Former Fat Kid Stephanie Klein Delivers the Skinny on Being Obese in Her Book Moose: A Memoir of Fat Camp. Presented by the JCC’s 26th Annual Jewish Book Festival
"Ask anyone who used to be the fat kid, and they’ll tell you it’s still part of their identity as an adult.”
With vivid characterizations, spot-on locale descriptions and sly jokes at her own expense, Klein offers an original and touching take on the all-too-common problem of childhood obesity.
Klein was a seventh-grader with a weight problem. It was a problem at school, where the boys called her “Moose,” her only friends were the nerds and misfits, and it was a problem at home, where her father reminded her, “No one likes fat girls.” After several unsuccessful attempts at dieting and many frustrating sessions with a nutritionist known as the Fat Doctor of Roslyn Heights, Long Island, Stephanie’s parents enrolled her for a summer at fat camp. Determined to return to school thin and popular, without her “lard arms” and “puckered ham,” Stephanie embarked on a memorable journey that would shape more than just her body. It would shape her life.
In the ever-shifting terrain between fat and thin, adulthood and childhood, cellulite and starvation, Stephanie shares the cutting details of what it truly feels like to be an overweight child, from the stinging taunts of classmates, to the off-color remarks of her own father, to her thin mother’s compulsive dissatisfaction with her own body. Calling upon her childhood diary entries to jog her memory, Klein opens up and uncovers her deepest thoughts and feelings from that turbulent, hopeful time, baring her soul and making her heartache palpable.
Whether Klein is describing her life as a chubby adolescent camper- getting weighed on a meat scale, petting past curfew, and “chunky dunking” in the lake—or what it’s like now as a fit mother, having one-sided conversations with her newborn twins about the therapy they’ll one day need, this hilarious yet grippingly vulnerable book will remind you what it was like to feel like an outsider, to desperately seek the right outfit, the right slang, the best comeback, or whatever that unattainable something was that would finally make you fit in.
Date: Thursday, November 13th, 2008.
Time: 7:30 pm.
Location: The Barshop Jewish Community Center
12500 NW Military Highway at Wurzbach Parkway
General Admission: $10
2 General Admission Tickets and a copy of Moose: $30
Tickets may be purchased at
www.jccsanantonio.org or at the Barshop JCC.
