Yesterday morning, I finished a book entitled, “Passing for Thin:  Losing Half My Weight and Finding My Self.”

Overall, I thought it was a decent book.  The author is extremely honest in her account of her experience in losing the weight and in learning how to interact with the world afterwards.  Like many of the others who reviewed the book on Amazon, I had a really hard time liking the author at times.  It’s difficult for me to like anyone that calls an overweight person, “fatty,” especially someone who was overweight herself.  We get enough of that from people who have never had a weight problem to be turning on our own.  In fact, she admits at one point that she doesn’t really like fat people.  I’m somewhat bothered by her system of classifying overweight people (whether they’re the Perfectionist, Orphan, Drab, etc.), but I realize later on in the book that she seems to classify everything, including the men she starts dating.  Perhaps this is only her way of trying to figure out where she fits in the world.  Invoking another complaint that others have already stated, it rather bothered me that she kept referring to her boyfriend’s son as “Dudley Dursley” merely because he was overweight.  You’d think she could show a bit of compassion.  I think maybe she was just trying too hard to be witty or funny.

As I said, even with these complaints, I have to give her credit for being so blatantly honest with her description of her journey.  She tells it how it was, regardless of the light that it shows her in.  It is a very truthful account of what it means to lose so much weight, and it was nice to read about a woman who actually had more to lose than I do.  As with “Half-Assed“, I found myself identifying with quite a bit of her experiences from the weight loss (minus the cynicism and harsh critiques of other people - the last thing I would ever do is criticize someone else for their weight).

In fact, a couple of days after I wrote my post about how “it’s the small things,” I read the following in “Passing For Thin” that obviously reflects how I was feeling when I posted that day:

This business of shapeshifting had the magical mislogic of Merlin.  I was living backward in time, growing smaller, with an infant’s fascination with her own body.

I also enjoyed (and identified with) this comment:

When you’ve lived far away from any part of your body besides your mouth, everything about your body is a sensation.  I can’t fucking cross my legs without wanting to call the Times.

So, I’m on to my next book.  I started a book called, “Scoot Over, Skinny:  The Fat Nonfiction Anthology” yesterday morning and it’s pretty interesting so far.  It’s not really so much about weight loss, but about living as an overweight person in the world today.