Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm by Emmeline Clein

From Knopf Publishing Group: A personal and cultural look at the dark underbelly of Western beauty standards and the lethal culture of disordered eating they’ve wrought“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 RecoveringIn 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 unexp