The Skinny: Adventures Of America's First Bulimic

Funny! Sexy! Moving! She thought she was the first one since ancient Rome. Her mother wished she could do it, too. Her doctor called it "a great weight control technique." In repressive 40's and 50's small-town America, no one knew of "eating disorders," but everyone yearned to be "skinny." Struggling with a spider-web of parental and social animosity up to and including abuse, Rowena Gay Wine is torn between a thirst for all of life's pleasures and her gut-wrenching secret. She survives -- even thrives -- with imagination, determination, and humor. Here is a novel that runs the gamut of timeless human experience, from terror to tickling, from deep love to shallow sex, from "baby whispering" to an intervention by angels that keeps Rowie miraculously alive, and much more in between, even including a car chase! Along the way, Rowie's self-awareness, personal insights, and creative courage open the floodgates for a whole generation of women to escape from limitations and doubt.

The author of The Skinny is Rayni Joan, who grew up as Roberta Joan Weintraub in Newburgh, New York during the 1940's and 50's. During a critical period in the early 1970s, she was part of the Liberation News Service collective, where for $35 and 10 free meals per week, she researched and wrote news and feature articles. It was during this period that her ground-breaking feature article, "Women, Fat of the Land" appeared widely throughout the U.S. It was June, 1970, and Ms. Joan became the first public confessor to the then unheard of habit of binging and purging, later diagnosed in the 1980s as bulimia. Although the word and the fact of "bulimia" were largely unknown at the time, her compelling story containing her stunning confession was picked up by and published on the front pages of dozens of alternative weekly newspapers, where it struck a chord with more than a million women readers - a chord that resonates to this day, when bulimia is universally recognized as a major affliction among 4% - 7% of young women and as many as 10% of college-age women. Although her public confession was a major turning point in her life, it nevertheless took Ms. Joan seven more years to kick the habit. Ms. Joan is now Director of the Center for Increased Consciousness, and lives near the beach in Santa Monica, California, with her husband, writer Robert Moskowitz.