasn't sure if it would disqualify me. And what did the recruitment officer say to you? How did they handle it? About the same thing that I heard any time I tried to get help for my eating disorder once it resurged and became significantly worse once I was in, which is, well, you're not really skinny enough to have an eating disorder, so it's probably not that bad. The recruiter said something pretty similar. Well, you look fine.

That becomes an ongoing theme throughout the book. And I would love to have you read a passage that expresses your state of mind and some of what you did while serving. And before I have you read this section, I want to note that there is the use of the word chit, that's C-H-I-T, which means going on leave. Is that right? Yeah.

Chit is a medical order from a doctor that exempts you from physical duty to some degree. For example, if you're on chit, you might be on chit to not run for a while while your ACL is mending, something like that. Here's a neat little tip from a misinformed corporal during a nutrition briefing. So nearly entirely wrong. It felt like being sandpapered. If you want to lose weight, pick your goal weight and add a zero to it. And that's how many calories you should eat in a day. Intriguing. That allotted me 970 calories a day.

If you want to mess up your head even faster, run 16 miles and still only eat your goal weight plus zero calories. Then you too can wake up in the middle of the night with hunger kneading your stomach from the inside. I nod my knuckles in my sleep. I woke up with blood on my pillow, noting with mild interest I was resorting to self-cannibalism. I turned the pillow over. I routinely slept with ice packs on bare shins. The frostbite blended in with other scars, mottled like blue bark.

Damn, Williams, you must be the first Marine to get frostbite in Monterey, an NCO laughed. I laughed along. Hilarious. If no pain, no gain, then I was rocking. Every time someone implied it was characteristic of females to be fat and broken, I furiously clocked another mile, right hip clicking along. When rumors circulated a female was malingering for going on shit, I flew out the door, shoelaces double-knotted, shouting at my injury to go on, hit me.

And when she was asking for it, or she's lying, she wanted it, I protested by running long hauls along the gray coast. I rarely cried. Sometimes, though, in the gray cocoon of oceanic fog, miles alone up the coast, hunger cracked into something else. Then I slowed on the sand, dropped my hands to my thighs, and took shuddering breaths.

What's so powerful about the way you write about your eating disorder is the language that you use. It's at times relentless. You're writing almost, put me inside of your body. The relentless way you withheld nutrients and exercise. It was very much for me the first time that I got a real lens into the hell of having an eating disorder. And I

I'm really curious, how long did it take you to write this book, to be out of your illness, to be able to write about it with such clarity? First, thank you so much for your kind words. They're

The hope with how unflinching the writing is was to show what that space was like simply because when I had an eating disorder, people who really loved me and were really trying to be kind would just say the worst things. It was like maybe I can illustrate like what this looks like from where I'm standing. And hopefully it will help other folks who have eating disorders or love people who do.

I worked on this book for nine years. The bulk of it was written by the time I was about 26 or 27. And the writing coincided with recovery. I have spent the last decade in like the meditation and mindfulness space. I've been a yoga teacher for, that's been my major way of supporting myself for years. And for me, you know, the events in the book are,

It's just my increasingly deranged quest to make myself fit in by being smaller, because that's what I feel is being asked of me. And I use the term deranged really intentionally. I believe it comes from the French to be removed from the land, de ranger, to have a lack of relationship with land. And so for me...

Writing was the accumulation of a lot of miles spent walking. I left the Marine Corps with an injury that really hurt, and what helped for me was movement. And I started walking and started backpacking and spent most of my 20s backpacking as much as I could, as frequently as I could, and building up this new story in my body. Because the story in Hollow, I feel within my own body that I am inherently weak.

And over the years of writing it, I was actively working on cultivating this new story in my body, which is actually I'm really strong and I'm very much capable of holding this younger self that didn't have me. It didn't have that sense of value and self-worth and strength.

It's so interesting because even your younger self in the Marines at 18 and for those three years that you served, there is also there's the desire to be small, as you said, but there's also this simultaneous desire to be strong. And one of the ways to do that, of course, is through nutrition, fuel in, fuel out, and

I want to get a sense, though, what was your disordered mind telling you about the impact of the binging and the purging and the starving yourself and what that was doing to your body in this world where being strong is such a value? This is the heart of the paradox, right? Like an eating disorder weakens you. An eating disorder weakens you, but you don't see it that way when you're in it.

I knew that what I was doing was harming me. I could feel it, especially in the end when I was very sick indeed. Like I could feel like these warning lights dimly going off in my body of like this is not like something is very wrong internally. And yet I always found this mental acrobatics to justify my eating disorder as the only thing that would fix it.

The problem, for example, OK, so binging and purging, that felt awful. It was just a horrible experience. So obviously the answer was I needed to just not eat, right? Like that's going to fix it, which is not at all true. It was so inconceivable to me that to feed myself would actually strengthen me. I think this really speaks to how inherently unsustainable an eating disorder is because effectively you are eating.

crippling your energetic force, right? Like you're taking your life force and you're trying to constrict it and say, I can live on less. And then I can live on even less than that. And I can live on it. And it's like, I felt like I was drawing my life closer and closer within me and like wrapping it as close as I could around the bones because I felt like somewhere really, really deep inside, if I just kept this archaeological expedition somewhere, some deep down layer of me was good and worthwhile. I just had to find it.

And that mindset is inherently crippling compared to you have worth and value exactly as you are, so feed yourself. What type of feedback were you getting from those around you, from your superiors, your fellow service members, who would see you go on these long runs for hours a day, and they would also share meals with you? Oh, admiration and approval, definitely. Yeah.

In fact, I once or twice heard men stand up for me because they saw me running so much. There was one time I dropped into a colleague's barracks room to borrow a book, The Psychology of Killing. I remember that distinctly. Went in, borrowed this book, and at that moment, the NCO on duty walked by. And my being in a male room was grounds for punishment. And so he definitely, you know, chewed us out. And then he said, well, I'm going to let you off this time because I see you running all the time. I'm

I was like, well, okay. And so that kind of thing was in my mind when I was tired and wanted to take a day off. It was like, well, my reputation, my entire sense of selfhood really revolves around being the endurance runner. So as long as I'm doing that, I don't know, like I'm doing something to claim my place within the Marine Corps. No matter how tiny it is, it makes me feel like I'm doing my best.

You have this quote from Maria Hornbacher at the top of one of the chapters. It's just so powerful. She's the writer of the book Wasted. And Wasted is about a woman struggling with an eating disorder.

And the quote says, when a woman is thin in this culture, she proves her worth. We believe she has done what centuries of a collective unconscious insists that no woman can do, control herself. A woman who can control herself is almost as good as a man. How much of your compulsion to have control over your body was also you trying to prove that you were as good or as equal as the men around you?

All of it. I enlisted, one of the greatest appeals of the military was the promise of meritocracy, that I would be judged on my character and my effort, what I could control, and not my gender, which is something that no one gets to control. It's just how you are. And that was just simply not the experience I had. My gender was so aggressively, I was sexualized.

From the first day, and that never really ended until the last day I left the Marine Corps. Like if someone managed to say something reminding me I was a girl and that that was inherently problematic, effectively every day of my enlistment. There were times as I worked on this book for nine years where I really hoped that some of the messaging had become irrelevant.

I am fortunate enough that many of my girlfriends who've chosen to have children and have the young women that I do see in my life have so much more empowered messages of what it is to be a girl. They're proud of their strength. They're here for it. They stand up for themselves. And it's so cool to see. And I kind of had this hope that, you know, maybe this work and some of the things I'm talking about of like the casual sexual harassment and misogyny, maybe this is the last generation. Maybe this is going to

You know, be more of a historical reflection of a certain point of time. And since the recent election, I kind of have felt this really familiar fire under my skin. Trump's nominee for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, is saying that women are incompetent and that their presence in the military causes love triangles and drama.

And the conversation about women in combat is a really charged one. And it distracts from the fact that ostensible leaders saying that kind of dismissive, reductionistic language is going to seep down through the ranks. And it is going to affect women like me who are nowhere near combat but are still going to be hearing this language of inherently your value within the Marine Corps, your value within the military is less than a man's.

Because you are not as mission critical. Where it really matters, where push really comes to shove, that's not you. It's me. And that kind of othering dismissed the heck out of the contributions of women who have been leaders in the military and who have been smashing all these barriers as long as they've been in.

My guest today is Bailey Williams, a Marine Corps veteran and the author of the new book, Hollow, a memoir of my body in the Marines. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.

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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and today I'm talking to Bailey Williams, author of the new book, Hollow, a memoir of my body in the Marines. Williams served for three years in the Marine Corps, where she pushed her body to extremes while suffering from a debilitating eating disorder. At 18, Williams enlisted in the Marine Corps, partly to escape a strict Mormon upbringing.

But what she found was an environment similar to the one she grew up in, one that required her to keep secrets about sexual advances and overtures from her superiors and other Marines. Williams was honorably discharged in 2011. She's currently a storyteller and a yoga teacher who lives in Alaska. And I want to give a warning to our listeners. Bailey and I will be talking about disordered eating and sexual assault.

Bailey, I want to talk about the infamous archetype that you talk about in the book of him and her. And to do this, I want you to read another passage from the book. Boot Marines became fluent in how we spoke of him. We would often speak of him. Everything the Marine Corps does is for the Lance Corporal on the front lines with his rifle, we echoed.

A mantra training our attention outward to our brothers overseas. Everything we did was for the infantrymen. Always the infantryman. Infantry was exclusively men. The pinnacle of actual Marines in the actual war meant forever and always he. You, Marine, are learning a language to support him.

Marines also spoke of her, too. A warning. She was a phantom, the female Marine accepted as the standard, an allegory. She was an overweight, non-deployed corporal. She spent half her life on chit nursing some made-up injury. She was a phantom, the female Marine accepted as the standard, an allegory.

That she was sexually repugnant yet slept with everyone, which would mean everyone slept with her also, no, confused me deeply. Males had their standard to prove, be like him. Females had our standard to prove, don't be like her. Thank you for reading that. I mean, it sounds like that's a culture that's been set up over...

time, way before you became a part of the Marines, how did you interpret the way your male counterparts viewed you? Did you think that they saw you as equals? I think there were a lot of people who had their heart in the right place. There were a lot of Marines who did have kindness to them. I think also very, very few, I can think of so few examples when

When someone was saying, you know, it was always joking, right? It was always intended. Well, I actually don't know the intention, but it was always portrayed as, oh, we're just joking. Williams just takes things too seriously. She's just too sensitive, you know, like females are, that kind of thing. Very rare would someone say, hey, maybe we shouldn't talk about our colleagues that way. Or like, hey, not only do we work together, we all live together. There is no separation between our professional and personal lives.

And maybe we don't need to be sitting here and speculating about our colleagues' sexual lives. Well, they're right there. And I don't think I ever heard anybody – and part of it is a maturity thing. We speak so much about like men and women in the military. I enlisted the week of my 18th birthday. A lot of us were under 21. I think our leadership who we looked for to mitigate some of our scuffles were like 23, 24, 25. Like we were kids. And –

didn't necessarily have the mentorship or maturity that maybe should have corrected some of the behavior that we had.

It's so interesting you say that because when I was reading this, I couldn't help but think, like, all of these little quips and things that are being said to her, they sound like middle school boys. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And it's another one of those things where with retrospect, it's like, wow, that was really childish. But I was 18 and I just left the Mormon church. I had no idea when to...

push back and say like, hey, that's inappropriate, knock it off. Never said that ever. I, again, believed in this kind of inherent superiority in men. And if that's how they saw it, then it must be so. And thank God, not every woman who serves has my, had my background and my kind of training and subservience. But nor do I think that was an entirely unique thing either, where I think many girls and women are conditioned to make allowances for the boys and men around them.

Some of the things that you heard other women experience in the Marine Corps and some of the things that you experienced, they weren't just snide comments, middle school talk. There was a real sense that you had to guard yourself and your body and kind of work in a real strategic way to not, I mean, just to say it flat out, to not be raped or sexually assaulted. Yeah.

The language was the path to normalizing the greater sexual violence. Because first you learn to be quiet when you hear things that are cruel, that are just jokes, right? They don't mean anything. And if you raise your voice and say, hey, I didn't like that, then you're sensitive. And, you know, maybe you shouldn't be a Marine because you can't hack it. So first I was conditioned to understand that, you know, basically anything I heard, the appropriate or the—

The thing to do that would best convey that I wanted to be on this team was silence. So it starts there. And then there's the casual touching, like the men who just like find an excuse to stand behind me and put their hands around my waist or who would move me physically with their hands. Just joking. Just joking. Never mind that it was in the barracks where I lived. Never mind that I had an eating disorder and never mind that I wasn't consenting.

you know, you're a woman among men. Again, why are you making a big deal out of this? So then that's the second level of conditioning. And then you learn to not believe other women.

that, you know, the first platoon I was in, there were women who had had a sexual violation. I don't know the details fully, but I do know that the perpetrators were back in our platoon. They'd been to some, you know, slap on the wrist, some degree of being removed, and then they were back. And I learned to question when women said, you know, this thing happened to me because I was hearing, well, what were you wearing?

Had you been drinking? Were you supposed to be there? What did you expect? And that kind of horrible, just heinous victim-blaming language I feel was very prevalent. So now you are isolated from feeling like you can speak up for yourself. You are disconnected from other women who could be your allies, but you're trying to be like the guys by distrusting them. You've

kind of normalized that men will sometimes touch you in a way that you don't love, but like you don't want to make a big deal out of it because you don't want to complain. And then, you know, when I was sexually assaulted, I was like this great numbness because there was kind of a sense of, I knew this was going to happen. And it's hard to explain that, but it was like all of the quieting of the lesser evils made the greater evil, it allowed it to happen in silence. Right.

There was nothing to say at that point, I felt. Of course, that's not every woman's experience. Again, there are women who fight very, very hard for justice. But in my experience, it was just like almost inevitable. You were sexually assaulted. You were raped. And even in your own experience, you were fearful of telling a superior what happened to you.

I at no point seriously considered reporting that assault, in part because I lacked the language to name it, and secondly because I knew it wouldn't be taken seriously, or at least I felt that it would not be taken seriously. I saw and heard for years how we spoke about women who did report sexual assault, and I knew that it would somehow be my fault. I was there, wasn't I? I hadn't been drinking, but I did.

was there. And I knew that people would, I knew I was perceived as a kind or a nice person because I was so eager to please. And I suspected that it'd be like, oh, you know, William, he's an idiot. He probably thought she was leading him on and he probably thought she was interested, but you can't really blame him for that, you know. And I just so absolutely anticipated that the response would be, but did he really? That I just, you know, the fact of the matter is that

To say it simply, you know, that rape hurt my feelings. Like it was violating and painful and sad. And it was like I don't want to expose this to scrutiny and to doubt.

That was just how we spoke about. Gosh, I wish that wasn't true. And I would like I would love to believe that that's changed or is changing. But I can definitely speak to my own experience and feeling like there was never for not a second did I consider reporting because I knew it wouldn't be taken seriously. And if it was taken seriously, it was going to be my life that got harder and not his. Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us.

My guest today is Bailey Williams, a Marine Corps veteran and the author of the new book, Hollow. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is Fresh Air. This message comes from NPR sponsor Merrill. Whatever your financial goals are, you want a straightforward path there. But the real world doesn't usually work that way. Merrill understands that.

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Support for this podcast comes from the Neubauer Family Foundation, supporting WHYY's Fresh Air and its commitment to sharing ideas and encouraging meaningful conversation. This is Fresh Air, and today I'm talking to Bailey Williams about her new book, Hollow, A Memoir of My Body in the Marines. At 18, Williams enlisted in the Marine Corps, partly to escape a strict Mormon upbringing.

But what she found was an environment similar to the one she grew up in, one that required her to keep secrets about sexual advances and overtures from her superiors and other Marines. And to prove her worth, Williams pushed her body to extremes, running for hours a day and suffering from a debilitating eating disorder. She was honorably discharged in 2011 after three years of service, and her memoir details her experiences and how she found her way out.

Bailey, your superiors did in their own way try to help you, but it was almost like, tell me you're okay versus are you okay? Is that how you interpreted their concern? I think the kindest among them, yes, very legitimately wanted to be good leaders, wanted to take care of me. I did feel that sense of

People did care about me as a person, some people. However, there was just a complete confusion over what an eating disorder was and a complete skepticism of its severity. There was also a remarkable lack of holistic care. So I would go to medical for all the different components of having an eating disorder, you know, the ulcers and the blood and everything.

the Raynaud's and the anemia and like all these different things. But at no point was there a comprehensive continuity of care of anyone saying, you know, all these things together, these are all indications that this person is really struggling with an eating disorder.

There's this moment in the book where you do meet with a dietician. And I'm bringing this up because I also would love to delve into what might have helped you, like that wraparound care that you talk about. But also when you met with this dietician, she gives you the all clear and you clock it that she actually has an eating disorder too. What was it about her interaction with you that made you think that?

So I went to a nutritionist who asked me what I ate in a day, and I described my day, which included about 900 calories, which is starvation levels of food. I described that, and she goes, oh, that sounds great.

Oh, you eat so clean. You eat so well. And that kind of rhetoric around good and bad food. And, you know, she told me, you know, most of her clients were on BCP, indicating most of her clients were people who were overweight or prescribed to be overweight by the military standards. And then she was helping them lose weight. So she's like, but you won't have to worry about that if you eat like this. You eat even better than I do.

And so, yeah, I diagnosed her as a fellow orthorexic, which is a part of my eating disorder was this kind of obsession with eating well. And eating clean is another way you hear that a lot. And for me, it extended to every bite of food I ate. Did this harm anyone? Did this harm the planet? I was, you know, vegan for a lot of my time in the military. I really sought to eat locally and just like anything you can think of of what makes food good. I exhaustingly tried to follow those those protocols.

You started fasting at seven. Was it part of a religious practice? Was it like Lent or like, yeah, Ramadan type? Yeah. So in Mormonism, the first Sunday of each month is set aside as Fast Sunday. So you fast for 24 hours without food or water. And now this is a it's considered a covenant, a two way promise with God. It's meant to renew the vows you take when you're baptized.

of, you know, following Christ and living a life that's sanctified and, you know, it's considered a very tender time and a time to connect again with spirit, again, by denying the body, right? So that message was there. And, you know,

Technically, your baptismal covenants, Mormon children are baptized at the age of eight because presumably by then that's the age of accountability because at eight you can make your own decisions apparently. But I was precocious and I wanted to prepare for my eventual baptismal covenants. So I started fasting before I was baptized when I was seven.

Do you remember the feeling when you were praised for being precocious and praised for being ahead of everyone else and fasting at that young age? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And that was, you know, those were in the years after my mother had died. And I really was seeking some degree of safety in the world and feeling, like, held by my father and brothers and just the being good lifestyle.

I am certainly not the first daughter to feel like if I'm good, then I will, you know, be filling my role within the family. You write so beautifully and it's so heartbreaking about your mother's death. And I don't want to spoil the book by going into great detail, but your mother died when you were very young. And this is a pivotal point for you in you trying to take control over your body. Yes, it was.

When did you become aware that that's what it was for you? You know, we were speaking earlier about eating disorders as a function of seeking control in a world that inherently you cannot control. I feel, too, that the root of that is a desire for safety. And my mother's sudden and violent death felt like being uprooted.

that I lost the sense of safety in the world. I lost the sense that you can reasonably expect to live through the day. And I think many people have that at some point in their lives, like that kind of understanding of your own mortality and your understanding that this is finite and

I just happened to have that when I was four years old. And I think that's actually left an incredible, again, you grow and you adapt and you kind of become, you grow around the things that shape you. And then sometimes you are able to see with perception of like, oh, that has shaped me in a certain way. I tend to be slower to form relationship. I tend to take my time. I tend to

hesitate in some ways because you don't know if someone's always going to be there. You know they're not, actually. That's just one of the funny shadows, not funny, but one of the strange shadows of losing a parent so young, I think. Yeah. Do you feel comfortable in your body today?

You know, I imagine you hiking in the backwoods of Alaska, enjoying nature, enjoying life. I mean, that's what I'm hoping for you. Yeah, no, I really appreciate that. And I, you know, I tried to fit in a little bit of optimism at the end of the book because the years since leaving the Marine Corps have been so beautiful. I have been outrageously blessed and just have had a really great, great last decade or so. Yeah.

Yoga was very transformative. I've practiced and taught for almost a decade and just learned different perspectives of feeling like my body is an ally and not something to subjugate, but something like... I think of my body as a teacher and like a very good teacher and a profoundly wise and intuitive teacher. And...

I know this book is quite dark. I know I worked with some really dark elements within it, but I also would name that I feel so much joy within my physical being and within my relationships and within my family. And I know in my heart that some of that joy I would not feel in quite the same way had I not known the alternative. So yes, I feel great joy in my body and a gratitude that comes from

recovery and knowing that there was a different way to live in my body that is no longer my story. Bailey Williams, thank you so much for this book and for this conversation. Thank you so much for having me. Bailey Williams' book is Hollow, a memoir of my body in the Marines. Coming up, critic-at-large John Powers reviews the new TV drama Landman, starring Billy Bob Thornton. This is Fresh Air.

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This is Fresh Air. Landman is a TV drama whose first episodes have begun airing on Paramount+. It stars Billy Bob Thornton as a savvy oil business veteran who handles things in the field for a Texas mogul. Our critic-at-large, John Powers, enjoyed the five preview episodes and says that Landman is an old-style family soap and a breezy portrait of what may be the most influential industry in the world.

America, it's often said, is a nation of addicts. We're addicted to sugar, to sports, to drugs, legal and illegal, and, of course, to our many screens. Yet our deepest, most powerful, and most pervasive addiction is to oil, the black gold that keeps our society going.

This addiction serves as the backdrop to Landman, a new Paramount Plus series from Taylor Sheridan, best known for creating Yellowstone, and Christian Wallace, whose hit podcast Boomtown served as a loose basis for the series. Set in the petroleum-rich Permian Basin around Midland, Texas, where the Bush family once went to get rich...

This drama centers on an oil company fixer who spends his time solving crises and dealing with his family, who seem to have parachuted into West Texas from a nighttime soap. Billy Bob Thornton stars as Tommy Norris, a once-flush oil man who went broke. He now works as a so-called landman for a billionaire, Monty Miller, played by Jon Hamm in his handsome reptile mode.

Tommy's job includes overseeing roughnecks, making sure the wells pump enough, fending off the local drug cartel, and handling assorted calamities, like when one of his company's jets gets rammed by an oil truck. Meanwhile, he's got family issues. Even as his college-age son has decided to work for him as a roughneck, he joins a Latino crew handpicked by his dad. He's being visited by his 17-year-old daughter, whose idea of higher learning is sleeping with a star quarterback.

"'Yes, we're in the Texas of Friday night lights.' The presence of the kids leads his ex-wife Angela—that's Allie Larter—to fly into Midland, too, bringing with her an array of skimpy outfits, party-girl whoops, and though she's remarried, quiet hopes of rekindling their romance. As if that weren't enough, Tommy wonders if he's being set up to take the fall for some recent accidents—

He's wary when his boss sends out a brisk young lawyer, played by Kayla Wallace, who's like a barracuda that bills $900 an hour. She seems to find Tommy, indeed the whole oil business, crude. Here, they visit the site of an oil pump explosion. And as often happens on Landman, Tommy explains how things actually work. What can you tell from this? From the well, nothing. From the type of fire...

There was a leak. A roughneck created a spark when he tried to open a valve with a hammer and a wrench. Why would he try to open it with a hammer? Because that's how you open the f---ing things. Doesn't seem very safe. It's not very safe. That's why they make $180,000 a year. That's not enough money to risk your life on. Yeah, for you, maybe.

For a felon with an eighth-grade education, it's a f***ing lottery ticket. And for an oil company whose manager knowingly sends employees to faulty wells that violate OSHA standards, it's a nine-figure lawsuit. Well, then the whole damn industry's guilty. Hollywood is no stranger to the oil business. Think of Giant and There Will Be Blood. Yet over the decades, pop culture has grown ever less interested in depicting ordinary work and actual working people.

So I was pleasantly surprised to realize that Landman doesn't focus on oil barons, but on the people involved in the violent task of wresting oil from the earth and shipping it out by tanker. It's no surprise that the writer to do this would be Sheridan, who's made a mission of updating our ideas of the modern West. Clearly driven by an old-school work ethic, this is the seventh new show he's created since Yellowstone only six years ago.

He tells stories that some hip reviewers write off as dead TV. They insist that beneath a few progressive touches, such as his sympathy for the Latino workers in Landman, he's a sentimental purveyor of traditional values. Now, I like it that Tommy has a retro air to him. All grizzled expertise, he's a decent man who instinctively sides with the guys on the rigs rather than in the country clubs.

He genuinely loves his kids and ex-wife, but he's gentleman enough to remind her that he was a lousy, work-obsessed husband. Played with wry, grouchy warmth by Thornton, Tommy embodies the honorable, sometimes baffled masculinity that you won't find in a ruthless SOB like Monty Miller, whose only ethical principle is keeping the cost of oil between $76 and $88 a barrel.

While some viewers may be drawn to Landman to watch Tommy's wife and daughter flaunt their scantily clad bodies, there's more of this than is strictly necessary. The show's true interest lies in the scenes that reveal the Wild West workings of today's oil biz. Here's an industry so vast and profitable that it makes business sense not to report a stolen jet, to build your own highways and cram them with tanker trucks, to simply buy off the families of those killed in unsafe conditions—

and to find it irrelevant whether fossil fuels are messing up the climate. Like Tommy, Landman knows all the things that are wrong about our addiction to oil. But it also hints at the naivete of those who think the world could easily go into rehab. John Powers reviewed Landman, now streaming on Paramount+.

On tomorrow's show, John David and Malcolm Washington join me to discuss bringing the August Wilson play, The Piano Lesson, to film on Netflix. It was a family affair with their sister and father, Denzel Washington, as producers. The two talk candidly about navigating Hollywood and forging a name for themselves outside of their famous father. I hope you can join us. ♪

To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our senior producer today is Sam Brigger. Our engineer is Adam Staniszewski. Our technical director is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman.

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