I first started following Evette Dionne on social media when she was named the editor of BITCH magazine, a publication devoted to feminist critiques of pop culture (sadly now shuttered). She also wrote an award-winning history for young readers about Black women’s struggles for voting rights. But only recently have I become aware of her role as an activist for fat people’s rights, a long-overdue movement aiming to combat one of the last socially acceptable forms of discrimination.

"WEIGHTLESS both opens and closes with some very positive action items that readers can take.... Dionne’s brilliance and candor will carry readers along with her."

In WEIGHTLESS, Dionne provides plenty of personal history as context for her activism. She opens by discussing her diagnosis, while she was still in her 20s, of pulmonary hypertension and heart failure. These conditions were likely caused, or at least exacerbated, by medical professionals’ repeated inability or refusal to see her as anything more than a fat body that needed to lose weight. Dionne’s chronic conditions are not a consequence of her fatness. Rather, they were most likely caused by earlier doctors’ failures to address a different (non-weight-related) condition until their only choice was to use a powerful medication with toxic side effects --- again, because her size blinded them to the need for any action beyond weight loss.

Indictment of the medical profession is a theme that runs throughout several of Dionne’s chapters, which include considerations of celebrity weight loss and the public portrayals of fat celebrities, the challenges of online dating as a fat person, and the dearth of serious roles for fat actors. Her chapters --- which for the most part could exist as stand-alone essays --- also delve into more personal topics, such as the shame she experienced as a young girl publicly humiliated by a (supposedly) well-meaning gym teacher, and the anxiety she felt when disrobing for sex or donning a form-fitting bathing suit on a cruise.

Dionne addresses complicated and perhaps controversial topics when she admits to tension between herself and her mother (a fellow fat person, but one keen to adopt every new diet or weight loss technique). She also acknowledges the extent to which even she has internalized society’s fatphobia, such as when she relates feeling uncomfortable while dating an equally fat man or when she admits to relishing shows like “My 600-Pound Life” with a feeling of superiority: “Fatness is intertwined in my very being; I don’t know who I am if I’m not fat. But I’ve also prided myself on not being that fat.”

WEIGHTLESS both opens and closes with some very positive action items that readers can take. These include techniques for finding doctors who won’t default to weight loss as the first (or only) solution and, later, ideas for how to combat discrimination against fat people via legal and political actions. At times, given the book’s relatively narrow focus and its mixture of the personal and the political, it can begin to seem slightly repetitious. But Dionne’s brilliance and candor will carry readers along with her.