Written after Eggshell Skull, this work begins from Lee’s own experience of disordered eating, body surveillance and the intensification of self-scrutiny that followed becoming publicly visible as a writer.

From there, it widens into an argument about the way thinness becomes not merely an aesthetic preference but something closer to a moral category: discipline made visible on the body, with failure equally visible. She is not standing safely outside the machinery diagnosing everyone else; much of the essay concerns knowing intellectually that a standard is absurd while continuing to want what it promises. Advertising, celebrity, women’s media, social comparison and the strange moral language surrounding food and bodies all enter the frame. The result sits somewhere between memoir, cultural criticism and extended personal essay — accessible, intimate and deliberately uncomfortable about the gap between political belief and embodied behaviour. 

Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2019. First edition, first printing, with complete 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 number line. Paperback. ISBN 9781760876524. Light shelf and edge wear to covers, including minor rubbing and a small crease/mark to lower front cover; internally appears clean and sound.