Kim Brittingham struggled for years with her weight and body image before she learned how to love her self unconditionally, find her confidence, and fully enjoy her life. In this unflinching, humorous, and uplifting memoir, she openly explores her complex relationships with food and dieting, sex and dating, and exercise and health, ultimately inspiring every woman to live life to the absolute fullest, no matter what your jean size.
Kim Brittingham is the author of the memoir, "Read My Hips: How I Learned to Love My Body, Ditch Dieting and Live Large" (Three Rivers Press, May 2011) and "Write That Memoir Right Now! (AudioGo, January 2013).
Brittingham was first interviewed on the Today Show and NPR in February 2008 after she conducted an informal social experiment on public transportation. She created a mock self-help book jacket with the title, "Fat is Contagious: How Sitting Next to a Fat Person Can Make YOU Fat", wrapped it around a real book, and pretended to read it while riding the buses of New York City. She wrote about her experience in "Read My Hips".
Although she's been publishing her creative writing in literary journals since the early 1990s, Brittingham's writing first gained widespread attention when she started writing for the internet - personal essays for web sites like iVillage, Salon and Fresh Yarn. Her memoir "Read My Hips" was inspired by an essay of the same name that appeared on iVillage.
Ms. Brittingham wrote, illustrated and stapled together her first picture book at the age of six. She co-authored her first novel with her best friend in junior high school - a thriller about an English pop group with a curious resemblance to Duran Duran. "Read My Hips", Brittingham's first published book, was written when she worked as a patent prosecution legal assistant. She wrote the book on her lunch break - on a second-hand laptop, in 45-minute increments, in the office lunch room.
For most of her adult life, Brittingham has made a habit of launching creative projects. In the 1990s she founded and operated "Philadelphia Dial-a-Poet", a free service providing recordings of poetry by telephone. Also during the '90s she published "Café Eighties" magazine, for which she tracked down and interviewed entertainers from her favorite pop culture decade. "Café Eighties" began as a photocopied 'zine that Brittingham laid out on her living room floor; when she folded the publication, it was a nationally-distributed glossy sold in most bookstore chains. She has also designed plus size clothing under her own label.
In 2009, Brittingham appeared as the star of a video series pilot for NBC Universal called "Big Life". The series did not continue into a second episode (something she writes about in "Read My Hips"), but she went on to create her own video series called "Kim Weighs In", which is viewable on the internet.
Ms. Brittingham is a high school graduate who enrolled in community college at the age of 39. She is now 40 years old and divides her time between New York and the Jersey Shore, spending her hours studying, writing articles and essays, and working on her second book, another work of non-fiction. She's an Anglophile; dreams of finding an affordable fencing school; lustily watches the History Channel and can't stop having good ideas.
