Overview

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—Jennifer Weiner, Marisa Meltzer, Virgie Tovar, 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.  

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9780063278370

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Reviews

"""More, Please is a five-course meal of delight. It is an absolutely delicious read, that never shies away from the truth in favor of some tidy, societally approved narrative. Specter’s own honesty forced me to look at my relationship with my body without a filter and held my hand while I did so."" — Kelsey McKinney, co-creator and host of Normal Gossip ""Few topics are as viciously knotted together as food, health, weight, pleasure, and the crushing social pressure to be a certain size. Emma Specter slices through all of it, probing our obsession with 'wellness' with a voice that’s 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 “Moving, intelligent, transparent, and companionable, Emma Specter’s More, Please more than earns its place among our literatures of bodies, of self, of queerness, of freedom.” — Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of All This Could Be Different ""Emma Specter's More, Please is a generous coming-of-age and coming-to-self memoir that offers pathos, levity, and depth (in equal measure) to conversations around how complicated a role food can have in our lives."" — Alicia Kennedy, author of No Meat Required ""More, Please is fluid, expansive, and frank. Anyone whose relationship with food has ever been fraught (so: everyone) will find something new and sharp in Specter's writing, which has and will continue to help people, despite—or maybe because of—her refreshing refusal to prescribe."" — Katie Heaney, author of Would You Rather? ""More, Please maps what it feels like to be caught in constant contradiction: to love and fear food, and to want connection and aloneness at the same time. For those of us who have felt like our bodies are houses where no one was home, this book gave me new glittering and curious inhabitants. I recognized myself here like never before."" — Emma Copley Eisenberg, author of The Third Rainbow Girl and Housemates ""[A] smart first outing...Specter’s incisive report will intrigue readers of all sizes."" — Publishers Weekly (starred review) ""In this 'hybrid memoir-in-interviews,' Vogue culture writer Specter blends her own struggles with binge eating and body image with the voices of prominent body-positive writers...to show how representation can be a healing agent. An inspiring personal account of living with an eating disorder and finding joy in a fat body."" — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) ""...a loving, urgent and necessary book about food and bodies and being a person in the world."" — Romper ""Emma Specter’s debut is a banger, a journalistic memoir that melds her personal history with binge-eating disorder with cultural criticism of body representation in '90s and '00s media, as well as experts’ insights about fat liberation, intersectionality within the body positivity movement, and the wellness-to-eating-disorder pipeline. It’s an exciting addition to the body politics canon—not least of all because of its queer lens—from a writer who’s been living and breathing these themes for most of her life."" — Bustle ""Specter, a culture writer at Vogue and vital voice in the literary landscape, makes her book-length debut exploring our love-hate relationship with food, how it can be both a source of nourishment and shame.  — Electric Literature ""This book’s tone is compassionate as Specter creates a foundation for accepting oneself and rejecting stereotypes. Self-help, sociology, entertainment, and memoir readers from many generations will appreciate this wholehearted approach, which challenges society to do a better job of understanding the realities of eating disorders.” — Library Journal ""Specter’s experience with binge-eating disorder frames this conversation, which includes incisive analyses on wellness-and-diet culture from Virginia Sole-Smith, Jennifer Weiner, and Leslie Jamison. But it’s her voice—acerbic, skeptical, humane, and funny—that makes More, Please so compelling."" — Air Mail"

"""More, Please is a five-course meal of delight. It is an absolutely delicious read, that never shies away from the truth in favor of some tidy, societally approved narrative. Specter’s own honesty forced me to look at my relationship with my body without a filter and held my hand while I did so."" — Kelsey McKinney, creator and host of Normal Gossip ""Emma Specter's More, Please is a generous coming-of-age and coming-to-self memoir that offers pathos, levity, and depth (in equal measure) to conversations around how complicated a role food can have in our lives."" — Alicia Kennedy, author of No Meat Required ""More, Please is fluid, expansive, and frank. Anyone whose relationship with food has ever been fraught (so: everyone) will find something new and sharp in Specter's writing, which has and will continue to help people, despite—or maybe because of—her refreshing refusal to prescribe."" — Katie Heaney, author of Would You Rather? ""More, Please maps what it feels like to be caught in constant contradiction: to love and fear food, and to want connection and aloneness at the same time. For those of us who have felt like our bodies are houses where no one was home, this book gave me new glittering and curious inhabitants. I recognized myself here like never before."" — Emma Copley Eisenberg, author of The Third Rainbow Girl ""In this 'hybrid memoir-in-interviews,' Vogue culture writer Specter blends her own struggles with binge eating and body image with the voices of prominent body-positive writers...to show how representation can be a healing agent. An inspiring personal account of living with an eating disorder and finding joy in a fat body."" — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"

Author Information

Emma Specter (she/they) is an author and journalist living in Los Angeles. Emma currently works as the culture writer at Vogue, where she covers film, TV, books, politics, news, and (almost) anything queer; they have previously worked at GARAGE and LAist and have freelanced for outlets including The Hairpin, Bon Appetit, them, Hollywood Reporter, and more. More, Please is her first book.

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