Emmeline Clein

Emmeline Clein is the author of Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger & Harm (Knopf US, Picador UK). Her chapbook, Toxic, was published by Choo Choo Press. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The Nation, The Yale Review, The Washington Post, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications. She is an editor at Triangle House Review. She teaches writing at Columbia University.

Write her an email

Literary Representation:
Monika Woods at Triangle House Literary

Publicity:
Sarah New at Knopf

Praise & Press for Dead Weight

“Emmeline Clein’s Dead Weight seems destined to fundamentally reshape how we think and write about the subject of eating disorders. What separates Clein’s book from others on the topic is her commitment to treating the sufferers of eating disorders with the kind of dignity that clinicians tend to withhold. Dead Weight not only exposes how little control patients have had over their own narratives and bodies, it returns the narrative to those who have suffered from the disease. This is a moving, brilliant, and important book.”

—New York

“Dead Weight is a book you must read...It is, in its broadest sense, a hopeful book offering an alternative, communitarian way of existing in our bodies and in the world.”

—Jezebel

“Canny...persuasive...The book is a personal testimony and cultural analysis on the subject of disordered eating.”

—The New Yorker

“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

“At once sweeping and incisive, Clein’s book positions eating disorders within histories of capitalism, technology, popular culture, and social media. The story she spins hasn’t simply stuck in my mind; it’s caused a reconsideration of language.”

—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Spectacular...lyrical, deeply researched”

—Air Mail

“With Dead Weight, Emmeline Clein Cracks Open the Myths of a “Culture of Disordered Eating,” Elle

“We’re Not Crazy”: Emmeline Clein in Conversation with Cat Marnell, Interview

“In Emmeline Clein’s Dead Weight, A Compassionate Dive Into Disordered Eating,” Vogue

“Emmeline Clein by Allie Rowbottom,” Bomb

“Author Emmeline Clein on the Machine that Fuels Eating Disorders and Grinds Up Young Women,” Self

“Emmeline Clein & Rayne Fisher-Quann Want You to Deconstruct the Western Beauty Standard,” Nylon

“Author Emmeline Clein on the Truth Behind the Eating Disorder Crisis,” Dazed

“Emmeline Clein’s Reframing of Eating Disorder Culture Makes Dead Weight A Must Read,” Jezebel

“Writer Emmeline Clein on Yearning for Connection,” The Creative Independent

“Dead Weight: Emmeline Clein on Disrupting Eating Disorder Culture Through Her Writing,” Service95

“Emmeline Clein’s Debut Book Takes a Critical Look at Y2K Pop Culture,” Bustle

“Ths Country Has an Eating Disorder,” Mental Hellth

“The Body is Not a Metaphor: an Interview with Emmeline Clein,” Cleveland Review of Books

“The Societal Causes of Eating Disorders,” Columbia Magazine

Named a Bustle & Self Book Club Pick & a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by Oprah Daily, LitHub, and Bookshop

Read excerpts from Dead Weight in The Nation, Literary Hub, the Washington Post & Katie Couric Media

Listen to Emmeline talk Dead Weight on Going Mental with Eileen Kelly, Next Question with Katie Couric, Celebrity Book Club, Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness, Good Bodies, and Nonfiction with Callie Hitchcock

“An assiduously researched and urgent debut book, Dead Weight is both a collective memoir of girlhood and a blistering take on the need to abolish the Western beauty standards that actively promote self-harm.”

—Nylon

“With fierce wit, excavating curiosity, and a heart fully surrendered to her subject, Emmeline Clein writes about our eating disorder culture from the inner reaches of what this culture has wrought. This book is electric with insight, and suffused with a strange, stubborn tenderness.”

—Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters

“[Clein] pulls no punches in her analysis of eating disorders and their psychological underpinnings, and her prose style is urgent, intense, and often captivating . . . This is a book that deserves attention.”

—Kirkus Reviews [starred]

“Clein’s stellar debut collection probes the inciting factors and effects of eating disorders in young women...This announces Clein as a talent to watch.”

—Publishers Weekly [starred]

“With compassion and rage, she wrestles with the root causes of the ongoing eating disorder epidemic in the U.S. Across 12 deeply researched essays, she calls out Kim Kardashian for “impl[ying] the customer’s natural form is a problem to be solved” with her influential company SKIMS, and analyzes the role pro-eating disorder content on social media plays in the current crisis.”

—Time

“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. Clein writes with flash and drama, talking to readers like friends in the know, which balances the at-times scholarly lean of her approach.”

—Booklist

“Dead Weight offers a personal and unconventional look at disordered eating...In her debut, Clein privileges the voices of women associated with eating disorders, the writings of Simone Weil, catholic saints, the saints of the 2000s Tumblrverse, and even Mischa Barton, making for a vital entry into the regrettably slim canon of ED literature.”

—Interview

“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.”

—Elle

“Dead Weight approaches its subject from a range of directions: it is, among other things, a memoir; a cultural critique of the “skinny, sexy sad girl” media of the 00s; an anti-capitalist polemic, and a history of fatphobia and its relation to white supremacy. It’s a remarkable book. Dead Weight is harrowing and infuriating, but it’s not unremittingly bleak: Clein’s graceful, lyrical prose and her deep belief in solidarity and sistership shine throughout the book.”

—Dazed

“Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm by Emmeline Clein, is one of the smartest, most well-reported books I’ve ever read on the root causes of our culture’s disordered eating. Emmeline examines how our obsession with food and body image has permeated literature, history, and pop culture and how the weight loss industrial complex has exploited our fears and insecurities.”

—Katie Couric

“Dead Weight is a lyrical and scrupulously researched portrait of disordered eating in its many manifestations, which is also, of course, a portrait of this country’s disordered relationship to women’s bodies. An authoritative, generous, and persuasive debut that I wish I could go back in time and gift to my teenage self.”

—Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood

“This book is a bomb, made of all of the fury and intensity of any girl who wonders what exactly they are hungering for. Emmeline Clein, the Joan Didion of the Tumblr era. This manifesto is meant to be devoured, in all of its witty, compassionate, feverish, elegantly argued brilliance.”

—Kate Zambreno, author of Heroines

“Dead Weight is part eating disorder theory, part history, part collective memoir of modern girlhood (often rendered in the first person we) and part condemnation of the corporate, heteropatriarchal forces that demand the impossible of girls and women: self-objectification and self-disappearance, somehow simultaneously.”

—Bomb

“Dead Weight removes the onus from those suffering with eating disorders by offering a path to recovery via a meticulously-documented case against the powers that be.”

—Cleveland Review of Books

“Disordered eating became the connective tissue of Clein’s incisive, urgent essay collection, Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm, in which she examines the effects of the condition on herself, early aughts tabloid stars, and even French philosophers such as Simone Weil.”

—Bustle

“Dead Weight is a blistering debut— stylish, sharp, and smarter than anything else I’ve read about the fraught and gendered terrain of disordered eating in America. These essays are kaleidoscopic and virtuosic.”

—Jordan Kisner, author of Thin Places

“Clein takes a close, empathetic look at the cultural frameworks that destroyed nearly any possibility of a positive body image for people alive in the early 2000s. By the end of the book, you’ll be left with a better understanding of how society at large failed you—and not the other way around.”

—Self

“It’s a joy to read such sharply intelligent writing on a subject where critical thinking is rarely found; a consoling and enraging book in which thoughtful readers will find fellowship.”

—Sarah Moss, author of The Fell