Life Stories #20: Dara-Lynn Weiss
photo: Juliana Sohn
In April 2012, when Dara-Lynn Weiss wrote about her attempts to control her seven-year-old daughter Bea’s diet in order to get her to lose weight, there were a lot of vehement reactions; Jezebel, for example, described it as “the worst Vogue article ever.” So when Weiss wrote a memoir, The Heavy, expanding on her experiences and discussing the reactions to her original magazine article, I was interested in having a conversation with her for Life Stories, the podcast where I talk with memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir.
So we talk some about the health issues that were involved, and the controversy that erupted over Weiss’s revelations about the dietary choices she made for her daughter, and her feeling that while some parents are applauded for their vigilance over what their kids eat in other situations, parents of obese children are often not given similar benefit of the doubt. But we also talk about why she now feels it was a mistake to let Bea pose with her in the photo accompanying the Vogue article, and about her surprise at Bea’s reaction when she successfully reached her target weight—and about the difference between eating the right foods and the right amounts of the right foods, and why the “food media” seems to focus on the former rather than the latter.
One especially positive aspect of The Heavy is Weiss’s desire to broaden our sense of the word “diet,” which has popularly come to mean a short-term plan for weight loss, to a more long-term strategy for healthy eating choices throughout life. Much of her memoir centers on the attempt to instill that kind of consistency in her daughter’s eating habits, but more importantly the hope that Bea would, as she grows older, have the maturity to make smart choices for herself.
Listen to Life Stories #20: Dara-Lynn Weiss (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).
5 February 2013 | life stories |
My First Book for 2013: Bedroom Roulette
Back in early 2012, I met one of the founders of TruLOVEstories, a publishing company that had, in addition to its line of original romance fiction, acquired the archives to True Love and True Romance, dating back to the 1920s. When I got a chance, I poked around their website, especially a section where they reprinted a few stories from each decade. One of the stories they selected from the 1970s was so outrageous (“My Mother’s Lover Is My Husband!”)—and the other headlines on that month’s cover so equally lurid—that I joked on Twitter that they should let me loose among the back issues and I’d put together a wild anthology.
Well, they saw that tweet.
Bedroom Roulette collects 13 stories from the early 1970s, and the sexual revolution is in full swing, from “Free-Love Farm” to “The Night My Husband Demanded an Orgy.” (The confessional tale that gives the anthology its title is helpfully subtitled “The Game Suburban Housewives Play.”) The entertainment value is fantastic, but as somebody who’s written about the cultural upheavals of this decade—in my ’70s Hollywood retrospective, The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane!—I was also interested in what these stories could tell us about reactions to those upheavals. Putting this anthology (and its sequels) together, I sometimes described the archival search as like taking a core sample from a glacier; you get to see through the years what issues and concerns were deemed to be most resonant with the magazines’ readerships. And the way the stories address those concerns was complex: Yes, some of these stories have dirty hippies, but there are other stories of feminist awakenings, and the attitude towards gays and lesbians was a bit more tolerant than I’d expected.
The link above will take you to Powells.com, where you can get the trade paperback edition; if you’re interested in a digital version for the Kindle or Nook, or you just really like to order from Amazon or Barnes & Noble, visit the TruLOVEstories Bedroom Roulette page, where you can also find the story “Why Not? We Used to Be Married.” And keep an eye out later in 2013 for the ’80s anthology Women Undone, as well as some holiday-themed collections that will be appearing in the spring.
Oh! For the rest of January and on through February 2013, TruLOVEstories is also running a “Bad Boyfriend” contest, where you can share your short-short stories about awful beaus—because you just know some of the entries are going to end up on the site—and be in the running for a $350 prize. They’re also accepting short videos as well as prose stories, so if you’re ready to tell the world about your awful boyfriend, and how you turned him around or turned him loose, you might want to give that a look.
29 January 2013 | read this |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
