Published in 2020
304 pages
Marisa Meltzer is author of Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music and co-author of How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time. Yes, she really loves the nineties that much.
As a freelance writer, her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Elle, Slate, New York Magazine, Teen Vogue, and many other publications. She has covered such diverse topics from why Miley Cyrus is a good role model to which Pride and Prejudice adaptation has the best Mr. Darcy and she’s reported on Parisian riots and overachieving New York City high school students. She is a graduate of The Evergreen State College and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.
What is this book about?
The true story of a cross-generational, beyond-the-grave — and beyond-the-scale — friendship that led to the first breakthrough Marisa Meltzer ever had in her quest for self-improvement.
Marisa Meltzer began her first diet at the age of five. Growing up an indoors-loving child in Northern California, she learned from an early age that weight was the one part of her life she could neither change nor even really understand. Fast forward nearly four decades. Marisa, a contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Times, comes across an obituary for Jean Nidetch, the Queens, New York housewife who founded Weight Watchers in 1963. Weaving Jean’s incredible story as weight loss maven and pathbreaking entrepreneur with her own journey through Weight Watchers, Marisa chronicles the deep parallels, and enduring frustrations, in each woman’s decades-long efforts to lose weight and keep it off. The result is funny, unexpected, and unforgettable: a testament to how transformation goes far beyond a number on the scale.
