When popular blogger Stephanie Klein became pregnant with twins, her doctor instructed her to gain 50 pounds, sending the now-svelte Klein into terrified flashbacks of her years as an overweight child who spent several summers at "fat camp." She conflates those summers here, augmenting her memories with adolescent journal entries, in a memoir that is often funny and always brutally honest.Klein's issues with her weight began in earnest at the age of eight when her mother took her to see Fran, a Long Island nutritionist known as "the Fat Doctor of Roslyn Heights." Fran's counseling proved ineffective when it came to shedding pounds; four years later, Klein weighed "156 pounds and change" and was regularly taunted by boys who called her "Moose." Although Klein repeatedly disdains "fatnalysis" (she wants just to lose weight, not figure out why she's gained it), she paints a familial portrait that seems to offer at least a partial psychological explanation. Klein's thin, emotionally distant mother would not hold her daughter's hand or express love without prompting, and her rotund father, who thought the nickname "Moose" hilarious, told Klein that she would never be liked as long as she was fat.
Once shipped off to Camp Yanisin, Klein found herself surrounded by campers who had all suffered the same shame and stigmatization and was, for the first time, on a socially level playing field. Her journey, however, was not without pitfalls. The admittedly hypersexual Klein was teased relentlessly after being busted for stashing pornographic magazines in her cabin and was not accepted into the camp's cliques. Two weeks before camp ended, Klein was sent home after the camp doctor discovered she had helped a group of girls vomit up their lunches. Klein's narrative achieves its greatest poignancy here, in her descriptions of a brief but frightening dalliance with bulimia that cast long shadows all the way into her adult life.
Klein's graphic candor sometimes makes for a rough read, but it is extremely effective in showing the emotional and psychic toll of all those extra pounds. While she has maintained an average weight for more than a decade (pregnancy notwithstanding), Klein has known since her sessions with Fran that "I would be fat for the rest of my life even if I looked thin." Although personal, this is a timely and valuable insight at a time when childhood obesity rates approach 20%--triple what they were when Klein stepped on a scale for the first time.--Debra Ginsberg