Fusing memoir and cultural history, Dead Weight is an essential exploration of disordered eating in the internet era.

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

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.

"A compassionate dive into the disordered eating . . . enters the ED discourse like a red-bound blaze of light'" - Vogue

"Urgent, intense, and often captivating . . . A book that deserves attention." - Kirkus

"Clein writes with flash and drama [and] critiques with clarity and nuance. She can't look away, and her writing asks that we don't, either." - Booklist

"Canny . . . persuasive . . . a personal testimony and cultural analysis." - The New Yorker

"At once sweeping and incisive, Clein's book positions eating disorders within histories of capitalism, technology, popular culture and social media." - Los Angeles Review of Books

"A dense, complex collection . . . earnest in its pursuit of a healthier society." - Elle

"With compassion and rage [Clein] wrestles with the root causes of the ongoing eating disorder epidemic." - Time

"A book you must read . . . It is, in its broadest sense, a hopeful book offering an alternative, communitarian way of existing in our bodies and in the world." - Jezebel