Well, I WAS With You

I made it rain at the friends of the library book sale just prior to my annual promise not to buy more books until I read everything in my unread stack (almost always 50 books no matter what I do), and like any good binge it was all impulse.

I love personal challenge essays (see above – although I will never ever succeed in diminishing that unread stack, my novels apparently breed in captivity) and for two bucks, how bad could this be? (How many of my reviews have some variant of this sentence? Do I never learn anything?)

Not that bad, but not that great either.  It was refreshing to read an account of disordered eating from a man because these books always seem to be written by women, and it’s telling that the impetus for the author’s weight loss was primarily health based and instigated by his wife – though he concedes his looks are diminished by his weight gain, he isn’t confronted by a world that doesn’t accommodate his size the way women constantly are.

Maybe that’s why the cheap jokes at the end are so off putting to me – I don’t think the author meant poorly by them, but jokes about women with pronounced Adam’s apples just don’t have any place in the 20-teens, especially from an author whose book discusses the otherness of being overweight and of being Jewish. It’s a cheap joke, it adds nothing, and it made me lose sympathy for an otherwise likable author.

Aside from that, this was a pleasant if insubstantial book.  I’m curious about his first book about working with lottery winners, even if it’s not a great sign that the most interesting part of this book was the description of his last one.