1) "45 Pounds (More or Less)" by K.A. Barson
Ann has a weight problem and a mother problem—and the two issues are likely connected.
A rising high school junior, Ann has fought (and lost) the weight battle since early childhood. Getting hilariously stuck in a too-small dress she tries on at the mall surely proves it. She clearly has a dysfunctional relationship with food, eating way too much whenever she’s troubled—which is to say quite often—and blithely rationalizing her behavior. Unwisely determined to lose 45 pounds in two months in order to look good in a bridesmaid’s dress when her aunt marries her girlfriend, Ann buys a diet program from an infomercial. Her account of suffering horrendous exercise videos and bad food is both funny and sad, and she falls off the wagon several times. She and her thin, driven mother don’t, at first glance, seem to have much in common. But when Ann sees her 4-year-old stepsister telling her teddy bear he’s too fat, she realizes both she and her mom have serious food issues that threaten her sister’s well-being. That recognition, presented in an authentic first-person voice, gradually paves the way for believable changes as Ann re-evaluates failed friendships, her own role in consuming secretly spiked drinks at a party, and the potential for a relationship with a nice—and attractive—guy.
While lessons are offered, they are deliciously coated in readable prose and a compelling plot.(Fiction. 12 & up)
2) "Poisoned Apples" by Christine Hepperman
A slim volume sharp as knives.
Lacing traditional fairy tales through real-life perils, Heppermann produces short poems with raw pain, scathing commentary and fierce liberation. There’s no linear arc; instead, girls buck and fight and hurt. One poem takes the expression “You Go, Girl!” literally, banishing anyone with “wetness, dryness, tightness, looseness, / redness, yellowing, blackheads, whiteheads, the blues.” In a structure heartbreakingly inverted from “The Three Little Pigs” (and nodding to “Rumpelstiltskin”), one girl’s body goes from “a house of bricks, / point guard on the JV team” to “a house of sticks, / kindling in Converse high-tops,” until finally “she’s building herself out of straw / as light as the needle swimming in her bathroom scale. / The smaller the number, the closer to gold.” She’s her own wolf, destroying herself. Sexual repression, molestation and endless beauty judgments bite and sting, causing eating disorders, self-injury, internalization of rules—and rebellion. A hypothetical miller’s daughter says, “No, I can’t spin that room full of straw into gold. / …. / No, I can’t give you the child; / the child will never exist.” Gretel’s act of eating will literally rescue Hansel; Red Riding Hood reclaims sexual agency, declaring, “If that woodsman shows up now, / I will totally kick his ass.”
Full of razors that cut—and razors to cut off shackles: a must. (author’s note, index of first lines, index of photographs) (Poetry. 13-17)
3) "Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body" by Susan Bordo
In dense, challenging, subtly argued philosophical essays, Bordo (Philosophy/LeMoyne College; The Flight to Objectivity, 1987- -not reviewed) offers a postmodern, poststructuralist feminist interpretation of the female body as a cultural construction in Western society, emphasizing eating disorders, reproductive issues, and the philosophical background. Many of the problems and ideas of contemporary Western society, says Bordo, derive from the ineluctable mind/body dualism of Plato, restated by Descartes. From the viewpoint of feminist theory (of which the author offers a useful history and critique), women have been identified with the body, which itself has been characterized as an alien, instinctual, threatening, passive, and false self in which the true self--the active and manly mind/soul- -is confined. In occasionally repetitive pieces--some a decade old, some revised from lectures--carrying titles like ``Are Mothers Persons?,'' ``Reading the Slender Body,'' and ``Material Girl,'' Bordo demonstrates how this identification is deployed in law, medicine, literature, art, popular culture, and, especially, advertising, which she perceptively decodes by showing how the most trivial detail (men eating hearty meals, women consuming bite-size candies) reveal cultural values and even pathologies. Following Foucault's archaeological technique, Bordo shows how the female body has migrated from nature to culture, where it can be controlled through dieting and altered through surgery--and where women are perpetually at war with it. A cerebral introduction to liberal feminist thinking that's humanized by the author's anecdotes of her own experience as a female body (e.g., confessing to the delights of making stuffed cabbage) and that demonstrates what it advocates: ``What the body does is immaterial, so long as the imagination is free.'' (Fifty- five b&w illustrations)
4) "Wake Up, I'm Fat!" by Camryn Manheim
A stand-up story of being fat in a thin-is-in culture from the Emmy Award—winning actress who plays a spirited lawyer on ABC’s The Practice. Born in Peoria as Debra (“a name with no character, no euphony, no style”), the author was thin until her family moved to Southern California. There, where thin really mattered, she grew tall (5—10”) and wide; with no place for her in the usual high school cliques (jock, cheerleader, even the nerds), she smoked marijuana and faked acid trips with the druggies. Summer jobs as a “wench” at the local Renaissance Faires, where “women like me were worshipped” bolstered her self-confidence. The University of California at Santa Cruz introduced her to radical feminist politics, and graduate study at New York University’s theater school to public humiliation: one teacher persisted in interrogating her in class regarding “what [she was] going to do about [her] body.” She challenged him and others like him, but faced by rejection from agents, producers, and even (she believed) by her parents because of her weight, she learned to hate herself. In search of her lost self-confidence, she explored the world of fat fanciers via personal ads and found both a supportive community and a frightening underworld of S/M, where women let themselves be force-fed into gaining hundreds of pounds. Meanwhile, her acting resumÇ continued to accumulate credits, including a role in the film Wellness and a one-woman show, Wake Up, I’m Fat, that eventually led to both her TV role and this book. She credits her family’s history of political activism with her current activism on behalf of fat women. Rosie O’Donnell wrote the foreword. Amusing, gossipy, frank, but also replete with stories of the psychic nicks and scrapes that fat people face every day as a result of “society’s contempt for people like me.” (15 b&w photos) ($100,000 ad/promo; TV/radio satellite tour)
5) "Big Fat Manifesto" by Susan Vaught
6) "Skinny" by Ibi Kaslik
7) "Thin is the New Happy" by Valerie Frankel
Novelist and self-help journalist Frankel (I Take This Man, 2007, etc.) chronicles her 30-year addiction to dieting and subsequent “journey out of the waistland.”
After trying 150 different diets, the author made a pact with herself to go on a “Not Diet,” a decidedly forgiving approach to eating based on the theory that she would achieve her goals via moderation and exercise, as long as it involved getting rid of the negative emotions and self-flagellation that characterized her relationship to food. With the aid of a stopwatch, she spent a day counting 263 specific instances of negative thoughts. These thoughts far exceeded those about family, sex or money (which she also tallied), which convinced her of the need for a complete overhaul. Before the Not Diet could work, however, she had to confront the sources of her negative emotions. She started with her “fatphobic” mother, followed by her bully tormentors in junior high school. She explored how a weight-obsessed culture at Mademoiselle, where she worked for years, validated and enhanced her own preoccupations. As part of her self-acceptance process, she posed nude for Self magazine and got a wardrobe makeover from friend Stacy London (of What Not to Wear fame), who helped the author make the connection between looking good and feeling good. Frankel’s attempts to shift her focus toward love, personal success and even the pleasure of food prove galvanizing, and the journey is relevant and even inspiring. Infused with humor and refreshing candor, the book will resonate with anyone who’s counted carbs or tried to subsist on rice cakes and grapefruit.
A self-aware, witty exploration of a woman’s body issues.
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