Emmeline Clein

@dreambabypress asked @emmelc for a list of 10 things she loves and 10 things she hates. Emmeline Clein is the author of Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm, a cultural, political, and personal history of disordered eating, and the chapbook Toxic, on Britney Spears, bad girls, and the bayou. Her writing has been published in The Nation, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Subscribe to our substack for an extra 10 Loves and 10 Hates from Emmeline. Link in bio 📍

my book has been out for a month so here are some of my favorite dead weight in the wild sightings thank you to my fabulous friends for being her paparazzi

Dead Weight is out today & so is the most iconic conversation i’ve had about it, with legend @cat_marnell for @interviewmag — scroll for some of my favorite moments & stroll to a bookstore near you to buy the book

“Cartography, I’ve learned, is a wily art.”⁠ ⁠ Emmeline Clein (@emmelc ) ruminates on risk, improvisation, attachment, and the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, who delivered her from rock bottom. ⁠ ⁠ 🔗🗺️💋Read more on PW Broadcast at the link in bio. ⁠ 🖼️ Artwork by Sofia Belen Criswell (@atrevidasofia )

Remember when desire was not painful, but f*cking funny? Clowns do. Long overshadowed by less carnivalesque forms of comedy, clowning—utterly vaudevillian, earnestly desperate, childishly physical—is bewitching and bewildering audiences tired of nihilistic tirades, who are instead in pursuit of catharsis and connection. Puppet shows are taking over prestigious theaters, clowns are starring in steamy romantic dramas, and psychoanalysts are enrolling in clown school. This increased visibility is a sign of the times. On a recent panel about comedy at the New Orleans Book Festival, Danzy Senna posited that satire might not be a useful comedic mode in apocalyptic circumstances. Sartre famously distinguished between rebels, who want the system to remain the same so they can continue rebelling against it, and revolutionaries, who are willing to risk their own obsolescence in the service of genuine change. Where a satirist might rebel, clowns—the ultimate failure artists—manage to enjoy getting flamed by the society that their revolution galvanizes. Next month, @dopaminebooksla , through the independent press @semiotexte , will release an anthology entitled Clowns, edited by poet, memoirist, and editor @michelleteaz . Ahead of its publication, Books Editor @emmelc called Tea to spill the tea on the jester’s privilege, the humor inherent in mourning, resistance, and more. Link in bio to read their conversation. Words: @emmelc

What if cocktail acquaintances and real-life frenemies Elaine de Kooning and Lee Krasner were secretly lovers? This question underpins Ann Rower’s 2002 novel, ‘Lee & Elaine,’ which is getting a second life next month with a new edition by @semiotexte . In the book, Rower, the author of the 1990 essay collection ‘If You’re A Girl’ and the 1995 novel ‘Armed Response,’ predicts and parodies a raft of now-popular genres in Lee & Elaine. Her autofictional protagonist attempts to pen a joint biography of Krasner and de Kooning that also operates as a journey of self-discovery. When she fails to find evidence that Krasner and de Kooning were lovers (their associates insist they harbored nothing but animosity for each other), Rower is eventually forced to write a love story between ghosts. In the end, the book becomes an accidental love letter—not to de Kooning or Krasner, but to Hannah Wilke, the lost peer whose death sends the lightly fictionalized iteration of Rower into a spiral; to a short-lived love affair; and to Rower’s own past and future lives. Rower’s lover’s viscous lip gloss becomes a glue—a gummy substance stretching across generations, so women who might have hated each other can become friends, those who never met can trade secrets, and those who never knew how to phrase their compliments can simply smack their lips and smile. Ahead of the book’s republication, Books Editor @emmelc visited Rower at her home on the Upper West Side to discuss midlife stories, artistic friendships, cemetery sex, giving gossip a good rap, coming out narratives, and more. Link in bio to read their conversation now.

wrote about a book that changed my life, a store that didn’t, and an app that wanted to—if you know me, you know instagram ads have been trying to convince me to ‘disappear for 6 weeks and come back completely rebranded’ for over a year now…i bravely resisted & instead flirted, conversed, read psychoanalytic literature, laughed, played to lose & wrote about it for @parisreview 🩵

“There’s absolutely a rejection of autofiction. I am grateful to that era, but I must respectfully graduate,” @madelinecash tells @emmelc in the latest installment of Word on the Street. In ‘Lost Lambs,’ Cash’s debut novel, the author declines to tell us where, let alone when, we are—inventing a fictional universe devoid of “proper nouns.” Rather than simply condemn modernity for atomizing us, she offers an alternative vision of collectivity: refusing her readers a protagonist and offering us an eccentric troupe of players instead. Whether they’re competing in a game of life or staging a performance is up to you; in either case, their madcap hijinks require banding together, and a new approach to being part of a community. Decades after the turn-of-the-century heyday of hysterical realism, Cash, who is also the author of the 2023 short story collection ‘Earth Angel’ and the co-founder and former co-editrix of @forevermagusa , may be pioneering a new mode for this moment: Call it optimism-pilled manic-pixie-paranoid-realism spiced with the sacred. If that sounds like a mouthful, it’s only because this book is as invested in a zany, zigzagging lucidity as it is in pithy, parodic zingers. 5G and Web3 promise opportunities more than just doomscrolling. Ahead of Lost Lambs’s release earlier this month, Cash and I met, fittingly, on the outskirts of Dimes Square to discuss religion, vindicated paranoia, retaining optimism against all odds, and maintaining a healthy relationship with your phone. Words: @emmelc

We seem to be in the midst of a moral panic around how dumb, exactly, we’ve become. Lobotomy memes continue to accrue likes in the hundreds of thousands, while the girls retweeting them, increasingly, have gotten so much Botox and filler that they can’t even forge outraged facial expressions. Boys are locking themselves in cum-stained basements to masturbate on livestreams, which leaves little free time for reading books. At The Baffler, an array of writers penned “dispatches from a postliterate world” in which literature as a craft is positioned as “well on its way to becoming a lost art.” Last year saw a raft of layoffs in publishing, part of a larger devolution in which the total number of jobs in the industry is down 40 percent from 30 years ago. Meanwhile, small presses are thriving by reissuing invigoratingly strange stories that have fallen out of print. Longstanding institutions like New York Review Books, Semiotext(e), and New Directions are flourishing alongside younger upstarts like Hagfish and McNally Editions, while new presses continue to crop up—Doubleday just announced the debut of its own reissue imprint, Outsider Editions. For her latest column, Books Editor @emmelc met with editors at a few of these presses to talk about their dying and decadent industry, what the future holds in 2026, and the enduring romance and detective work inherent to publishing the dead. Link in bio to read the full feature.

“I hope I can show younger generations of women that it actually gets better.” @monica_lewinksy has called herself “patient zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale.” Now a podcast host and TV producer, Lewinsky is a cipher for much of what ails our media ecosystem and our politics today—from her circuitous route to finding an authentic form of feminism to the seismic shift her story fomented in political reporting and the role of the Internet. Over the last 30 years, we’ve seen the tides of feminism rush in only to recede, while the Internet’s initial democratic promise has given way to a breeding ground for fascism, misinformation, and misogynistic ideology in the manosphere. But Lewinsky is interested in the healing potential of attention, in listening to people who have too often been poked, prodded, and violently exposed. “We rubberneck the car accident,” she tells @emmelc in CULTURED’s Winter issue. “How many of us think, five minutes or five weeks later, I wonder if that person is okay?” Link in bio to read how she has reclaimed her agency on- and offline, and reevaluated her place in political history while she’s at it. 1/ Monica wears a jacket by @gabrielahearst , top and skirt by @thefrankieshop , belt by @maxmara , vintage rings from @wildwestsocialhouse , and a vintage lighter by @ysl . 8/ Jacket, sunglasses, and shoes by @celine with a shirt by @hermes , skirt by @reformation , tights by @falke , and jewelry by @vancleefarpels . Words: @emmelc Photography: @mollymatalon Styling: @kattypaldos Hair: @ramsell for Home Agency using @bumbleandbumble Makeup: @sandyganzer for @forwardartists Production: @carolinewestdyk

In most true crime narratives, a woman’s dead body is a problem to be solved by a man on an almost evangelical mission, in pursuit of a motive and, usually, another man. The genre usually revolves around dead girls and detectives—or, in the more recent micro-genre devoted to forgotten, unsolved crimes, intrepid podcasters and journalists—and culminates in revelations that quell the audience’s ballooning anxiety. But true crime’s telephoto lens zooms in on individuals, obscuring the systems that molded and often mangled their psyches, a reality that renders the notion of motive reductive, if not insidiously obfuscating. Chris Kraus’s latest novel, ‘The Four Spent the Day Together,’ offers an X-ray of the genre’s rapidly fracturing foundations. The story is set in Minnesota’s Iron Range, an impoverished stretch of stunning wilderness where local teenagers drink at desiccated, abandoned mines called “pit lakes.” There, Kraus’s autofictional avatar, Catt Greene, and her husband, Paul Garcia, purchase a home, hoping to escape the literal and existential claustrophobia of their coastal urban milieu. The crimes that interest Catt—legal and interpersonal—have perpetrators but are devoid of villains. And the crime that interests Kraus is not one of passion but of raw chaos, unfolding within the hollow surreality of a drug binge. Her writing is an exercise in extended eye contact—through the discomfort, finding grace in a stranger’s twitching iris. At the link in bio, the cult author touches on attention, chance, noir, addiction, stargazing, and more with @emmelc in the latest installment of Word on the Street.

paperback baby!