All products featured on Vogue are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
In a 2016 article for LitHub, writer JoAnna Novak points to just how little writing there is (literary, academic, or otherwise) about eating disorders, asking: “What fear keeps more eating disorders from being depicted—and written—with edge and quirk?” I’ve been living with an eating disorder for most of my adult life, yet it was only upon reading Novak’s piece that I encountered a veritable bibliography of other writers—Louise Glück, Alexandra Kleeman—who managed to spin the day-in, day-out pain and tedium of disordered eating and recovery into literary gold (much of which, however fleetingly, helped me feel less alone).
Emmeline Clein’s new essay collection Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm enters the ED discourse like a red-bound blaze of light, skillfully interweavig multiple stories about eating disorders, from the author’s own to those of “historical figures, pop culture celebrities, and the girls she’s known and loved.” Vogue recently spoke to Clein about situating her own story within the context of others’, the putative literary eating-disorder canon (such as it is), and facing off against a beauty standard that she calls “extremely misogynistic, racist, and impossible to achieve without great amounts of self-harm for the vast majority of us.”
**Vogue: **Can you tell me a little bit about how this book initially came together?
Emmeline Clein: My eating disorder began when I was really young, like around 12, and I struggled with it on and off for over a decade. I never was able to totally recover through traditional treatments; I ended up finding real recovery through speaking about it with friends who’d gone through it and strangers on the internet and also through a lot of self-education about the history of these issues. I had a kind of revelation that I’ve been kind of a complete pawn to a weight-loss industry that is designed to give me and many other people eating disorders, and a treatment industry that is not designed to even cure the eating disorder, but to trap you in a sort of cyclical journey through various treatment centers. It was just extremely galvanizing to me to realize all of that, in addition to the fact that, of course, this beauty standard is itself extremely misogynistic, racist, and impossible to achieve without great amounts of self-harm for the vast majority of us.
I have also noticed that almost every woman has struggled with disordered eating somewhere along the way in their life, and at a clinical level it is also highly, highly prevalent. And yet I don’t see the issue being seated in the public intellectual sphere with the same kind of serious attention that other mental illnesses—like opioid addiction, like alcoholism, like depression—that do not primarily afflict women regularly receive in the media. I wanted to present a sort of sweeping historical, medical, political, and personal story of this issue to contextualize it and really tell people it’s not their fault that they’ve developed a coping mechanism that is also diseased while in thrall to beauty standards we’ve all lived under our whole lives.
How did you prepare yourself emotionally to tell such a personal story so publicly?
I’ve been asked about this a lot, and it actually wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. When I started writing about it, to sort of share it with people in my life, it was a lot more than I expected, but I think that part of the ethos of the book and part of the intellectual argument is that the culture of silence around this issue is a massive part of the problem. It’s something that we’ve been taught and has been ingrained in us in a way that, sadly, serves to sort of uphold various industries that want us to stay sick, right? The narrative of the stereotypical eating disorder patient [is] sort of a thin, white girl who gets anorexia because she’s “too good” of a girl, and then goes to treatment and realizes that she has body dysmorphia and she’s not actually as fat as she thought, and so she can recover. Being thin isn’t as important as she thought, so she can finally recover! I mean, that story is as narrow as the body we’ve been taught to want, and that story isn’t true for most people.
That story also reinforces a lot of the ideals that actually stick in a lot of people, the first being that eating disorders mainly happen to thin, white girls. But the fact is that we live in a world in which the studies being done are largely done on people that fit the stereotype, which then feeds the stereotype into the next generation of research, et cetera. And then we also like that narrative that you are overvaluing weight and you’re “not as bad as you think,” which is an inherently fatphobic narrative. That’s completely harmful and, also, I think it functions as a form of gaslighting… You’re being told in treatment that your eating disorder a false consciousness in your mind and you need to not trust it, when in fact I think it can be a lot more healing to hear, “No, you’re actually not insane.”
Completely. Sometimes you need to hear that!
For me, talking about disordered eating openly is kind of the only way to hold myself accountable and maintain recovery. As someone who never was thin enough to receive an anorexia diagnosis and who had an “eating disorder not otherwise specified” diagnosis, which resulted in me getting sicker because I felt, and was sort of explicitly being told by the medical establishment, that I wasn’t sick enough to deserve help...all of this is to say that I feel it is emotionally healing for me to speak openly, largely because I’ve heard so many other women do so. At the end of the book, I proposed this “feminism of attention” to kind of replace some of our dissociative feminisms and other feminisms that seemed to be flailing in [the internet era]. I really think that only through telling a far more diverse array of stories about this issue can we unseat the dominant narrative of it, which is one that is just continuing to make people sicker.
What do you think it would take for the literary world (or maybe just...the world?) to take disordered eating seriously?
I mean, I guess I’m about to find out! [Laughs.] I’m very curious to see how the book is received, not just in terms of Will people like it? but also, How will it be understood? Because of course there is a personal thread in it, and I bring myself into it, but I’m only really explicitly in a few of the chapters. It’s much more of a sociopolitical history and cultural-criticism project and a kind of choral narrative. I tried to collage together the voices of so many interview subjects and people I found on the internet, whose blogs I read, and books and movies; I wanted to hand a microphone to this ghost choir of women who’ve been harmed by this culture. I also wanted to do a very historical and economically rooted and politically rooted project, so I wonder if it’s going to be covered just as a memoir, because that is the way that eating disorders have historically been understood by the literary world. So many of the eating-disorder memoirs I’ve read, I wonder what they might have been if they had been given more leeway on a genre level—which circles back, I think, to that point about this extremely narrow story of eating disorders we’re willing to hear.
Are there other books or works of art around disordered eating that you feel made space for your own?
There’s one book called Appetites by Caroline Knapp. I don’t know why that book isn’t more widely read within the eating-disorder community, and I think it’s largely because it’s not a traditional memoir, and it places eating disorders alongside other sort of feminized addictions, like shopping. In terms of my sort of meta-textual ethos, I definitely was influenced a lot by Kate Zambreno’s Heroines. I think that book really kind of maps this terrain of these feminized mental illnesses and the attendant bodily disorders and disturbances that come with them with a true tenderness, and without sacrificing any intellect.
Anne Boyer’s The Undying was incredibly important to me; I feel like she did an entire reinvention of a genre. While sort of exploring the history of breast cancer, she uses the term “carcinogenic sphere” to talk about the way our entire environmental atmosphere and economy is for creating cancer. And I hope that this book can do a similar thing for eating disorders, and demonstrate that we live in a society that is truly designed to give you an eating disorder. Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant wrote this book called Health Communism that I also really loved, and I’m also trying to echo their call for this kind of radical reorientation of our healthcare system towards care, rather than a diagnosis in the name of profit. So much of the reason for our exclusionary diagnostic paradigms that hurt people so much is just insurance wanting it to be easier to label us and chart us as things. Lastly, I would say that Sabrina Strings’s book Fearing the Black Body and Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick so definitely unraveled the racist and misogynistic tapestry of our beauty standards in a way that really opened my eyes and helped me situate these diseases in a much larger, longer history.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
