Passing for Thin: Losing Half My Weight and Finding My Self - Softcover

Kuffel, Frances

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0767912926 ISBN 13: 9780767912921

Verlag: Crown, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

An intimate and darkly comic memoir of a woman who does a 180 with her body.

When she was in her early forties, Frances Kuffel lost half her body weight. In Passing for Thin, Frances describes with unflinching honesty and a wickedly dark sense of humor her first fumbling introductions to her newly slender body, shining a light on the shared human experience of feeling uncomfortable in one’s own skin. She gradually moves from observer to player—enjoying for the first time flirting, exercising, and shopping–as she explores the terrain on the “Planet of Thin.” As Frances gradually comes to know—and love—the stranger in the mirror, she learns that her body does not define her, but enables her to become the woman she’s always wanted to be.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Frances Kuffel is a literary agent who has published poems and short stories in literary journals, such as Triquarterly, the Georgia Review, Glimmer Train, Prairie Schooner, and the Massachusetts Review. A native of Missoula, Montana, she has an M.F.A. from Cornell. She currently makes her home in Brooklyn, New York.

Aus dem Klappentext

An intimate and darkly comic memoir of a woman who does a 180 with her body.

In the opening pages of Passing for Thin, Frances Kuffel waits at the airport to be picked up by her brother, Jim. He strides past her without a glimmer of recognition because she barely resembles the woman he is expecting to see. Jim had last seen her when she was 188 pounds heavier.
What follows is one of the most piercing explorations of the limits and promises of a body since Lucy Grealy s Autobiography of a Face. With unflinching honesty and a wickedly dark sense of humor, Frances describes her first fumbling introductions to the slender, alien body she is left with after losing half her weight, shining a light on the shared human experience of feeling, at times, uncomfortable in one s own skin.
Buoyed by support from a group of fellow compulsive eaters she deems the Stepfords, Frances adjusts not only to her new waistline, but to a strange new world the Planet of Thin where she doesn t speak the language and doesn t know the rules. Her lifetime of obesity had robbed her of the joys of lovers, a husband, children and even made it impossible to enjoy a movie, when standing in line was too painful, or travel, when airplane seats were too small and hadn t prepared her for the unexpected attention from strangers, the deep pleasure of trying on a tailored suit, the satisfaction of a good run on a treadmill, or for the saucy fun of flirting and dating. She joyfully moves from observer to player, while struggling to enjoy the freedom her new shape has given her.
As Frances gradually comes to know and love the stranger in the mirror, she learns that this body does not define her, but enables her to become the woman she s always wanted to be.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1



Arrival on the Planet of Fat


No one was there.

I was neither surprised nor unhappy to find myself alone at the Missoula airport. My parents had appointments that morning and had left the arrangements to my brother. Jim was late or the plane was early, it didn't matter. I was glad for the time. I could absorb the difference between New York and Montana. I'd left New York at dawn under its August pall of heat and rusty horizons and emerged into air so finespun it vibrated. The smell of ozone, clover, and cinnamon lingered from thunderstorms the night before, not yet evaporated in the dry desultory heat of midday; the cornflower sky glowed famously big, even in the valley. The Montanans milling around me at the curb were tall and blond, speaking with nasal cadences that, pronounced with a looser jaw, were a perfect west Texas drawl. Conversations there were always, I was reminded again, about the weather. Ask a Montanan about his chemotherapy and he'd give you that evening's forecast. Gaits and gestures were just shy of torpid, the sky and mountains rambled on and on in their own sweet time. Montana was a slow place.

I watched the crowd with the furtiveness of a refugee, hoping fervently I wouldn't see anyone I knew. I wasn't ready.

I am five feet eight inches tall, medium framed. That Friday noon I weighed 168 pounds, my lowest weight since sixth grade. I didn't know who or what I was as I braced myself for Jim's arrival. I had one history in that town, a mean one, of being a freak with a brain, allowed to watch but not play. A talking head on a mountain of formless flesh.

In second grade I weighed 115 pounds, by the end of sixth grade, 174 pounds. I lost a proud 36 pounds between my freshman and sophomore years in high school, getting down to 204 pounds. By college I struggled to stay at 248 pounds. I think. Our scale topped out at 245 so I was guesstimating. My top weight of all time: 338 pounds. I had begun this weight loss seventeen months earlier, in 1998, at 313 pounds. More or less--I didn't purchase a scale until the second week of the diet. Jim had last seen me, the year before, 100 pounds heavier.

And so I was glad for this pause, glad for the narrow opportunity of a cigarette, a five-year habit, before being thrust into my assiduously tobacco-free extended family. I was smoking at the curb when I saw Jim hurrying across the parking lot, scanning the clumps of people. Even my big brother's dash across a parking lot roused specters of the things he could do all those years that I could not.

Jim's eyes darted with worry as he paused for traffic. Had he missed me? Had the flight been delayed? He shook his head as he bolted around a pile of luggage, heading in to look for me at the carousel. I tossed my cigarette into the gutter, forming a joke about the life we've shared: Wanna buzz the root beer stand before we go to lunch? He walked right past me.

"Jim," I called.

He panned the sidewalk, looked at me, the other people, searching for the voice.

"Uh. Jim? Over here?"

The look--blank.

The second look--questioning. "France? Francie? Oh my--wow!" A beat as he took the measure of his reaction, then a conscious modulation. "I'm sorry. I didn't recognize you."



People ask, "Were you always fat?" The photographic evidence is inconclusive.

There is a picture taken for my father's office desk, a studio portrait: my brothers with Brill Cream-slick hair and cotton shirts buttoned up to the necks, my mother looking like Madeline Kahn in black and pearls, me, the baby of the family, front and center in a dotted Swiss confection that must have itched horribly. At two, I fill the dress to capacity, my arms dough-ample and my face full. A year later, a photo shows me sprawled next to Dick, my oldest brother. I'm rangy. My long legs are dimpled a bit at the knees but I'm growing out of the baby fat of that earlier family portrait. A year or so later, I am stalky-legged, my stomach pushes at the buttons of my dress. In this last photo I am intently inventorying the contents of my and my cousin's Easter baskets; she, blond and pixieish, is talking to the photographer.

Once in a while, a photograph distills a truth to its essence.

Everything about my next thirty-seven years can be culled from that picture. Fat and thin, my total absorption in food no matter whose it is, and other people's engagement with a world I blotted out.

I identified myself as fat at such an early age that for a long time there was no other adjective to follow. I held the strong suspicion that I was given my serious name because it echoed the word so closely: Fat Frances, Fatty Francie. I hated it. After my mother explained that only boys could be called Junior, I decided I wanted to be named Cathy.

"Fat" is a powerful word to a child. It's one of the first words we learn to read and spell, like "cat" and "dog." It yields similes so easily that it prods the teaser to greater flights of fancy. Where pigs are invoked, whales, elephants, and Sherman tanks are sure to follow.

The average preschooler is not often categorized, with any degree of finality, as mathematical or musical or athletic. She is "cute," "good," "bright." Even disparaging descriptions are carefully phrased for further evolution. "A difficult child." "A plain child." "A clumsy child." "A slow child." I was "fat." A noun, not a modification, to my ears it was my definition and destiny. Not remedial but remediless. It was not a matter of not living up to my potential or being on probation for further measurement, but a fait accompli, an irrevocable pronouncement. Right up there with "crippled," "mentally retarded," or "deformed."

Worse-squared were the terms that came later. One evening, in fourth grade, sitting companionably with my father as he ate dinner after late rounds at the hospital, I picked up a Journal of the American Medical Association and flipped idly through it. My father rarely initiated conversation, so questions were a good way to get him talking. "How does penicillin work?" might prompt ten minutes of explanation I didn't understand, but it was hearing his voice that I wanted most.

I paused over a photograph of glistening marbled guck, parted neatly by a retractor to display a cluster of pebbles. "Eee-ewe," I squealed with lascivious horror as I studied the caption. "What does--" I paused to spell out the unfamiliar word "--o-bee-sess' mean, Daddy?"

" 'Obese,'" he grunted. "That's you."

I knew exactly what he meant. The word tocked across my head like a cuckoo clock. "That's you. That's you. That's you."

The next question I'm asked is why I got fat. It's a remarkably Victorian question, the nexus of Mendel and Freud. Were my parents fat? Is it genetic? The answer "yes" holds the possibility of a kind of forgiveness born of inevitability. Oh, well, in that case . . . But my parents were not fat. And I am adopted so I don't know whether this is the trajectory of my forebears or an anomalous burp of biology. Lack of information turns the question to nurture versus nature. I can hear the interrogator's mental calliope churning, What happened?

Food happened. Food in conjunction with circumstances. My obesity snowballed. A few motivations for eating--safety, satisfaction--prompted half a lifetime's compulsive eating, which in turn made me a fat girl/woman to the world and a whore to food in my heart. Compare it to alcoholism. If bourbon helped Joe Doe ask a girl to dance one night, does that justify being drunk twenty years later?

Still,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Crown
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0767912926
• ISBN 13: 9780767912921
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland