Dead Weight

In Dead Weight, Emmeline Clein fuses her own experience of disordered eating with social commentary told through the stories of other women – famous figures from across time and popular culture, and girls she’s known and loved – and 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, revealing the dangerous messages that connect female worth to inhabiting an ever-smaller form.

Galvanizing 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, it is far past time for a book like Dead Weight.