I am a fan of Stephanie Klein, whose first memoir, Straight Up and Dirty, told the story of what it’s like to find yourself in your 20s with not a husband, but a "wasbund" who had an affair, only to have to begin again by "rodating" (rotating the men to have as much sex as possible). This love of sex began early, and Klein was indeed the fey chick who all the guys would play with. Just ask any former football-playing, best-looking, most-popular guy in high school who he had the best raunchiest sex with and he will, I can almost guarantee, give the accolades to the unpopular pudgy girl who knocked his socks (as well as other things) off.
In Moose: A Memoir of Fat Camp, Klein gives us another slice of her life, this time as a journey through her tweens and teens punctuated with her many summers spent at weight loss camp, or “fat camp”. Each chapter begins with a diary entry from that time of Klein’s life and then we get the story to go with it. But in the end we get a true sense of what it is like to live your entire life with a focus on your size and the food you eat.
As an eighth-grader Klein knows she is overweight. The boys at school call her “Moose” (which sticks to her no matter how thin she becomes); her father constantly comments on her size, telling her that “No one likes fat girls”; her mother takes her to the neighborhood nutritionist, Fran Levine the “fat doctor” of Roslyn Heights, Long Island; and finally they enroll her and her sister (who doesn’t need to lose weight) in fat camp. So imagine her horror when, years later and pregnant with twins, she gets on the scale at her obstetrician’s office and is told that she needs “to gain 50 pounds."
- "Mimi, you have no idea how hard this for me." I’m fat as it is, I was about to say aloud, but I knew she’d start in about my distorted body image. She could’t undrestand. Instead, almost apologetically, I lamented, "I used to be fat."
"Well, to look at you no one would ever know it."
No, I thought, I will never forget it.
Article comments