More, Please
On Food, Fat, Bingeing, Longing, and the Lust for "Enough"
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
ONE OF TIME 100'S MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2024 • A DEBUTIFUL BEST BOOK OF 2024 • FEATURED IN NYLON • W MAGAZINE • GLAMOUR • BOOK RIOT • HEYALMA • BUSTLE • ELECTRIC LITERATURE • ROMPER • AND MORE!
"Tender, funny, angry, and sharp as hell. This is an essential book for anyone with a body, anyone with a heart." —Helen Rosner, James Beard Award-winning food journalist and New Yorker staff writer
An unflinching and deeply reported look at the realities of binge-eating disorder from a rising culture commentator and writer for Vogue.
Millions of us use restrictive diets, intermittent fasting, IV therapies, and Ozempic abuse to shrink until we are sample-size acceptable. But for the 30 million Americans who live with eating disorders, it isn’t just about less. More, Please is a chronicle of a lifelong fixation with food—its power to soothe, to comfort, to offer a fleeting escape from the outside world—as well as an examination of the ways in which compulsory thinness, diet culture, and the seductive promise of “wellness” have resulted in warping countless Americans’ relationship with healthy eating.
Melding memoir, reportage, and in-depth interviews with some of the most prominent and knowledgeable commentators currently writing about food, fatness, and disordered eating—Virginia Sole-Smith, Virgie Tovar, Aiyana Ishmael, Leslie Jamison, and others—Emma Specter explores binge-eating disorder as both a personal problem and a societal one. In More, Please, she provides a context, a history, and a language for what it means to always want more than you’ll allow yourself to have.
This raw and necessary book explores:
Eating Disorder Recovery: Specter chronicles her lifelong fixation with food with unflinching honesty, offering language for what it means to want more than you’ll allow yourself to have.Fat Acceptance: A powerful look at compulsory thinness, fatphobia, and how the seductive promise of "wellness" warps our relationship with our bodies.Coming Out Story: Delving into the intersection of queerness and body image, this memoir explores how identity shapes our hunger and our healing.An Anti-Diet Book: Melding personal narrative with sharp reportage, Specter interviews leading voices like Virginia Sole-Smith and Leslie Jamison to dismantle diet culture.
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In this smart first outing, Vogue writer Specter braids journalism and autobiography to unpack her battle with binge-eating disorder. The chronological narrative begins with her girlhood, which she uses as a prism to explore how diet culture can sour relationships between mothers and daughters. Specter's weight yo-yoed as she entered young adulthood and internalized the idea that fat was "the one thing I couldn't be if I wanted to be loved." She lost 50 pounds with Weight Watchers, but "the part that felt fundamentally unworthy was harder to shed." After moving from L.A. to New York City and coming out as queer in her 20s, Specter reorganized her relationship with food, and eventually came to accept herself as "a fat, mostly happy, out-and-proud dyke." Interwoven throughout are insightful interviews with science reporter Sabrina Imbler, weight-discrimination expert Virgie Tovar, and others who compare their own experiences with body image and disordered eating against broader social trends. Specter's incisive report will intrigue readers of all sizes.
