Weightless: Making Space for My Resilient Body and Soul

A poignant and ruthlessly honest journey through cultural expectations of size, race, and gender—and toward a brighter future—from National Book Award nominee Evette Dionne

My body has not betrayed me; it has continued rebounding against all odds. It is a body that others map their expectations on, but it has never let me down.

In this insightful, funny, and whip-smart book, acclaimed writer Evette Dionne explores the minefields fat Black women are forced to navigate in the course of everyday life. From her early experiences of harassment to adolescent self-discovery in internet chatrooms to a diagnosis of heart failure at age twenty-nine, Dionne tracks her relationships with friendship, sex, motherhood, agoraphobia, health, pop culture, and self-image.

Along the way, she lifts back the curtain to reveal the subtle, insidious forms of surveillance and control levied at fat women: At the doctor’s office, where any health ailment is treated with a directive to lose weight. On dating sites, where larger bodies are rejected or fetishized. On TV, where fat characters are asexual comedic relief. But Dionne’s unflinching account of our deeply held prejudices is matched by her fierce belief in the power of self-love.

An unmissable portrait of a woman on a journey toward understanding our society and herself, Weightless holds up a mirror to the world we live in and asks us to imagine the future we deserve.

Dionne’s unflinching analysis asks a central question: how does a culture that hates fat people reinforce that repulsion in our daily lives?

• Fat Liberation, Not Just Body Positivity: An incisive look at a movement that demands more than just acceptance, challenging the very systems that profit from shame.
• Diet Culture and Pop Culture: From TV's asexual comedic relief to dating sites where bodies are rejected or fetishized, Dionne dissects the media's role in perpetuating harmful myths.
• A Chronic Illness Journey: A raw, personal account of navigating heart failure at age twenty-nine and fighting for a diagnosis in a system that defaults to “lose weight.”
• Black Womanhood and Mental Health: Dionne shares her personal battles with agoraphobia and anxiety, exploring the intersections of race, size, and the right to take up space—both physically and mentally.

Evette Dionne is a journalist, an editor, and a pop-culture critic. She is the National Book Award–nominated author of Lifting as We Climb: Black Women’s Battle for the Ballot Box, a middle- grade nonfiction book about Black women suffragists. Her work has appeared in Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Time, the New York Times, the Guardian, and Teen Vogue, among other publications. A graduate of Bennett College, Dionne is based in Denver, where she works as the executive editor of YES! Media.