Dead Weight - by Emmeline Clein (Hardcover)

About the Book

"A personal and cultural look at the dark underbelly of Western beauty standards and the lethal culture of disordered eating they've wrought. In Dead Weight, Emmeline Clein tells the story of her own disordered eating alongside and through other women from history, pop culture and the girls she's known and loved. Tracing the medical and cultural history of Anorexia, Bulimia, and Orthorexia, Clein investigates the economic conditions underpinning our eating disorder epidemic, and illuminates the ways racism and today's feminism have been complicit in propping up the thin ideal. While examining GOOP, Simone Weil, pro-anorexia blogs, and the flawed logic of our current methods of treatment, Clein also grapples with the myriad ways disordered eating has affected her own friendships and romantic relationships. Dead Weight makes the case that we are faced with a culture of suppression and denial that is insidious, pervasive, and dangerous, one that internalizes and promotes the fetish of self-shrinking as a core tenet of the American cult of femininity. This is replicated in our algorithms, our television shows, our novels, and our relationships with each other. A sharp, perceptive, and revelatory polemic for readers fascinated by the external forces shaping our lives, Dead Weight is electrifying, unapologetically bold, and fiercely compassionate"--

Book Synopsis

A personal and cultural look at the dark underbelly of Western beauty standards and the lethal culture of disordered eating they've wrought

"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

"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

In Dead Weight, Emmeline Clein recounts her struggle with disordered eating alongside the stories of other women: historical figures, pop culture celebrities, and the girls she's known and loved. Through the story of her own sickness, the raw recollections of interview subjects, and dispatches from social media rabbit holes, Clein challenges stereotypes and renders statistics and science deeply personal and urgent. From her first encounters with icons of the thin ideal to her years ricocheting between hunger and bingeing, from the pro-anorexia blog that unexpectedly saved someone's life to the residential treatment centers that make so many people sicker, from a wrenching elegy for those who didn't survive to a manifesto for sisterhood, solidarity, and recovery, Clein uncovers girlhood's appetites and injuries to reveal the economic, cultural, and political history of an epidemic.

Dead Weight makes the case that we are faced with a culture of suppression, self-denial, and self-harm, an insidious, pervasive, and dangerous American cult of femininity rooted in racism and misogyny. Tracing the medical and cultural histories of anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder and investigating the recent rise of orthorexia, Clein reveals the economic conditions underpinning diet culture, and grapples with the ways today's feminism can be complicit in propping up the fetish of self-shrinking.

Drawing on a kaleidoscopic array of sources--from cult classic films like Jennifer's Body to the aughts-era Tumblrverse, the writing of Simone Weil, Chris Kraus, and Anne Boyer to the medieval canon of anorexic saints--Clein calls for a feminism that doesn't compel women to shrink their bodies to increase their value, urging radical acceptance of all our appetites instead: for food, connection, and love. A sharp, perceptive, and revelatory polemic about the external forces that shape our lives, Dead Weight is electrifying, unapologetically bold, and fiercely compassionate.

Review Quotes

"Dead Weight by Emmeline Clein is one of the smartest, most well-reported books I've ever read on the root causes of our culture's disordered eating . . . Fascinating and insightful."
--Katie Couric

"This book is a bomb, made of all of the fury and intensity of any girl who wonders what exactly they are hungering for. Emmeline Clein, everybody! The 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

"Dead Weight is a lyrical and scrupulously researched portrait of disordered eating in its many manifestations, which is also, of course, a portrait of this country's disordered relationship to women's bodies. 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, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

"Canny . . . Persuasive."
--New Yorker

"Dead Weight is a blistering debut-- stylish, sharp, and smarter than anything else I've read about the fraught and gendered terrain of disordered eating in America. These essays are kaleidoscopic and virtuosic: With rigor and curiosity, she writes about Simone Weil and the history of the virtuous anorexic saint to the arrival of Ozempic on the mass market to the moral question of categorizing an eating disorder patient as 'terminal.' Deeply researched, highly literary, rageful and tender, Dead Weight offers new and urgent angles on this familiar subject."
--Jordan Kisner, author of Thin Places

"Stunning . . . With top-notch reporting, frankness, and humor, Dead Weight thumps with imagination and insight."
--Wendy Walters, author of Multiply/Divide

"Eviscerating . . . An assiduously researched and urgent debut . . . Blistering."
--Nylon

"Dead Weight seems destined to fundamentally reshape how we think and write about the subject of eating disorders. What separates Clein's book from others on the topic is her commitment to treating the sufferers of eating disorders with the kind of dignity that clinicians tend to withhold . . . This is a moving, brilliant, and important book."
--Vulture, "Best Books of 2024 (So Far)"

"[Clein] pulls no punches in her analysis of eating disorders and their psychological underpinnings, and her prose style is urgent, intense, and often captivating . . . This is a book that deserves attention--not just by those suffering from eating disorders, but by anyone trying to understand this insidious phenomenon."
--Kirkus Reviews [starred]

"Essayist Clein's stellar debut collection probes the inciting factors and effects of eating disorders in young women . . . Clein skillfully weaves together pop culture anecdotes, personal reflections, and analysis of social media posts in prose that's vivid and sharp . . . This announces Clein as a talent to watch."
--Publishers Weekly [starred]

"Dead Weight is part eating disorder theory, part history, part collective memoir of modern girlhood and part condemnation of the corporate, heteropatriarchal forces that demand the impossible of girls and women: self-objectification and self-disappearance, somehow simultaneously . . . Sweeping."
--Bomb Magazine

"A dense, complex collection, outright scathing in its assessment of systemic failures; generous in its compassion for those experiencing ED; familiar in its textual and pop-cultural references and earnest in its pursuit of a healthier society."
--Elle

"Fiercely galvanizing . . . I have rarely read such intimate, revelatory, exhaustive, and sensitively strong writing as in Emmeline Clein's essays. Her insight leaves me both close to tears and ready to revolt."
--Public Seminar

"Sweeping and incisive . . . Clein has hit upon the zeitgeist . . . It's in the moments during which Clein peeks through as our guide--at once a vulnerable, self-proclaimed "sister" and an investigative mastermind--that Dead Weight proves imperative . . . Striking and arrestingly different . . . Compassionate, cerebral . . . That this compassion is deftly interwoven with such scrupulous research is at once a testament to Clein's storytelling powers and an insistence that we take this seriously . . . Clein has marshaled her considerable powers to unearth and elucidate the reasons we think of ourselves as problems to manage in the first place."
--Los Angeles Review of Books

About the Author

EMMELINE CLEIN's writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Yale Review, The Nation, Smithsonian, Berlin Quarterly, VICE, BuzzFeed, Catapult and Antigravity, among other publications. Her chapbook Toxic was published by Choo Choo Press in 2022. She received her MFA from Columbia University's School of the Arts; she lives in New York.