Thin Is the New Happy
A Memoir
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
From Valerie Frankel, author of the hilarious memoir IT'S HARD NOT TO HATE YOU, comes a hilarious, unflinching, self-deprecating, and joy-filled memoir that will appeal to every women, everywhere.
You've heard the phrase "the mirror is not your friend." For Valerie Frankel, the mirror was so much more than "not a friend." It was the mean girl who stole her lunch money, bitch-slapped her in the ladies' room, and cut the hair off her Barbie.
Like most women, Valerie spent most of her conscious life on a diet, thinking about a diet, ignoring a diet, or failing on a diet. At age eleven, her mother put Val on her first weight-loss program. As a teen, she was enrolled in Weight Watchers (for which she invented creative ditching methods). As a young woman, her world felt right only when she was able to zip a certain pair of jeans. Not wanting to pass this legacy on to her own daughters, Valerie set out to cleanse herself of her obsession. Thin Is the New Happy is the true story of one woman's quest to exorcise her bad body-image demons, to uncover the truths behind what put them there, and to learn how to truly love herself.
This ebook edition includes two bonus essays from the new memoir It's Hard Not to Hate You.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Prolific author Frankel (most recently, I Take This Man) was only 11 when her mother put her on a diet. She went from 100 to 88 pounds in six weeks, making her mother ecstatic, although she gained back four pounds right away. Frankel learned a basic lesson: she could enjoy eating or "have approval," but not both. Although she blamed her mother's "fatphobia" for her unhappy childhood, from middle school on her peers were her cruelest tormenters. As she got older, her "bad body image" translated to "anorgasmia"; research shows that women who feel unattractive often develop sexual dysfunction. Later, working at Mademoiselle, where so many co-workers had eating disorders, she realized that an obsession with diet was one way of avoiding life's thornier issues. In her 40s, Frankel decided to jettison all the emotional baggage she was carrying about her weight, to free herself, finally, from dieting. After hiring a photographer to shoot a portfolio of her nude, having a friend help her find her personal style in clothing and coming to terms with her husband and her mother over fat issues, Frankel finally got rid of her body-image negativity.
