R. Coffman

Mediocre book, horrible recording.

Revisado: 05-12-23

I read an article by Kara and was actually really excited to listen to this book. Especially knowing that she was reading it. My favorite audio books are autobiographies and memoirs read by the authors. There's just something about that emotional connection that makes it special. Unfortunately Kara's reading of her own words is stilted and hard to listen to. So many sentences are read in a very broken, unnatural cadence that I had to replay them in my head after she was done in order to figure out what she meant.

Every chapter had major errors and parts that were re-recorded afterwards, sometimes by a completely different person. They tried to match her tone, but you can tell it's not her. That's not to be confused with the parts she re-recorded herself that just sound different because they didn't normalize the volume across the whole audio track. "Every chapter" may not sound like a lot, but the book has 40+ chapters, most under 10 minutes, so there are enough errors to make it hard to listen to. I literally stopped listening to it, listened to a whole other book, then came back to it because unfortunately I am a completionist and have to finish the books I start.

Then there are the issues with the book itself, which admittedly may not have bothered me as much if I was reading it and not listening to it. There was an insincere level of exaggeration and melodrama that may have been made worse by her reading performance. However, the amount of internalized fat phobia, privileged tone deafness, and white savior complex present throughout the book had nothing to do with her reading and everything to do with the content. There were also some extremely graphic descriptions in the book that were completely unnecessary and contributed nothing. There were side stories that felt like gratuitous filler, because she never really connected them to the main narrative.

This book was uncomfortable to listen to on every level and anything but inspirational. I actually had to go find some body positive books by people who know how to talk about weight issues and disordered eating from a recovery perspective and not from a position of continued self-loathing. I can't speak to the actual level of the author's recovery, but I can say she writes like she's still in it and her language choices can be extremely triggering. There's a way of discussing past versions of ourselves with perspective and compassion when you've done the work and managed some healing. This is not it.

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