Hardcover
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
“Everyone had a clearer vision of my body than I did. It didn’t feel as if my body was really mine...” At age fourteen, Jonathan Wells weighs just sixty-seven pounds, triggering a scrutinizing persecution of his body that will follow him into adulthood.
Upstate New York in the 1970s: A boy in preparatory day school suffers a harrowing attack by a teacher offended by his failure to put on weight. For the first time in his young life, Jonathan Wells is forced to question his right to take up space in the world. Jonathan’s father, reading his weight as a clear and deeply concerning deficit of masculinity, creates a workout regimen meant to bulk him up. When that doesn’t help, he has Jonathan seen by a slew of specialists, all claiming he is in perfect health, and yet the problem cannot be denied: the boy is simply too skinny.
Jonathan’s complicated relationship with his charming but elusive mother does not help matters. As the eldest son, he is privy to the struggles of a fraying marriage in which he, unwittingly, plays a divisive role. As a result, Jonathan is sent to boarding school in Switzerland, where he manages to establish an identity of his own among the child exiles and outcasts that make up the student body. And yet, his father’s obsession follows him to Europe, threatening to destroy the space he has painstakingly won for himself.
The critically acclaimed poet and author of the collection Debris, Jonathan Wells gives us a candid, powerful, and quietly humorous memoir about the universal exploration of adolescence and self-image, the frailty of masculinity, and all the places we seek comfort in a world that tries to define us.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781733540193 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The Unnamed Press |
| Publication date: | 08/17/2021 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
What People are Saying About This
"Layer by layer, Jonathan Wells unravels the father-son knot in ways both troubling and uplifting. I was gripped by The Skinny, a remarkable portrait of the most tangled of relationships, written with a poet's eye and grace."—Roger Cohen, The Girl from Human Street: A Jewish Family Odyssey
"With a poet’s grace, Jonathan Wells has written a harrowing memoir about growing up severely underweight, about surviving sexual abuse by a schoolmaster—and about his tyrannical father’s determination to transform his son’s body into his own ideal of masculinity. The Skinny is a deeply haunting account of the lasting effects of emotional and physical bullying. I couldn’t put it down."—Besty Bonner, The Book of Atlantis Black
"Here's the skinny on The Skinny. Wells has written a memoir that's lean without being gaunt, rawboned without being fleshless. It's an elegant work of curving contours and sharp-edged insight that captures a world long gone in voluptuous prose that nonetheless, is delightfully devoid of flab or excess."—Allen Kurzweil, author of Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year Old Bully
"The Skinny is a poignant account of what it is like to grow up as a diminutive boy in a world that prefers its men big and strong. In precise and poetic prose, Jonathan Wells explores the intersection of wealth, sexuality, and body image, peeling back the glittering layers of privilege, searching for his father's approval, and examining the assumptions made about male size in a culture of toxic masculinity. Ultimately, The Skinny is an illuminating memoir of one man's search for meaning, acceptance and love."—Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover and Me
"Jonathan Wells's extraordinary coming-of-age memoir, The Skinny, is not only startling and heartbreaking, but each page seems somehow even more riveting and moving than the last. If you want the skinny - I mean, the real skinny - about growing up in a male body in this country it's time you read this deeply compelling and eminently wise new book."—David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour
“One of the most vulnerable memoirs I’ve ever read, Jonathan Wells’ Skinny is the story of surviving the long, brutal gauntlet toward manhood that many boys who grew up in the 1970s and ;80s endured. An important cautionary tale illuminating the devastating, lifelong harm caused by rigid gender rules and the parents who try to enforce them.”—Bill Clegg, author of Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and he End of the Day
"Jonathan Wells was small as a child—short, but also quite thin. That trait, the way others reacted to it, and its nonconformity with perceived male norms led to a painful chain reaction of events...The Skinny is gripping in its wonderful articulation of an underrepresented perspective on masculinity." —Foreword Review
“In The Skinny, Jonathan Wells has written a searing, page-turning narrative of growing up light – and a profound meditation on the meaning of manhood. I’ve read nothing like it. A vital, important book.” —Scott Lasser, author of All I Could Get
"This touching memoir of growing up in suburban New York in the ’70s and ’80s reads a bit like outtakes from Mad Men, if told from the perspective of a teenager with a more nuanced point of view on the overwhelming tropes of masculinity that dominated that era...This coming-of-age chronicle is lushly rendered and touchingly intimate, a critique that is loving and unsparing at the same time." — Vogue's Best Books of the Summer
"A poetic remembrance of pain and forgiveness that rivals Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life in its power to enthrall." — Airmail
13