“Writing about my body is like breaking that mirror, cathartic and chaotic and unclean,” writes Emmeline Clein in Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm. In her debut essay collection, Clein braids together scientific and academic writing, original reporting, cultural criticism, and memoir in an attempt to reorient our understanding of eating disorders. Ultimately, she argues that the disease should not be seen as the willful failure of individuals to care for themselves, but as a symptom of a racist, classist, and misogynistic society that regulates the body in pursuit of narrowly-defined conceptions of health and beauty.
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