Publishers Weekly
★ 01/08/2024
Essayist Clein’s stellar debut collection probes the inciting factors and effects of eating disorders in young women. “Autobiography in It Girls” recounts how Clein imbibed damaging body standards from such tabloid stars as Kim Kardashian, whose Skims Solutionwear line “implies the customer’s natural form is a problem to be solved,” and Tyra Banks, whom Clein remembers watching on the reality show America’s Next Top Model (“As a viewer in the fourth grade, I saw a direct line between extreme slenderness and attention, admiration”). In “On Our Knees,” Clein meditates on how bulimia affects friendships between girls, discussing how Jane Fonda and her childhood friend used to binge and purge together, how the 2009 film Jennifer’s Body allegorized the disease as demonic possession, and how Clein herself found community in online eating disorder forums. Throughout, Clein envisions sisterhood as an antidote to sexist social expectations and imagines “a feminism of attention” in which women bear witness to each other’s stories. Clein skillfully weaves together pop culture anecdotes, personal reflections, and analysis of social media posts (“Starving in the Cyberverse” surveys the complicated motives behind pro–eating disorder content on TikTok and Instagram), in prose that’s vivid and sharp (“I learned to find something sacred in skeletons and something profane in the way my skin folded”). This announces Clein as a talent to watch. Agent: Monika Woods, Triangle House Literary. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
“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
Library Journal
01/12/2024
Clein's (Toxic) book is a personal and political scrutiny of disordered eating that draws attention to the painful ways in which societal preoccupations with thinness are compounded by some people's desire to pathologize women's bodies. By mashing up pop culture, personal narratives, psychological research, evidence-based studies, and feminist theory, this book of complex collection of essays shows how dangerous it is to strive for perfection and how quickly "perfect" can morph into disordered, diseased, monstrous, and shamed when the standard upheld by culture is, in and of itself, dangerously unreal. Some readers may find several of the book's explanations too detailed or too dense. Others may perceive a few of the descriptions to be glamorized depictions of people who have been diagnosed with eating disorders, such as anorexia, bulimia, and orthorexia, but most content is presented with the appropriate tone and compassion. VERDICT Written with acumen and care, this title will be of value to readers interested in learning more about media portrayals of disordered eating and feminist theory. Those drawn to the work of Roxane Gay, Elise Loehnen, and Susan Bordo will likely enjoy this title too.—Emily Bowles
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2023-09-28
Combining personal experience, anecdotal evidence, and solid research, Clein examines how eating disorders have become a pervasive crisis.
The author, a New York–based essayist and critic, pulls no punches in her analysis of eating disorders and their psychological underpinnings, and her prose style is urgent, intense, and often captivating. She has firsthand experience, and this book is as much the story of the impact on her life as it is an attempt to understand how and why eating disorders have become so widespread. “Have you ever seen a girl and wanted to possess her? Not like a man would, with his property fantasies,” writes Clein at the beginning. “Possess her like a girl or a ghost of one: shove your soul in her mouth and inhabit her skin, live her life? Then you’ve experienced girlhood, or at least one like mine. Less a gender or an age and more an ethos or an ache, it’s a risky era, stretchy and interminable. It doesn’t always end.” The author examines the effect on young women of the equation of thinness with beauty, exploring characters in TV shows, movies, and novels. Innumerable social media sites praise anorexia and bulimia, and when communities form around addictions—not to escape from the addiction but to encourage it—breaking the pattern is nearly impossible. Another source of the problem is the companies that draw a direct line between skinniness and good health, selling dubious diet plans, extreme weight-loss drugs, and products built around celebrity endorsements. The disturbing subject matter of this book makes it difficult to read in some places. Nevertheless, this is a book that deserves attention—not just by those suffering from eating disorders, but by anyone trying to understand this insidious phenomenon.
With painful honesty, Clein capably dissects eating disorders, locating the issues within wider cultural drivers.
