With Dead Weight, Emmeline Clein Cracks Open the Myths of a ‘Culture of Disordered Eating’
In 2019, author Emmeline Clein began a daunting project: Synthesize decades worth of memoirs and magazine articles, academic studies and statistics, TV shows and movies, Tumblr blogs and Reddit forums, novels and medical texts—all to point the beam of scrutiny not on individuals living with eating disorders (ED), but on the systems that mobilize and monetize their suffering. Doing so, Clein understood, would require writing essays that did not condemn the voices of the women it referenced. As such, her own voice would join them.
Having undergone ED recovery herself, Clein attended to this project—what would become her newly published nonfiction collection, Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm—with the reverence of a sister. Clein often describes the voices pasted into Dead Weight (including her own) as a sororal “ghost choir,” pulled from internet message boards and memoirs and case studies and put into intimate conversation with one another between two covers. She understands that using such source material is a risky move; it’s hard enough, she argues, to be taken seriously as a woman writing about eating disorders, let alone when you introduce Instagram comments and Subreddits to the equation. So much of “women’s nonfiction writing that isn’t actually that confessional or isn’t that memoiristic is exclusively discussed as though it is, right?” Clein tells me. She wanted to write a book that would fuse her own perspective—and those of the “ghost choir”—with the scholarly sources that might get the literary and academic “establishment,” as she puts it, to pay attention.
The result is a dense, complex collection, outright scathing in its assessment of systemic failures; generous in its compassion for those experiencing ED; familiar in its textual and pop-cultural references; and earnest in its pursuit of a healthier society. (Not a more optimized society, Clein urges. Not a more economic society. Not a thinner society. A healthier one.) Dead Weight is not without its flaws, but Clein seems all too aware of them, and views the book itself as an invitation to study her choir a bit closer: “If somebody wants to feel like I was doing too much, then I hope that makes them want to read the book that comes after this one by the girl who figures it out even more than I do,” she says.
Ahead, Clein takes ELLE.com deeper into the urgency and ethos behind Dead Weight.
Tell me a bit about the impetus for this book. I’d love to know not only when you decided you wanted to write a book about eating disorders, but specifically a book in this form.
I really found recovery from my own eating disorder only through a vast amount of self-education on the weight-loss industry, the history of eating disorder treatment, as well as the history of disordered eating as a feminized disease class that has existed for much longer than we generally imagine it has. I found that pretty much all of that type of education—that I found both cathartic and liberating in my own odd journey toward recovery—hadn’t been present in any of my own treatment experiences, nor had I been able to find it on a bookshelf in one place.
I’d had to find it through an array of reading medical studies; reading books that were about beauty standards but not really eating disorders—about female hysteria, et cetera; realizing that I had been a pawn to an incredibly profitable racist and misogynistic and longstanding weight-loss industry that itself is motored by a beauty standard that is only really possible via a lot of self-harm for the vast majority of people. [That research] helped me realize I didn’t want to keep upholding that beauty standard in the way I live my own life.
These are diseases that [approximately] one in 10 Americans will be diagnosed with in their lives, and that’s a massive under count because the diagnostic demands mean that most people don’t actually get diagnosed that suffer from eating disorders. So this is affecting so many people, and it’s also killing so many. More than 10,000 people die of eating disorders a year in this country, and any other type of mental illness with those types of statistics—opioid addiction, alcoholism, depression—is treated this way in a nonfiction book contextualization, which recognizes these diseases as both clinical diseases and central microcosms of our political and economic system. I really felt that eating disorders deserved that type of treatment, rather than the kind of literary treatment that individualizes the disease in the way most eating disorder books do.
Your own experiences and recovery give the book not only credibility, but a real sense of urgency and intimacy. Yet Dead Weight is not a memoir. Why was it so important to you to not write a memoir?
Honestly, eating disorders for so long have been pretty much exclusively addressed through memoirs within literature. There are so many eating disorder memoirs that have been so formative to me, both as a writer and as a person in eating disorder recovery. But I also think that exclusively addressing the issue from that perspective really plays into this individualization of it, and this artificial narrative that people have to recover alone and along a linear path.
But I also think that, in addition to the education I did for myself in my recovery, speaking to other people who had struggled with the same issues was truly the most cathartic and healing part of my process. Some of those were strangers online. Some of those were characters in the memoirs that I was reading. Some of them were fictional characters I saw on TV and in fiction books. I also found a much more diverse array of stories, both of sickness and of recovery—in terms of who was suffering from these diseases and in what size, shape, and color of body, as well as gender—both online and in my real life. I wanted to hand the mic to this ghost choir, or create a collage that allowed a lot of the stories that have historically been silenced by the prevalence of the memoir genre that centers one specific stereotypical eating disorder patient to finally be heard. I also wanted it to combine a cultural criticism angle with a medical history and a sociopolitical history angle.
As a young girl growing up in this country, you really are receiving messages that prize thinness from all sides, from the way that thinness is prized in your general practitioner’s office, to the way you see it prized in the television shows you watch, to the way you see it talked about by celebrities that you idolize. And I wanted to both show that those lessons are ones we need to unlearn to save each other, but also not demonize any of the fictional characters or real-life celebrities who themselves were pawns to this system and had just received those messages themselves. I was trying to walk this fine line between demonizing and glamorizing, because I think sometimes the impulse to demonize something like a pro-eating disorder forum obscures the larger issue, which is where the girls on that forum learn the lessons they are simply repeating.
This topic is a difficult one to tackle for an obvious number of reasons, not the least of which is that it’s inherently triggering. You’ve written before about your concerns that the book might be read as triggering or instructional. I wonder how you actually went about trying to avoid those reactions.
I have spent so much time thinking about and agonizing over just this question. Ultimately, it was very important to me for the book to not be instructional in the way that so many eating disorder memoirs end up being, despite their author’s best intentions. I know I’ve misread many a cautionary tale as a manual, and I know that that was not the intention of the author. I say that not to demonize the authors because, again, a big part of this project is … I think so much of the literature around eating disorders pits women who are victims in different ways against each other, rather than allowing us to commune about the way we’ve been indoctrinated in the same cult of self-harm. By pitting us against each other, it obscures the actual system that is benefiting.
Still, I didn’t want [the book] to be capable of being read that way. But I also knew it’s almost impossible, because people with eating disorders are incredibly smart and they’re reading between the lines. They’re going to read things how they want to and from the vantage point of where their illness is at that point. So one thing that was very important to me was to redact as much numerical information as I could. Unless it was incredibly specifically necessary to a scientific point I was making, I don’t have calorie numbers or weight numbers, even though those are constantly used in diagnostic regimes and in treatment often. That’s because this isn’t a story about calories or weight loss; it’s a story about lies and love and community and care and capital and hunger.
In treatment centers, often, the speech of eating disorder patients is heavily policed and censored. You’re not allowed to talk about things that led you into your eating disorder out of a fear of triggering each other and worsening each other’s illnesses. Yes, that type of conversation can sometimes be triggering, but it can also spark a moment of catharsis and community that you never saw coming, and that allows you to realize you—and someone very unlike you—can help each other no longer engage in a coping mechanism that’s also a form of self-harm that you didn’t even realize you were doing in the same way as someone else.
All of which is to say, I think young girls in pain are far smarter and stronger than we give them credit for. I think that part of the fear of triggering each other is an effort to censor us and to blind us to the ways in which we are being used as pawns and can drag each other out of this quicksand rather than mire each other deep in it. I trust that the readers who the book can help are strong enough to handle it. I understand if they don’t feel ready right now, and if somebody wants to read it later. A girl who reads the jacket copy will be able to tell whether the book is right for her at this point in her journey or if it’s going to be later.
Who did you write this book for? Was there an intended group in mind as you were putting this together?
There were a few audiences in mind, but the primary one that’s most important to me is: anyone who has ever blamed themselves for the ways in which they’ve engaged in self-harm in order to manage existence in a society that wants them to [self-harm], in order to bring themselves closer into alignment with a beauty standard that that person does not believe in politically. It is so easy to understand yourself as someone who wasn’t “strong enough” to resist these forces, or someone who artificially overvalued fitness and, therefore, is “crazy” in a certain way.
I just want to say to that community of people: You aren’t crazy. You read between the lines of a message society was sending you and developed a coping mechanism that is also a disease, enthralled to a beauty standard that you’ve been being bombarded with from all sides.
I want us to unlearn the myth that props up a culture of disordered eating, which is that if we want to satisfy our hunger for affection and attention, we have to repress this hunger for nourishment. Maybe we can find a feminism of care and acceptance of our appetites that is a form of solidarity to replace the sorrow and sickness we’ve all been sharing.
That’s the core audience. But I also deeply want it to reach—and I don’t know if it will—a literary and scholarly establishment that does not believe eating disorders are as effective a microcosm through which to understand our economic systems in this country, our healthcare industry at large, and a lot of our social issues. I think it is in, fact, a better microcosm than many of the diseases we often use as a metaphor for those issues. But we haven’t been willing to look at eating disorders that way because they historically have primarily afflicted women.
In other interviews, you’ve discussed how part of your instinct for writing this book was to combat the nihilism inherent in how, culturally, we talk about women and ED and disordered eating: “Well, that’s just how it is, lol. Aren’t we all a little messed-up?” You’ve said you wanted a kinder, maybe even more optimistic approach. Do you feel as if the book ultimately accomplishes that?
I hope so, but it’s a delicate operation, and it is extremely dark out there, especially with the rise of Ozempic and the re-entrenchment that we’re seeing right now of a beauty standard that we were at least beginning to, maybe, try to deconstruct a few years ago. When I talk to women about this book, they’re often nodding and chuckling and being like, “Well, of course, what woman hasn’t had an eating disorder?” I think that’s an important question. I think the only way to survive finding out the answer to that question is balancing an approach that allows for gallows humor, when the time calls for it, while also forcing ourselves to engage in a much more earnest and even “cringe” investigation of these hungers and our pain.
I think that it’s impossible in our era of the internet—with such a demand on self-surveillance and such a cruel attitude from anons—often not to have this impulse toward making self-awareness our prized virtue and being like, “Well, previous feminists tried getting out in the streets and they tried doing body positivity. Look where it got us, so let’s just give up and get our bag by fitting the beauty standard.” That ethos of, “We’ll play by your rules, but we’ll let you know we think they’re fucked up.”
I wanted to be deeply compassionate to that perspective, because I completely understand why you would have it, and I don’t want to demonize anyone who’s been taught to have it. But I also want to reach those people in a kinder voice and a softer voice and basically say, “We can do the sarcasm when it’s called for and when we need a laugh, but also, I don’t think that approach is going to save you in the way you think it is.” I think that once you achieve that beauty standard and are making the jokes about it while embodying it … I’ve been there, and I haven’t felt as free as I thought I would.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.