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So I kept pushing myself to be more honest, to tell the truth the best I could. Other overweight people – or people with any other addiction, really – would be able to sniff it out if I faked it.
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But I decided early on that if I was going to do this book, I had to do it right. There are things in this book that I had never told anyone – my wife, my closest friends, anyone – before I put them on the page. Of her memoir, “Hunger,” Roxane Gay said: “ When I was writing it I was worried about exposing myself like this, and being this honest.” Did you feel the same way? The more important questions are why, and what we should do about it. The proposal sold in two weeks.Įverybody knows we’re getting bigger. I wrote a proposal for the book as I was finishing up the story on Jared.
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As I talked to Jared, and figured out how to tell his story, it helped me see the path for how to tell mine. But in 2014, I did a story for ESPN the Magazine on Jared Lorenzen – a famously overweight quarterback who had ended up playing minor-league football at more than 400 pounds. I was worried about what it would do to me to have to dig that deep. TOMMY TOMLINSON: It’s a story I had been circling all my life, but I was always afraid to tell it. STORYBOARD: Why did you decide to write a book about your life as a fat man in America? (The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.) We talked about all the above and about the kind of things writers tend to talk about: What prompted the book? How many drafts did he write? How did he tackle structure? How long did it take? How did he weigh the honesty needed to tell a true story with the need to protect those who are part of that story? And perhaps most important when considering memoir – or any intense reconstruction that relies on the quirks of memory – how did he report the past with any assurance of its accuracy? “The Elephant In The Room” is no exception, but this time at booklength.Īfter reading an advance copy, I wanted to know why someone who feels the stigma of obesity every day would expose himself so nakedly, to the extent that he describes how it affects his sex life. In the arc of his career – newspaper reporter and columnist, magazine writer, podcast host, writing teacher, blogger – Tomlinson learned to devise simple but effective ways to structure a range of narratives. But this is no lecture on obesity: Tomlinson’s book is a clear-eyed look at himself in the mirror. He juxtaposes his personal story with the societal crisis of obesity, drawing on the memoirist’s exploration of intimate moments with the journalist’s probe of public implications. Tomlinson’s book is a brutally honest memoir that tracks his addiction from earliest memories through college and a successful newspaper and magazine career. He has now chronicled his life’s battle in “The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man’s Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America.” (Due out Jan. At the dawn of 2015, he weighed 460 pounds.Īfter his beloved older sister Brenda died – killed, he was convinced, by her obesity – and after writing a powerful and personal story about a morbidly obese athlete, Tomlinson decided the time had come to kick his own habit after many failed attempts. What I didn’t know was that the southern cooking we ate that day was, for Tomlinson, baked into a lifelong, intractable addiction to food, and to a hunger that gripped him as a child and never let go as he grew larger and larger. In fact, I thought, a very, very fat man, although I certainly didn’t mention it at the time. Tommy was, and remains, a warm, funny and compassionate man devoted to the craft of reporting and writing. If memory serves – and this is important for what follows – the meal was delicious, filling, and loaded with carbs and fat. The first time I met Tommy Tomlinson, he and his wife, Alix Felsing, took me to their favorite spot for breakfast in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they lived and where Tommy wrote a wildly popular column for the Charlotte Observer. Tommy Tomlinson at Hadrian's Wall in England, before the weight-loss journey that led to his memoir.