Wake Up, I'm Fat!

But can she write? Yes. This memoir is by turns funny ("If Barbie were a real woman, she'd have to walk on all fours due to her proportions") and excruciating. It helps that the material was honed in a one-woman show that sold out at New York's big-deal Public Theater, but the subject matter was strange and interesting in the first place. Manheim could not possibly be a less likely candidate for artistic and commercial success on TV. Born Debi Manheim in Peoria, the very metaphor for mainstream culture, Manheim re-created herself as a dozen-earringed California biker chick, a Renaissance Faire wench, a protester who helped drive the Miss California Pageant out of Santa Cruz, and one of 28 actors in America accepted at NYU's exclusive graduate school. In her book, Manheim gets even with her cruel, fat-bashing teachers; credits the director who gave her her first ingenue lead role (Tony Kushner, who cast her in Fen); and tells how the same temper that got her booted from school and arrested also won her the TV role that made her name.

There's good gossip for drama buffs. Manheim ribs her famous boss David Kelley within an inch of her livelihood; rips into Celeste Holm for cattiness backstage in Clare Boothe Luce's The Women; and opines that Bridget Fonda, whom she got naked next to in a movie, "could use a sandwich." But it's the private-life stuff that sticks with you. Read her touching, hilarious account of a personal-ad date from hell, and how she got even by picking up the hunky model who plays the Marlboro Man. She is not making this up!

Product Description
Thankfully, Camryn Manheim has never played by the rules. Her fierce determination to defy the beauty myth, the naysayers, and casting stereotypes has resulted in one of today's most remarkable and unique Hollywood success stories. Her groundbreaking role as Ellenor Frutt on television's hottest drama, The Practice, has won her an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award--victories that are the culmination of decades of hard work, perseverance, and battles fought with her parents, lovers, the establishment, and herself.

In this inspirational memoir, Camryn chronicles her journey from a self-hating, "overweight" teenager who desperately wanted to fit in, to a self-loving, fat activist who is proud to be a misfit. Wake Up, I'm Fat! shares her intelligent, candid, poignant, and often hilarious stories of being fat in a society obsessed with being thin. Camryn takes us from her days as a motorcycle-riding hippie in Santa Cruz to her enrollment at New York University's prestigious school of drama--where Pulitzer Prize-winning Tony Kushner broke the unspoken theater rules of size and cast her in the role of the ingenue--and finally to Hollywood, where she dispelled the fallacy that large women can't be portrayed as sensual, sophisticated, and confident.

Camryn's endearing honesty, sass, and razor-sharp wit will appeal to all those who have ever felt like outcasts or yearned to make peace with their bodies.