Dead Weight

Starred review from November 1, 2023
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.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from January 8, 2024
Essayist Clein’s stellar debut collection probes the inciting factors and effects of eating disorders in young women. “Autobiography in It Girls” recounts how Clein imbibed damaging body standards from such tabloid stars as Kim Kardashian, whose Skims Solutionwear line “implies the customer’s natural form is a problem to be solved,” and Tyra Banks, whom Clein remembers watching on the reality show America’s Next Top Model (“As a viewer in the fourth grade, I saw a direct line between extreme slenderness and attention, admiration”). In “On Our Knees,” Clein meditates on how bulimia affects friendships between girls, discussing how Jane Fonda and her childhood friend used to binge and purge together, how the 2009 film Jennifer’s Body allegorized the disease as demonic possession, and how Clein herself found community in online eating disorder forums. Throughout, Clein envisions sisterhood as an antidote to sexist social expectations and imagines “a feminism of attention” in which women bear witness to each other’s stories. Clein skillfully weaves together pop culture anecdotes, personal reflections, and analysis of social media posts (“Starving in the Cyberverse” surveys the complicated motives behind pro–eating disorder content on TikTok and Instagram), in prose that’s vivid and sharp (“I learned to find something sacred in skeletons and something profane in the way my skin folded”). This announces Clein as a talent to watch. Agent: Monika Woods, Triangle House Literary.

February 1, 2024
A student of medical journals and Subreddits, of researched statistics and anonymous posts, journalist Clein, in her first book, offers an expansive, damning survey of the state of diet culture in this millennium. While focusing on eating disorders, which she has suffered, in long essays Clein looks to the related medical-treatment complex, pop-culture appearances, inherent racism and fatphobia, media hypocrisy, and many other intersections, giving voice to real people as well as characters in Ottessa Moshfegh's novels and TV shows like Fleabag. Clein writes with flash and drama, talking to readers like friends in the know, which balances the at-times scholarly lean of her approach. ""Today, small bodies are still celebrated right up until the point when they stop functioning."" In the landscape of disordered eating, nothing escapes Clein's view. Taking on the labyrinth of our current medical, social, and economic systems we can hardly see, let alone know how to escape from, Clein critiques with clarity and nuance. She can't look away, and her writing asks that we don't, either.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 12, 2024

Clein's (Toxic) book is a personal and political scrutiny of disordered eating that draws attention to the painful ways in which societal preoccupations with thinness are compounded by some people's desire to pathologize women's bodies. By mashing up pop culture, personal narratives, psychological research, evidence-based studies, and feminist theory, this book of complex collection of essays shows how dangerous it is to strive for perfection and how quickly "perfect" can morph into disordered, diseased, monstrous, and shamed when the standard upheld by culture is, in and of itself, dangerously unreal. Some readers may find several of the book's explanations too detailed or too dense. Others may perceive a few of the descriptions to be glamorized depictions of people who have been diagnosed with eating disorders, such as anorexia, bulimia, and orthorexia, but most content is presented with the appropriate tone and compassion. VERDICT Written with acumen and care, this title will be of value to readers interested in learning more about media portrayals of disordered eating and feminist theory. Those drawn to the work of Roxane Gay, Elise Loehnen, and Susan Bordo will likely enjoy this title too.--Emily Bowles

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