Dead Weight

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What to expect

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

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 listeners 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.

Critics Review

It’s a joy to read such sharply intelligent writing on a subject where critical thinking is rarely found; a consoling and enraging book in which thoughtful readers will find fellowship.
Sarah Moss, author of The Fell
A compassionate dive into the disordered eating . . . enters the ED discourse like a red-bound blaze of light'
Vogue
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.
Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering
Dead Weight is a meticulously researched and carefully told exploration of eating disorders and how they pervade our culture. Emmeline Clein has handled this volatile, complex topic with a grace and kindness that is so often missing from discussions of eating disorders. It feels like talking about recovery with a very smart friend who knows what you've been through and wants the best for you.
Marianne Eloise, author of Obsessive, Intrusive, Magical Thinking
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.
Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood
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.
Kate Zambreno, author of Heroines
Urgent, intense, and often captivating . . . A book that deserves attention.
Kirkus
Clein writes with flash and drama [and] critiques with clarity and nuance. She can't look away, and her writing asks that we don't, either.
Booklist
Canny . . . persuasive . . . a personal testimony and cultural analysis.
The New Yorker
At once sweeping and incisive, Clein's book positions eating disorders within histories of capitalism, technology, popular culture and social media.
Los Angeles Review of Books
A dense, complex collection . . . earnest in its pursuit of a healthier society.
Elle
With compassion and rage [Clein] wrestles with the root causes of the ongoing eating disorder epidemic.
Time
A book you must read . . . It is, in its broadest sense, a hopeful book offering an alternative, communitarian way of existing in our bodies and in the world.
Jezebel

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