PASSING FOR THIN: LOSING HALF MY WEIGHT AND FINDING MYSELF, by Frances Kuffel, Broadway, 260 pages, $24.
Despite the title, "Passing for Thin" is not a diet book.
If any booksellers are reading this, please display it a comfortable distance from any books that discuss calories, low-carb foods, cutting cholesterol or any other how-to-get-thin manuals. The author would appreciate it, because she has written "an intimate and darkly comic memoir" about how she adjusted to a new body of 125 pounds after weighing as much as 313 pounds at her peak.
Frances Kuffel sometimes feels she is impersonating a thin person or even that she has lost her identity. After all, her own brother failed to recognize her in the airport.
On the other hand, she has enjoyed some of the simple pleasures of being small — sitting through a movie in a standard seat, using only one seat when traveling by air, sitting in booths at restaurants, getting noticed by the opposite sex, running on a treadmill and trying on a tailored suit. One other thing: She hadn't been able to hug her knees since grade school.
Professionally, Kuffel is a literary agent, but her real love is writing. And she is very good at it. Her light, ironic style carries the reader quickly through a difficult, painful and ultimately delightful story. Sadly, she feels as if she has lost the first 40 years of her life, yet she is now enjoying good health without any harmful side effects from her massive weight loss.
Besides looking at Kuffel with admiration for demonstrating the courage to drop 188 pounds in just 21 months, the reader will find an energized, classy and funny writer who had no idea what becoming thin would do to her life. She speaks satirically about the genuine affection she has for Janeane Garofalo, who stars in the 1996 film "The Truth about Cats and Dogs," which Kuffel has watched over and over again. The slightly overweight but beautiful Garofalo inspired the now beautiful Kuffel with confidence enough in herself to think that maybe a man would be interested in her for her smart, funny personality, rather than be blown away by her beauty.
In the film, Abby Barnes (Garofalo) wins over the leading man by telephone and the radio show she hosts, but she asks Noelle (Uma Thurman) to pretend to be Abby for face-to-face meetings. "Janeane Garofalo gave me something tangible in my curiosity about the Planet of Girls. You could be smart, ironic, crabby and a Real Girl. You don't have to be a pipe cleaner to be thin and beautiful. You could inspire the insipid and defy the smug. It wasn't the sunset kiss that got me; it was the long passionate phone conversation before. Abby Barnes and Janeane Garofalo got me thinking. I needed a role model. They gave me hope."
Once she lost weight, Kuffel realized very late that getting thin "included being feminine." Initially, she felt like "a spy in the house of Girls." She wore a dress "that topped out just above my knees. With my pageboy hair in its usual state of misbehavior, black tights and Doc Martens, I was in full Janeane Garofalo mode."
She learned things about her new self through clothes. "I was looking for order and precision and completion. I was searching for sensation and romance. I don't find romance in patterns or frills . . . but I found it in the valves of motion, in pleats and lines and the sway of fabrics. I wanted my clothes to purr to the touch."
Kuffel had a couple of serious romantic relationships that ultimately broke her heart. Now she is approaching both romance and life in a less hurried manner.
Let's hope she keeps writing good stuff like this.
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com