Dead Weight

Combining cultural history and honest memoir, Dead Weight is a powerful exploration of disordered eating in the internet era.

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'Enters the ED discourse like a blaze of light' - Vogue
'Sharply intelligent . . . consoling and enraging' - Sarah Moss, author of The Fell

In Dead Weight, Emmeline Clein brings together her own experience of disordered eating with the stories of other women – famous figures from across time and popular culture, and girls she has 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 economics that underpin our eating disorder epidemic, grapples with the many 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, which connect female worth to inhabiting an ever-smaller form.

In an age of appetite suppression, Clein imagines a world where we allow ourselves to listen to our appetites and fight back against these diseases of self-destruction.