About mini reviews:

Maybe you’re not an audio book person, or maybe you are. I provide mini reviews of audio books and give a recommendation on the format. Was this book improved by a voice actor? Would a physical copy have been better? Perhaps they complement each other? Read on. . .

Evette Dionne is a writer and magazine editor, and her collection of essays in Weightless read much like someone with a background in online media. Yes, she talks about fatness as it pertains to dating, flying, famous fat people, and the medical industry. She also explains her heart defect, agoraphobia, and depression. Surprisingly, little time is spent on the aspects that make her work unique from other books that read similarly (see Shrill, You Have the Right to Remain Fat, Bad Fat Black Girl, and Fat, Pretty, And Soon to Be Old), which bring their own conversations to the discussion. Instead of digging deep into what it’s like to be fat and have an unrelated heart condition, or why she won’t date fat men, she reiterates the conversation around Lizzo being fat, TV husbands being fat and married to hot wives, people congratulating Adele on losing weight when she was in the middle of a divorce, etc. I started to wonder to what extent Dionne had read books by her peers, and if she did, why she decided to tread old territory.

On the other hand, Dionna doesn’t take the same care with her word choices as her peers do. She oscillates among words like fat, plus-sized, obese, overweight, and curvy. Those words don’t mean the same thing, nor do they carry the same repercussions. She also mentions body positivity a number of times without examining how the movement was coopted by self-conscious thin women. Then again, would I want her to discuss the problems with body positivity when it’s already been done? Not really, but why continue using the term if it doesn’t mean what it sounds like it means?

Overall, I was left with the impression that Dionne is currently in a challenging place in the fat body discussion, one in which she’s learning what others have said and paraphrasing it into her own words. But, she’s failing to really examine and challenge her own biases, particularly against dating fat men, and her “appointment” to tune into shows devoted to humiliating fat people who need care beyond weight loss, like My 600-lb Life, The Biggest Loser, and 1000-lb Sisters.