Archive for April, 2010
on being fancy
A reporter wrote me and said, “I’m doing an article about the fairy tale of weight loss—can I interview you? And I said what? Of course! Holy crap! And the article came out today, and is here, and after some terror and then some encouragement, I managed to read it. The completely fabulous Pastaqueen is in it too, and says many smart things. And the whole thing turns out to be kind of awesome.
The article was a chance to talk about the conclusion I’ve come to, the whole point I’ve been trying to make this whole time: while being skinny is far, far easier in this world than being fat, being skinny does not solve all your problems. Losing weight does not give you the perfect life you’ve always dreamed about. I don’t know where I got the idea—the wicked media? the inside of my own crazy brain?
on drafts, finished and future
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So it took me at least three months longer than I had blithely assumed it would, but I finished a first draft of my memoir, the one that’s about the weirdness of weight loss surgery, and all the attendant Important Life Changes and mind-bending crazinesses that occur and blah blah blah etc. And when I typed “The End” I sat there for a full minute, looking at those words, expecting to—I don’t know. Burst into tears? Have my heart burst in a shower of sparks that spell out “YOU ARE JUST SO AWESOME” above my desk? Something. I expected a dramatic reaction, physical, emotional, emotional couched in the physical, but mostly I was just so relieved to be done with the goddamn thing, I shut my computer and went downstairs and out for a drink.
The book is—way too big. It’s 393 pages, 120,000-ish words. It’s enormous, bloated, a mess.
