It Was Me All Along: A Memoir

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, January 2015: Andie Mitchell is irresistible. And by that I mean she’s irresistible no matter whether she weighs 268 (at the start of this delightful memoir) or 133 (by its end.) She’s so funny, so bouncy, so full of wit and energy and kindness (even or especially to the parents who contributed, in various ways, to her obsession with food) that even readers who would never think they’d read a “weight loss memoir” would be charmed by this one. How’s this for an opening line: “If you were not able to attend my twentieth birthday party, you missed a fabulous cake. . . . And if, by chance, you were able to attend my twentieth birthday party, you, too, missed a fabulous cake.” See? Somebody else might have begun her mournful story of bingeing and dieting and other eating disorders with an admonition or a complaint: Mitchell starts it with a joke. (Some things, as a friend of mine once said, are too serious NOT to joke about.) She then goes on to tell us the whole sad-and-funny story: of a father who loved her but not, ultimately, as much as his alcohol, about a caterer-mother who taught, perhaps too well, the young Andie to bake, about the friends who stuck by her as she careened from mood to mood and weight to weight, of the boys who did, too (and a few who did not). There are a lot of anecdotes here, many of them poignant, but also, usually leavened with sly self-knowledge: “I wish I remembered his face as precisely as I remember eating the muffins,” Mitchell writes about the eating binge she embarked upon learning that her father had died. Now a health and food blogger at canyoustayfordinner.com, Mitchell has become an inspiring thin person – but to readers of this delightful memoir, she’s also always going to be the girl with the big, fat heart. --Sara Nelson