Whether it’s teenage runway models representing “different” body types or hailing all people over a size 2 as “curvy,” Vogue‘s annual “Shape Issue” is always a barrel of bitter laughs. This year, however, it may have gotten its darkest: socialite Dara-Lynn Weiss wrote candidly (and, seemingly, obliviously) about putting her seven-year-old daughter Bea on a strict diet that included publicly humiliating her, withholding cake at a birthday party and a bunch of other nightmare shit only a really, really, really questionable mother would do.
…Not only that, but the accompanying photo spread features mother and newly thin daughter posing in fancy designer clothes (which she can wear now! because she’s thin! life is full of magic!). Oh, and don’t forget how Weiss published her story in a magazine that deifies eating disorders.
How could this get more horrible, you ask? Weiss, of course, has landed a book deal with Random House’s imprint Ballantine, who describe the book as “an experience that epitomizes the modern parenting ‘damned if you do/damned if you don’t’ predicament.”
Surely this isn’t horrible enough, you say. We respond: the tentative title is The Heavy.
Outcry over the original article has been massive and harsh–our own comment thread on the matter includes shouts of “child abuse” (also consider reading the excellent Katie Baker‘s piece at Jezebel). Unfortunately, the uproar all but guarantees Weiss’ book will make a splash.
[Ed. Note: EIC Jennifer Wright is sitting across from us threatening to shoot heroin directly into her eyeballs to land a deal with Random House]
[Ed. Note 2: Unlike Weiss' predictably intolerable book, we'd actually read that]
