More Please: On Food, Fat, Bingeing, Longing, and the Lust for Enough

A NYLON MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2024

A ZIBBY MAG MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2024

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.

"[A] smart first outing….Specter's incisive report will intrigue readers of all sizes." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"An inspiring personal account of living with an eating disorder and finding joy in a fat body." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

"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 (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 Appétit, them, Hollywood Reporter, and more. More, Please is her first book.