Dead Weight

On Hunger, Harm and Disordered Eating

By: Emmeline Clein

Narrated by: Karissa Vacker

Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

Emmeline Clein's own history of disordered eating began when she was just twelve. In Dead Weight, alongside her own experience and through the stories of other women – famous figures from across time and popular culture, and girls she's known and loved – she 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, unearthing the pernicious messages that connect female worth to inhabiting an ever-smaller form.

Aiming to galvanize listeners 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, when self-shrinking is fetishized as a core tenet of the feminine experience, it is far past time for a book like Dead Weight.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2024 Emmeline Clein (P)2024 Penguin Random House LLC

Critic reviews

"A lyrical and scrupulously researched portrait of disordered eating in its many manifestations... 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)

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

"With fierce wit, excavating curiosity, and a heart fully surrendered to her subject, Clein writes about eating disorder culture from the inner reaches of what this culture has wrought. This book is 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)