Winner of the Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize, Jennifer Renee Blevins’ s debut memoir, Limited by Body Habitus: An American Fat Story, sheds light on her experiences living with the emotional and psychological struggles of taking up space in a fat-phobic world.
Bringing together experiences of personal and national trauma, Blevins adeptly weaves the tale of her father’ s gastric bypass surgery and subsequent prolonged health crisis with the environmental catastrophe of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Blevins looks to each of these events as a “ leak” of American society’ s pitfalls and shortcomings. These intertwined narratives, both disasters that could have been avoided, reveal points of failure in our systems of healthcare and environmental conservation.
