This will not be a book about how I had an eating disorder and how I conquered this disorder through therapies or group process or antidepressants or religion or twelve-step programs or a personal trainer or white knuckling it or the love of a good man (or woman). This will be the last time in this book you will see the words “eating disorder.”

I am not a fat activist. This is not about the need for acceptance of fat people, although I would prefer that thinner people not find me disgusting.

I know, from being thin and listening to thin people talk about fat people, that thin people often denigrate fat people. At best, they feel sorry for them. I know too that when a thin person looks at a fat person, the thin person considers the fat person less virtuous than he. The fat person lacks willpower, pride, this wretched attitude, “self esteem,” and does not care about friends or family because if he or she did care about friends or family, he or she would not wander the earth looking like a repulsive sow, rhinoceros, hippo, elephant, general wide-mawed flesh-flopping flabby monster.

I will not write here about fat people I have known and I will not interview fat people. All I will do here is tell my story. I will not supply windbag notions about what’s wrong with me. You will figure that out. I will tell you only what I know about myself, which is not all that much.

I will tell the story of my family and the food we ate. We were an unhappy family. With the exception of my father's maternal grandparents and a woman who worked for them and my adorable and generous gay uncle, nobody much loved anybody. Everybody was pretty much in it for themselves. We were hard American isolatos. We were solitaries. Unhappy families, though, still have to eat. For my father and for me, who are this story's primary fatsos, food was the source of some of our greatest pleasure and most terrible pain.

Narrators of first-person claptrap like this often greet the reader at the door with moist hugs and complaisant kisses. I won’t. I will not endear myself. I won’t put on airs. I am not that pleasant. The older I get the less pleasant I am.

I mistrust real-life stories that conclude on a triumphant note. Rockettes will not arrive on the final page and kick up their high heels and show petticoats. This is a story about an unhappy fat girl who became a fat woman who was happy and unhappy.

But I haven’t always been fat. I had days when I was almost thin.