Dead Weight

'Electric with insight' - Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering'Lyrical and scrupulously researched' - Melissa Febos, author of GirlhoodEmmeline Clein's own history of disordered eating began when she was just twelve. In Dead Weight, alongside her own experience and through the stories of other women – famous figures from across time and popular culture, and girls she's known and loved – she traces the medical and cultural history of anorexia, bulimia, orthorexia and binge eating disorder.In writing that’s electric, fierce and endlessly curious, Clein investigates the economic conditions underpinning our eating disorder epidemic, grapples with the myriad ways disordered eating has affected her own friendships and romantic relationships, and illuminates how today's feminism has been complicit in disordered eating culture. Through it all, she challenges the accepted narratives women absorb every day about themselves, unearthing the pernicious messages that connect female worth to inhabiting an ever-smaller form.Aiming to galvanize readers against disordered eating, Clein imagines a world where we allow ourselves to listen to our appetites and fight back against these diseases of self-destruction. In an age of appetite suppression, when self-shrinking is fetishized as a core tenet of the feminine experience, it is far past time for a book like Dead Weight.

A lyrical and scrupulously researched portrait of disordered eating in its many manifestations . . . An authoritative, generous and persuasive debut that I wish I could go back in time and gift to my teenage self., This book is a bomb, made of all of the fury and intensity of any girl who wonders what exactly they are hungering for. Joan Didion of the Tumblr era. This manifesto is meant to be devoured, in all of its witty, compassionate, feverish, elegantly argued brilliance., Urgent, intense, and often captivating . . . A book that deserves attention., With fierce wit, excavating curiosity, and a heart fully surrendered to her subject, Clein writes about eating disorder culture from the inner reaches of what this culture has wrought. This book is electric with insight, and suffused with a strange, stubborn tenderness - a deep regard for what intimacy, hope and resistance might look like in a world where women are taught to devote their lives to destroying themselves.

Emmeline Clein is a writer and Columbia MFA graduate. Her criticism, essays and reporting have been published in outlets including The Yale Review, Buzzfeed, VICE, The Nation and Berlin Quarterly. Her work explores the intersection of disordered eating, diet culture and contemporary feminism, blending history, cultural criticism and memoir. With a lifetime of personal experience fighting an eating disorder and consuming the literary, filmic, televised and online content propagating our destructive cult of femininity defined by slenderness, she has also spent years studying disordered eating’s culture, epidemiology and diagnostic history academically, and writing about these issues in memoir, essays and investigative reporting.

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