A Bathing Suit Too Far: Stephanie Klein's Fat Past

What's more American than summer camp? I went to some kind of camp every summer from ages 6 to 17, from two-night overnights with the Girl Scouts to stints on (relatively luxurious) college campuses. But unlike Stephanie Klein, I never went to a fat camp, those institutions that advertised in the back of my teen magazines promising summers of weight loss and (yeah right!) fun. And if I were her, now thin, happily married and author of a bestselling memoir on dating and love after a divorce, I probably wouldn't have written MOOSE: A MEMOIR OF FAT CAMP.

Klein as a girl was predisposed to gain weight and had a weakness for cereal, so her parents packed her off to fat camp one summer. (They also sent her normal-weight sister, who probably should write a memoir of her own.) Dying to be popular by September -- "Moose" was her middle-school-given nickname -- Klein aspires to lose a lot of weight and become one of the camp's "mean girls," now that she's no longer the fattest girl in the room. But losing weight can't fix her problematic body image, and (even less surprising) teenagers are a feral bunch.

MOOSE: A MEMOIR OF FAT CAMP is not the kind of book I would want to read over and over, but for every wince-worthy moment there was one where I could only nod assent to myself. And like her first memoir STRAIGHT UP AND DIRTY, I found myself completely unable to set this book down while I was reading it. I believe I read it standing up at the kitchen counter, even. The emotions it brings up aren't always pleasant, but I believed every word.