'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. Emmeline Clein's writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Yale Review, BuzzFeed News, VICE, The Nation, Catapult and Antigravity, amongst other publications. Her chapbook, Toxic, was published by Choo Choo Press in 2022. She received her MFA from Columbia's School of the Arts and lives in New York. Dead Weight is her first book. Fusing memoir and cultural history, Dead Weight is an essential exploration of disordered eating in the internet era.
