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.

This unforgettable memoir offers an unflinching excavation of:

• Diet Culture Critique: From Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign to Weight Watchers, Dionne dismantles the billion-dollar industry built on the shame of fat bodies.
• Health and Self-Advocacy: A raw account of being diagnosed with heart failure at twenty-nine and learning to fight for care in a medical system that dismisses fat Black women.
• Pop Culture's Gaze: A sharp analysis of how television, movies, and online life shape our perceptions of fatness, from the asexual sidekick to the pitfalls of internet chatrooms.
• The Politics of Desirability: Honest and funny explorations of friendship, sex, and dating while navigating a world that rejects or fetishizes fat bodies.

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.