Candy and Me: A Girl's Tale of Life, Love, and Sugar - Softcover

Liftin, Hilary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743254414 ISBN 13: 9780743254410

Publisher: Atria, 2004

Synopsis

As a seven-year-old child, Hilary Liftin poured herself a glass (or two) of powdered sugar. Those forbidden cups soon escalated to pound bags of candy corn and multiple packets of dry cocoa mix, launching the epic love affair between Hilary and all things sweet. In Candy and Me: A Love Story, Liftin chronicles her life through candy memories and milestones. As a high school student, Hilary used candy to get through track meets, bad hair days, after-school jobs, and her first not-so-great love. Her sweet tooth followed her to college, where she tried to suppress the crackle of Smarties wrappers in morning classes. Through life's highs and lows, her devotion has never crashed -- candy has been a constant companion and a refuge that sustained her.
As Liftin recounts her record-setting candy consumption, loves and friendships unfold in a funny and heartbreaking series of bittersweet revelations and restorative meditations. Hilary survives a profound obsession with jelly beans and a camp counselor, a forgettable fling with Skittles at a dot-com, and a messy breakup healed by a friendship forged over Circus Peanuts. Through thick and thin, sweet and sour, Hilary confronts the challenges of conversation hearts and the vagaries of boyfriends, searching for that perfect balance of love and sugar.
Written with a fresh dry humor that will immediately absorb you into Liftin's sweet obsessions and remind you of your own, Candy and Me unwraps the meaning found in the universal desire for connection and confection. Treat yourself to Candy and Me -- being bad never read so good.

About this title

Review

Hilary Liftin's Candy and Me (A Love Story) is not only a love story, but also the story of an otherwise normal, slender, strong-toothed woman's lifetime obsession with candy and all things sweet. With brutal honesty, Liftin exposes herself as insatiable. As a child she indulged in cups full of powdered sugar mixed with just enough water to make a paste which she ate in front of the TV, and multiple packs of hot chocolate mix, licked from her finger on her way home from school. She is a connoisseur of every candy you've ever tasted or even heard of, and of many candies you've never (and might never) come across. The friendships, love stories, and heartbreaks that make up her life story evolve through tales of candy consumption. Her memories of all major and minor life events are tightly woven with Necco Wafers, Snickers, Bottle Caps, Conversation Hearts, Circus Peanuts, Twizzler, Tootsie Rolls, Fireballs, Nonpareils, and countless others. Either you'll relate a little, or you'll relate a lot. You might be shocked by the volume of sugar she's ingested, but her story is familiar. She's made friends and lost them, she's fallen in love and had her heart broken. And then she's fallen in love again. Liftin's story is as sweet as her candy cache. --Leora Y. Bloom

About the Author

Hilary Liftin is the coauthor of Dear Exile. She grew up in Washington, D.C., and graduated from Yale University in 1991. She lives with her husband, Chris Harris, in Los Angeles and/or Brooklyn.

About this edition

• Publisher: Atria
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0743254414
• ISBN 13: 9780743254410
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240