Dead Weight: On hunger, harm and disordered eating

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Emmeline 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.

Reviews

Electric with insight. -- Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering

Author Bio

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.