EMMELINE CLEIN'S LOVE/HATE LIST (XL EDITION)
Dream Baby Press asked Emmeline Clein for a list of 20 things she loves and 20 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.
THINGS EMMELINE CLEIN LOVES:
Extended riffs, bits and banter
Vocal fry
Novels set in boarding schools or mental hospitals (preferably both)
That Jane Fonda’s aerobics empire was a fundraising effort for the Campaign for Economic Democracy & helped her recover from bulimia
Kindness (even after being told it’s making me look weak)
Raising Cane's chicken fingers
Memoirs by tertiary figures (Ivana Lowell’s Why Not Say What Happened about her parents’ literary love hexagon, Susan Strasberg’s Marilyn and Me, etc)
When Ashley Olsen went for a nature walk with a drink and a machete
Drinking martinis with my friends
Crystal hot sauce
2000s/2010s CW Television Shows
Telling an extremely long story in too much detail
Under-appreciated books by party girls & gays of the 70s/80s (Caroline Blackwood, Gavin Lambert, etc)
Live Oak Trees (especially when dripping with Spanish Moss)
Debriefs
My friends
Meditation (Reading in the sun while drinking an iced coffee)
Texting too much
Deleted scenes on DVDs
Country music
THINGS EMMELINE CLEIN HATES:
Condescension
Baggage claim at the airport
Color-coded bookshelves
That the films Drop Dead Gorgeous and Cherry Falls are not streaming
That the books Lost in the Cosmos and the Ritz of the Bayou are out of print
Calories on menus
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
That women with endometriosis or polycystic ovarian syndrome often experience extreme pain, which goes under-researched and untreated, while women in the Victorian era could at least buy opium-soaked tampons at their local apothecary (you can see a desiccated one at the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum, highly recommend a drink at Carousel Bar (an actual carousel) across the street after if you don’t get motion sickness)
When people think I’m Emma Cline
JFK Terminal 4
Thesaurus-coded prose
Insomnia
Most people's pets
The weight loss industrial complex
Meditation (the usual definition)
My ever-present existential dread
Taylor Swift probably being straight
When my friends' boyfriends are boring
Big Pharma
That we all act like the Paris Baguette chain isn't a front for somethinga
Why CBT? I am so curious! Excellent reading, as always
What’s boarding school or mental hospitals without Big Pharma?