“I think of future events, not in terms of dates, but in terme of pounds… Not ‘We go to the beach on June 26, ’but ’Only twenty more pounds, and we go to the beach.”

Hilariously funny, heartbreakingly sad, DIARY OF A FAT HOUSEWIFE is the real-life diary of Rosemary Green. At seventeen Rosemary was a Rose Festival Princess in Portland, Oregon —a slim, devastatingly beautiful girl. Then she gained seventy pounds before her first child was born. By her fifth baby she weighed over three hundred pounds. Feeling trapped, angry—and very depressed — she began this manic, brutally honest, scathingly witty journal, the record of her more than ten-year battle against fat.

In it Rosemary reveals the secret self of every dieter: the highs of losing pounds…the despair at bingeing and gaining them back… the irrational resentment directed at skinny people… the lies about cookies gobbled in the night… the chocolate cravings that led to near madness. But she also tells what obesity does to a family and a marriage, as she turns into a guilt-ridden wife who makes sure her husband never glimpses her unclothed body and disappoints her son because she can’t fit into the seat to take him on a carnival ride.

Yo-yoing in her weight and in her emotions, Rosemary ultimately realizes she is gripped by an obsession… and an addiction. Stark on these pages is the truth that obesity is a disease, with a cure that seems tantalizingly within the victim’s reach. Searching for solutions, desperate for willpower, repeating the diet-binge cycle, Rosemary Green blasts the “Big Is Beautiful” philosophy, gives straight-from-the-shoulder advice to spouses, friends, and relatives of fat people, and puts her own heart on the page.

The result is a testament to a woman’s courage, a book that will make you cheer when she succeeds and cry when she fails. Compelling, riveting reading, DIARY OF A FAT HOUSEWIFE will touch a responsive chord in every dieter, give hope to overweight people everywhere, and offer everyone, including thin people, a bold and candid look at life in the fat lane.

T. PERRIN - ON BROADWAY

ROSEMARY GREEN, a former columnist for The Oregonian, lives with her husband and children in Oregon.