American Bulk

Essays on Excess

by Emily Mester

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Pub Date 26 Nov 2024 | Archive Date 31 Oct 2024

W. W. Norton & Company

Essays & Collections | Nonfiction (Adult)

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Description

What if we explored our relationship to consumption with the same depth and feeling we use to tell stories of great loves and losses?

Americans are caught up in bulk. We guiltily watch Amazon boxes pile up on the porch, wade through endless reviews to find the perfect product, and crave the comforting indulgence of a chain restaurant. In American Bulk, Emily Mester intertwines cultural critique and personal history to explore how the things we buy, eat, amass, and discard become an intimate part of our lives. With humor and sharp intellect, she reflects on the joys and anxieties of family Costco trips, how a seasonal stint at Ulta Beauty taught her the insidious art of the sale, and what it means to get Mall Sad. In a nuanced examination of diet culture and fatness, Mester recounts her teenage summer at fat camp and the unexpected liberation she finds there. Finally, she ventures to Storm Lake, Iowa, to reckon with her grandmother’s abandoned hoard, excavating the dysfunction that lies at the heart of her family’s obsession with stuff. American Bulk introduces readers to a striking new literary talent from the American heartland, one who dares to ask us to regard consumption not with guilt but with grace and empathy.

What if we explored our relationship to consumption with the same depth and feeling we use to tell stories of great loves and losses?

Americans are caught up in bulk. We guiltily watch Amazon boxes...

Advance Praise

"With compassion, wit, and piercing honesty, Emily Mester delves into our love of consumerism—and what our desires say about who we want to become. Bravely personal, incisively critical, American Bulk is a report on our national psyche and a captivating family story." -Larissa Pham, author of National Book Critics Circle John Leonard finalist Pop Song

"A funny, incisive, humane dispatch from a brilliant new voice in nonfiction. American Bulk had me cringing, laughing, and yes, even tearing up as it drew the contours of my own, and our national, appetites. I remain amazed that a book so clear-eyed in its scrutiny of our capitalistic perversity left me with so much hope." -Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism

"American Bulk is composed of some of my favorite nonfiction essays on family, capital, love and dysfunction that I’ve ever read. It's a refreshing and needed reframing of what all these things mean, today, right now, as the neon haze of fast-food signs flicker from their long-time dominion of the American experience. Mester examines our compulsion to consume with careful incisions that I kept highlighting and coming back to, just to whisper the words to myself to make their clear-eyed cleverness my own." -Arabelle Sicardi, beauty writer and author of the forthcoming The House of Beauty