A candid and inspiring memoir.
A young blogger shares the story of how she overcame a lifetime of bad eating habits, lost the weight that threatened her health and began her journey to self-understanding.
Mitchell came from a working-class “family of eaters.” But beneath the “heaps and sloppy gobs and spilling surplus” of food she consumed was a dysfunctional home situation that included a chronically unemployed alcoholic father and a mother who struggled to support the family with wages from multiple jobs. Food—especially cookies, cakes and other sweets—became the author’s source of comfort and the way her mother could assuage her guilt for being unavailable. It also helped her forge a bond with the troubled, overweight father who drifted from the family and eventually died in poverty. The perennial target of schoolmate jokes about her size, Mitchell weighed 200 pounds by the end of seventh grade. Her sense of humor eventually made her popular among her peers, but her weight continued to increase. Mitchell signed up for medical studies and weight loss programs, but nothing worked. In college, she reached 268 pounds. Not just obese, “but morbidly so,” Mitchell began a strict regimen of exercising, dieting and journaling. A semester in Rome showed her a whole new way of eating that was as delicious as it was healthy. During her senior year of college, she eventually reached 133 pounds, only to realize that she now had to tackle a whole set of psychological issues that, in her drive to lose weight, she had ignored. Overeating had only been a symptom of a far deeper problem. To manage it, she had to learn to love herself and her body, understand the meaning of life-balance and ultimately accept that life had far more to teach her than she ever realized.
A candid and inspiring memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7704-3324-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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