A Mirror, Almost.

To be quite honest, I'd never heard of Andie Mitchell or her blog until I saw a Facebook post about her memoir, It Was Me All Along but when I read the excerpt, I recognized myself immediately. Never had I read anything describing my struggle with food and eating. I'm not very good at articulating my feelings or verbalizing my introspection. Part of it is self-consciousness. I don't like to focus attention on those aspects of myself that are negative. It feels like self-vicitmization, in a way, which is something I CANNOT stand, either in myself or others!
But in this touching, grounded, earnest memoir, I found the words that describe the emotional roller coaster that is my relationship with food. My childhood was not anything like Andie's but it was marked by periods of turbulence, as all childhoods are.  Andie astutely draws the line between her early memories of growing up in a working class home with an alcoholic father and an overworked mother, and her increasing weight gain caused by overeating and bingeing. She adeptly describes the thought process and flood of emotions that drive the decision to overeat and I was startled to find that I knew EXACTLY what she meant. I had experienced the very same phenomenon many times over, and still do.
I think it takes a special kind of person to put herself out there in the most vulnerable of ways, in a society that finds it embarrassing and shameful to talk about fatness, to be fat, even. I usually read memoirs to explore a perspective that is unknown to me, but this time, I read a memoir to understand myself better.

{I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review. This post contains affiliate links.}