"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
★ 2024-02-29
A memoir that examines disordered eating and body image.
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, including Carmen Maria Machado and Roxane Gay, to show how representation can be a healing agent. “The fat influencers and artists and writers and actors and musicians I sought out on social media when I first began to exceed the sizes that most stores kept in stock (or even manufactured) provided the road map that pointed me toward my current identity as a fat, mostly happy, out-and-proud dyke and decidedly fat-positive human being,” she writes. The author takes readers through relatable phases of her life in chapters titled “Watch,” about how so many girls learn from media presentations what the “ideal body” looks like; “Gorge,” detailing the struggles of living with binge-eating disorder; and “Move,” about finding joy through exercise of all kinds, not just the calorie-burning forms. Specter dives deep into her personal experience, but she never loses track of the far-reaching, societal factors that contribute to and arise out of diet culture and the shaming of fat bodies. “At a certain point,” she writes, “when we’re still selling diet plans to kids and rewarding grown women for fitting into sample sizes, I think we have to admit that our national obsession with being small isn’t just some tragic holdover from the aughts; its affirmation of white supremacist, cis-heteropatriarchal notions about physical appearance and intrinsic worth.” Though the author covers a lifetime of body image issues, her emphasis on the difficulty of the pandemic years for disordered eating is a fresh, timely take, which readers of all sizes will appreciate.
An inspiring personal account of living with an eating disorder and finding joy in a fat body.
