Thin Is the New Happy (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: inner bitch, bad body image, chronic dieting, Short Hills, New Jersey, Old Navy (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Prolific author Frankel (most recently, I Take This Man) was only 11 when her mother put her on a diet. She went from 100 to 88 pounds in six weeks, making her mother ecstatic, although she gained back four pounds right away. Frankel learned a basic lesson: she could enjoy eating or have approval, but not both. Although she blamed her mother's fatphobia for her unhappy childhood, from middle school on her peers were her cruelest tormenters. As she got older, her bad body image translated to anorgasmia; research shows that women who feel unattractive often develop sexual dysfunction. Later, working at Mademoiselle, where so many co-workers had eating disorders, she realized that an obsession with diet was one way of avoiding life's thornier issues. In her 40s, Frankel decided to jettison all the emotional baggage she was carrying about her weight, to free herself, finally, from dieting. After hiring a photographer to shoot a portfolio of her nude, having a friend help her find her personal style in clothing and coming to terms with her husband and her mother over fat issues, Frankel finally got rid of her body-image negativity. (Sept.)
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Product Description

“Val Frankel is a woman of amazing insight. . . . Read this, weep, and heal.”

—Stacy London, cohost of What Not to Wear

You’ve heard the phrase “the mirror is not your friend.” For Valerie Frankel, the mirror was so much more than “not a friend.” It was the mean girl who stole her lunch money, bitch-slapped her in the ladies’ room, and cut the hair off her Barbie.

If you’re like 99.9 percent of women, the war you wage with yourself over your body image begins at the ripe age of eight, and the skirmishes are fought for the next eight decades. Sometimes you don’t even know when you’ve won. (How many of us have taken out a photo from high school and thought, “Hey! I looked great—why didn’t I know it?”) This book is for anyone who has spent most of her life on—or thinking about being on—a diet. It’s for anyone who ever wished for candlelight in dressing rooms. It’s for anyone who has ever owned a pair of “fat pants.” In short, this book is for anyone who ever felt good or bad about themselves based on how they look.

Valerie Frankel, like most women, has spent most of her conscious life on a diet, thinking about a diet, ignoring a diet, or failing on a diet. At age eleven, her mother put Val on her first weight-loss program. As a teen, she was enrolled in Weight Watchers (for which she invented creative ditching methods). As a young woman, her world felt right only when she was able to zip a certain pair of jeans. Not wanting to pass this legacy on to her own daughters, Valerie set out to cleanse herself of her obsession. Thin Is the New Happy is the true story of one woman’s quest to exorcise her bad body-image demons, to uncover the truths behind what put them there, and to learn how to truly love herself. It’s a poignant, hilarious, and all-out honest account of one woman’s struggle with body image—the filter through which she’s always seen the world—and the way she ultimately overcame it.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press (September 2, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312373929
• ISBN-13: 978-0312373924
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #285,122 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Frankel Digs Deep to Unpack the Weight, Real and Mental, She's Carried Since Childhood, September 5, 2008

By	Rachel Kramer Bussel "Cupcakes Take the Cake ... (New York City) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

As someone who has struggled with my weight, dieted, and mainly, worried about my appearance, I've read plenty of weight loss memoirs, and will continue to do so, I'm sure. I can safely say that while Frankel's overall message (don't diet, eat what you want) isn't new, her approach, humor, frankness and willingness to dig deep are something unexpected.

Frankel starts with her mom pressuring her to lose weight as a child (sadly a very common scenario). She does, and immediately reaps the social benefits, but of course once she goes off her diet, the weight comes right back. This started her on her lifelong path of going up and down with her weight, something she only vows to stop when she realizes that her two daughters are approaching the age she was when weight became a central issue in her life.

It's in talking about her first husband's death that Frankel really shines here, not overdramatizing her story but sharing the real issues she dealt with. "Weight loss became my Vicodin, my Prozac. The red jeans were my delivery system. It took the edge off my pain. Shrinking calmed me, pleased me, gave me something to feel good about."

The other chapter that truly stands out is the third one about her mother, where she confronts her with the revelations Frankel's had about the roots of her behavior. The final exchange with her mom about her weight issues is illuminating. Far from seeing herself as part of the problem, her mother feels that she was protecting Valerie from a world that hates the overweight. Her mother's own food issues (she refuses to eat in public alone, even passing up Frankel's offer of $1,000 to sit at Starbucks for five minutes) come through clearly, but are not really the point; Frankel's acceptance of the fact that they will never see eye-to-eye is.

In some ways, what makes Thin is the New Happy so powerful aren't Frankel's tales of her highs and lows, but her relationships with those around her, from her parents to her two husbands to the classmates who teased her mercilessly. Each of them has a different perspective, ones that often clash quite extremely with her own.

Frankel doesn't back down, but she does, when confronting people like her mother or her former classmate, Z., let them have their say. A stray comment from her husband about her belly being big stays with her for five years (!) until she finally asks him about it.

Her adventures with What Not to Wear author Stacy London, who gives Frankel's tame, boring, baggy wardrobe a complete overhaul, are fun, as is her tale of posing nude for Self magazine; these stories are a welcome complement to the heavier material. Though the tone can sometimes be a bit too perky by the end, knowing Frankel's lifelong struggle makes it easy to cheer for her newfound happiness (though one does wonder if she would have the same level of optimism were she not to have dropped two dress sizes and twenty pounds). A fast but intense read, Thin is the New Happy is refreshingly blunt about sex, marriage, mother/daughter relationships, and food. Even if you've read umpteen books about diet and weight loss, this one's worth adding to your list.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "I was my own worst enemy.", September 14, 2008

By	E. Bukowsky "booklover10" (NY United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Valerie Frankel's "Thin is the New Happy" is a seriocomic look at the author's thirty-year battle with her weight. In sixth grade, she was eleven years old, five feet tall, and tipped the scale at one hundred pounds. This propelled her mother, Judy, to start "Project Daughter Diet," a humiliating and frustrating plan that destroyed Valerie's ability to relax and eat normally. Not only did her mother weigh her regularly and force her to count calories, but Judy "colluded with other adults," including teachers and the mothers of Valerie's friends to monitor her child's intake and prevent her from cheating. When her weight dropped to eighty-eight pounds, both she and her mother "cried big fat sloppy tears of joy." Unfortunately, the "acute sense of cynicism" that Mom's regimen instilled in Valerie lasted a great deal longer than her slim figure.

Frankel candidly discusses her relationship with her family, numerous sexual escapades, drug use, and love-hate relationship with food. She is a clever writer whose wisecracks and puns soften the obvious pain that she must have felt while dredging up a host of unpleasant memories. An example of her gallows humor is the line, "I might go to my deathbed wishing I'd left a skinnier corpse."

"Thin is the New Happy" is a blistering critique of "diet addiction," the tendency of women with a negative body image to go on one diet after another in a futile effort to achieve physical perfection. It is also a bittersweet memoir in which Frankel describes her journey of self-discovery: She makes peace with her mother, contacts a boy who bullied her during childhood, and attempts to do a thorough emotional housecleaning. Her goal? To learn to eat normally, exercise sensibly, and pass on a healthful psychological legacy to her two lovely daughters. This book would be heartbreaking if it were not so laugh-out-loud funny.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining read that hits home., October 10, 2008

By	L. Rees (Florida) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I mostly liked this book. It was funny, entertaining, and at times, sad. Frankel writes well. This is a book you can breeze through. I could relate to Frankel's body image and self-esteem issues. Her obsession with her weight is something many women can relate to.

While Frankel uses a lot of self-deprecating humor, she also gets a tad preachy at times. Preachy may not be the correct word. Long-winded may be a better term. There is a section where she goes on about how she is a "striver" and has "dreams" (unlike some people she once knew)! I think that's something readers can deduce on their own: She went to Dartmouth, she worked for years at a major woman's magazine, she has written many published novels.

It seemed that Frankel was/is on a quest for self-actualization. For most of the book she seems open, forgiving, and willing to admit her flaws, but she is a tad snobby and self-righteous. When she meets, Z, an acquaintance from junior high that used to tease her unmercifully about her extra poundage, she speaks about him in such a mean-spirited way. She claims that she isn't any better than Z, but you get the overwhelming feeling that she does think she's better. She snottily proclaims him as "just a bundle of skin, a thoughtless consumer of earth's oxygen." I lost all respect for Frankel at this moment. (I wanted to drop the book, but I kept reading.) I can't help to view her as mean-spirited and unforgiving at the moment she trash-talks Z, who is now a 40- something year-old man. This entire section where she speaks about Z was a huge turn-off. Her views of a certain "soulless state", her snobby views that Paris and London are "predictable destinations". I had to laugh near the end when Frankel described a trip to Disney World in Orlando and Fisherman's Wharf. How terribly pedestrian, Frankel! You can almost forgive the author for rudely talking about Z. She was wounded by his words. But, I have to wonder how a person could be so unforgiving to a person that was 12, 13, or 14-years old when the transgressions occurred.

Overall, this was an entertaining read. I wish the author the best of luck with her efforts to be at peace with her body.