Study Hall Book Club: Emma Specter’s “More, Please”

In Study Hall member Emma Specter’s debut book, More, Please: On Food, Fat, Bingeing, Longing, and the Lust for “Enough”, she interrogates her own journey with an eating disorder, using it as a lens through which to analyze society’s relationship to food and fatness. Specter, who has been a culture writer at Vogue since 2019, has penned essays about subjects like Ozempic, fatphobia in medicine, and portrayals of plus-sized people in pop culture. Prior to working at Vogue, Specter was an assistant editor at GARAGE. The book mixes reporting, memoir, and interviews with other writers like Aiyana Ishmael and Leslie Jamison. Adding to a new canon of writing about disordered eating and body image, More, Please carefully considers how race, class, and gender intersect with our experiences around food.

Leading up to More, Please’s release, Specter spoke to Study Hall about fashion media’s evolving relationship to body positivity, how unions have supported her career, and resources for covering eating disorders. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

What was your writing process for More Please?

I first got the idea—that you should write about this thing in your life that sucks and that you haven’t really found a way to make it poetic or rational—pretty soon after reading The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, who I interviewed in this book. She talks about the literary tradition around alcoholism, as both a beautiful [body] of work, and also…a challenge, because there’s this [tendency to]  romanticize. For better and for worse, I did not see that type of literary canon around food issues. To some degree, it exists for anorexia, but I don’t know that it exists in the same way for binge eating. 

So, I started working on a proposal and read a reading list of everything that my smart friends said I should read about the topic to make sure the book that I wanted to write didn’t already exist, but also just give myself some context. I found my agent [and then] spent a year with them working on their proposal, which went out to editors and eventually found its way to my editor Rachel Kambury who is the absolute queen. Then there were several years worth of writing and rewriting and editing. 

Do you have any advice for writers specifically with nonfiction projects looking for agents? It’s pretty different from querying a fiction project.

I highly recommend being a nonfiction writer, because you can sell a project without having it completed. I’m working on fiction right now, and I’m like, “Are you kidding me? I’m supposed to just work on this for many, many, many years and then maybe show it to someone?”

But I do really recommend fleshing out your proposal as much as you possibly can. [Having an in-depth proposal] is better and makes the writing process so much [simpler]. The [proposals] that the market wants sometimes are really in-depth, [but] sometimes it’s just vibes-based. And if you can sell a vibes-based book proposal, hats off to you. You can change what is in the proposal and you’re not married to the specific words you chose later on.

The thing that continues to be one of the hardest things of my life led to a book. That’s not everyone’s experience, and there’s so much privilege and access wrapped up in the journey. But I am glad that my first book is about binge eating because everything else will feel comparatively easier. I feel like I was able to wrestle with this thing that I needed to wrestle with as a person and as a writer. Not that the two identities always have to be separate, but it’s hard to grapple with something in writing if you’re not tackling it from all angles. 

Was there anything in your research for More, Please that really surprised you?

One of the studies that surprised me—even though it really shouldn’t, because it makes absolute sense—is about just how likely you are to have a negative body image or a bad view of yourself if your parents or the people around you when you’re younger disparage their bodies. I talk in the book about how I don’t think the answer is just to blame parents and caregivers, because most of the time, those people haven’t gotten the support to build something better for the kids in their care. But I was just stunned at how predictive that relationship can be. 

It’s just a reminder to not shit on the way I look in front of kids and young people. [That’s] something I do a lot less frequently now, especially as a fat person. But that study was such a reminder. It takes so little for someone to feel like “my body doesn’t look the way it’s supposed to, and therefore I am not the way I’m supposed to be.”

More, Please also touches on the digital media boom of the 2010s. One of the anecdotes that stuck out to me was about how, enroute to your interview with Anna Wintour for your position at Vogue, you read an article on your phone about how she does not like the color black, and you realize you’re wearing black. There’s humor in that situation, but it speaks to a broader dynamic about how fashion media is very looks-obsessed. How has the conversation around body positivity changed since you started working in fashion media?

A lot of the problems are the same but the conversation is evolving. [Now that] we see some fat influencers and some brands expanding their size range (to a certain degree), it’s tempting to be like, “progress marches forward.” I can directly credit Vogue’s beauty editor Margaux Anbouba this. [She personally] has done so much work around debunking the notion that thinness is always better for you, that wellness equals thinness, and therefore wellness should run your life. She publishes really smart and incisive stuff in an industry that does not always want or require smarter, incisive stuff, because sometimes dumb, mean stuff gets better SEO.  

At the time that I started at Vogue, I was probably midsized and a lot of that weight gain has also taken place while I’ve been a remote worker. I can’t say that my experience lines up directly with anyone’s experience who is fat or is struggling with body issues or disordered eating at a place like Vogue, but I do feel like I’ve been empowered to write about what’s going on with my body and food. 

It can be hard not to feel like everything has to be on the table. It took me a long time to write about Ozempic. For a long time, I didn’t really know what to do with my feelings about Ozempic, which is something I talked about in the book and in a recent essay. I would have chased that shit down if it had hit critical mass before I was at a place where I felt l more confident as a fat person. Being in a workplace that doesn’t make me feel like you have to be our resident hot fat take girl means a lot to me and being surrounded with peers, some of whom I talk to in this book, like Aiyana Ishmael, who does such incredible [writing] at the nexus of fashion and fatness and race and identity.

Can you elaborate on the relationship between organized labor and covering these topics? 

A big thing that has affected my life at Vogue is having a union and having a conversation around what our work is worth. It’s easier to feel worth as a fat human being, and just a human being in general, when you feel like there’s also a conversation going on around my rights as a worker, not that they’re totally interchangeable, but I do think there are links there.

I wish we had those little stickers that go on the sides of like egg cartons that are like this “writer has been treated the livable wage and has been treated appropriately at work” which we know is not always the case in media and publishing or any other field. Sometimes, there can be a weird feeling of: I don’t want to be gobbling off someone’s trauma when I don’t know that they were necessarily paid fairly or treated fairly in the pursuit of writing this work. I do think writing is stronger when you don’t get the sense that someone had to suffer to get that story to where it is. When you’re struggling to pay rent or bills or dealing with a health situation, it’s hard to be creative. But it’s also really hard to write about whatever slice of identity you are tasked with in a way that’s engaging [when you are working in poor conditions] because your priorities are elsewhere, as they should be.

This book touches upon negative media portrayals of fatness and the trivialization of eating disorders. What are some resources that you recommend for journalists and essayists covering these topics? 

It depends on your angle. If you’re someone who’s writing about children and weight and obesity and the scaremongering around that, Virginia Sole-Smith’s newsletter Burnt Toast is a great resource. If you’re writing about food systems and how the way we eat influences the way we see the world and how sustainability fits into it all, I recommend Alicia Kennedy’s writing.

The National Eating Disorders Association has a helpline that can be really helpful. Stuff can come up when you’re reporting that you don’t necessarily want to work out in that story. You might not have the resources or the language, or, frankly, the time, to seek out ways of dealing with that for yourself while you’re writing. I don’t think everyone needs to call an eating disorder hotline every time they write a story. But you are allowed to have complicated feelings that come up in the reporting of a story. I think this outdated expectation of journalistic objectivity can prevent people from getting the help they need.