Food has always been a pleasure and a curse for 26-year-old Frannie and the women of her family. Raised by a mother obsessed with the ritual of dieting, a woman seemingly more in love with food than with her daughters, Frannie and her younger sister, Shelly, have undergone a lifetime of fat camps and Weight Watchers programs and have experienced the sugar high of consuming a box of Girl Scout cookies, the illicit thrill of midnight binges, and the triumph of fitting into a pair of size 6 jeans. Frannie's family acts as if this fascination with food is normal, until Shelly takes dieting too seriously and descends into the nightmare of a life-threatening eating disorder. With devastating insight, Jillian Medoff looks deep into the heart of an American family and emerges with a first novel that is at once heartbreakingly honest, wickedly funny, and wonderfully life-affirming: a warm, witty, and perceptive look at a tough yet tender young woman struggling to understand a younger sister battling anorexia and bulimia, bewildered parents who have grown apart, and her own despair at ever finding the right job, boyfriend, or place of her own.
Jillian Medoff's bitterly funny, shocking new novel, I Couldn't Love You More, will be available from Grand Central Publishing in May, 2012. She is the acclaimed author of Hunger Point and Good Girls Gone Bad, both of which received surprisingly great reviews (surprising to her). A huge seller in the US, Hunger Point was the basis for the Lifetime movie starring Barbara Hershey and Christina Hendricks ("Mad Men"). Although Jillian is proud of Hunger Point, had anyone asked, she would not have selected such a bright pink (any pink, frankly) for the trade paperback edition. Her books have been translated into many different languages, including French, Spanish, Hebrew, Turkish, Hungarian, Japanese, Polish, and German, but her big wish is for an edition in Tagalog.
The eldest daughter of a traveling salesman, Jillian moved 17 times by age 17, ultimately ending up in Atlanta, where her new novel is set. She has a BA from Barnard and an MFA from NYU, and is grateful for having studied with such luminary writers as Mona Simpson, Jonathan Dee, Robert Coover, and Alice Walker. She also attended Master Classes with Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, and Grace Paley. Although each author continues to influence her work in powerful and diverse ways, she suspects few of them, if any, remember her. A former fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Blue Mountain Center, VCCA and Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain, Jillian taught at NYU and the University of Georgia, but for only, like, five minutes.
You can read more about her books at www.jillianmedoff.com. She currently lives in New York with her family, and has no plans to move anytime soon.
