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A hilarious and sometimes poignant
look at the absurdities of weight-loss culture from an appealing
and original new voice.
From the creator of the immensely popular websites Pound and
Candyboots, this is the memoir of Wendy McClure's odyssey-on-line
and off-through the Valley of The Shadow of Her Really Big
Ass. It's about the universe she created for herself when
she couldn't see herself as a kicky Weight Loss Success Story,
only she put it all on a website and became sort of an inspiration
anyway.
I'm Not The New Me is about coming to terms with a
family heritage of fat and drastic surgeries, and about self-esteem
issues that are nobody's business but your own. It's wondering
what's left of yourself after you lose weight-and just who
the hell you are if you gain it back. It's about the absurdities
of online identities and fat girl clichés, and the
sheer terror of appearing live and in person in your very
own life.
Wendy McClure grew up
in Oak Park, Illinois, the setting for a surprising number
of television sitcoms. She holds an MFA in poetry from the
University of Iowa, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow.
In the fall of 1999 she began writing for the web site Television
Without Pity, and a year later she began an online journal
called Pound, an account of her somewhat reluctant efforts
to lose some damn weight. In March 2003 she posted a collection
of vintage Weight Watcher recipe cards on her site with accompanying
commentary. and within a month her site was getting over a
million hits weekly. (This died down, eventually, thank God,
and she built another site, Candyboots, to give the collection
a permanent home.) She is a columnist for BUST and her work
has appeared in a number of literary journals and magazines,
from New American Writing to Australian Style. She lives in
Chicago, where she continues to work as a children’s
book editor.
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