DEAD WEIGHT

Combining personal experience, anecdotal evidence, and solid research, Clein examines how eating disorders have become a pervasive crisis.

The author, a New York–based essayist and critic, pulls no punches in her analysis of eating disorders and their psychological underpinnings, and her prose style is urgent, intense, and often captivating. She has firsthand experience, and this book is as much the story of the impact on her life as it is an attempt to understand how and why eating disorders have become so widespread. “Have you ever seen a girl and wanted to possess her? Not like a man would, with his property fantasies,” writes Clein at the beginning. “Possess her like a girl or a ghost of one: shove your soul in her mouth and inhabit her skin, live her life? Then you’ve experienced girlhood, or at least one like mine. Less a gender or an age and more an ethos or an ache, it’s a risky era, stretchy and interminable. It doesn’t always end.” The author examines the effect on young women of the equation of thinness with beauty, exploring characters in TV shows, movies, and novels. Innumerable social media sites praise anorexia and bulimia, and when communities form around addictions—not to escape from the addiction but to encourage it—breaking the pattern is nearly impossible. Another source of the problem is the companies that draw a direct line between skinniness and good health, selling dubious diet plans, extreme weight-loss drugs, and products built around celebrity endorsements. The disturbing subject matter of this book makes it difficult to read in some places. Nevertheless, this is a book that deserves attention—not just by those suffering from eating disorders, but by anyone trying to understand this insidious phenomenon.

With painful honesty, Clein capably dissects eating disorders, locating the issues within wider cultural drivers.