Tag Archives: books

Nudes for the Holidays

Laurie and Debbie say:

We had a such wonderful response to last year’s holiday sale of Laurie’s books of photography (with Debbie’s text), that we thought we’d offer the same price again this year. It means a lot to us that Nudes for the Holidays pleased so many people.

Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes

WEL cover

and Familiar Men: A Book of Nudes

FM_cover

Signed copies (which Laurie can personalize for you as gifts) of each are on sale for $15 including U.S. shipping: a great bargain given that each book is usually available for $25 plus shipping! (International shipping is $10 per book.)

There are two great things about doing art that is also social change work: the art and the social change. Laurie never dreamed when we started this project that her photographs would be internationally exhibited and become part of permanent museum collections.

April on the chaise

The social change aspects make the best stories. We’ve heard about women who’ve thrown away their entire wardrobe and bought a new one after looking at the pictures, or bought a bathing suit for the first time in years.

We watched a man who had been a porn model burst into tears at a slide show, just at the concept that there could be nudes of men who didn’t have to look perfect.

Philip with his bicycle

It’s no exaggeration: these photographs, and these books, change lives. Buying them for yourselves is terrific; giving them to the right someone else can start a cascade of exactly the kind of changes we all want to see.

In the early days of Women En Large, the pictures, plus a long talk with Laurie which would never have happened without the pictures, helped a woman recover from active, life-limiting anorexia. When the Familiar Men pictures were shown in at the National Museum of Art in Osaka, Japan, one of the workmen on staff at the museum wrote the senior curator to say how much the pictures changed how he felt about himself, and how important that was to him.

Richard LaBonte

And just last week Laurie got an email from a man who is dealing with surgical disfigurement, who said that Familiar Men had completely changed the way he feels about his body.

These books are the tangible markers of our work together. Our goals are to make the invisible visible, to widen the range of what is beautiful and what is powerful, and to help change the way people see. Buying the books gets the images out into the world where they can do good, and also supports our work; in particular, giving it to someone you think is beautiful but they don’t think so is a perfect way to show them what you see in them. At the same time, book sales help us maintain the blog, seed new projects for Laurie, and pay the bills.

Isn’t there someone you know who needs a copy? Or several someones?

Debbie and Tracy

Tell your friends.

Wintergirls: A Novel About Anorexia

My friend Lizzy, aka the writer Elizabeth A Lynn, pointed me at Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson.  It’s a young adult novel about anorexia.  We talked about it on the phone and she said: its not really about adolescence; the protagonist is 18. It’s about family dynamics. I’ve never encountered the author before, but damn she’s good.  I think the book deserves a tremendous amount of attention.

Some quotes from the New York Times Sunday Book Review:

Anorexia… imposes profound rigidity on experience, seems to force its captive into a labyrinth made of mirrors. There, the dialogue is only with one’s self, and is of the most self-annihilating sort: “You’re fat, stupid, disgusting.” In that world, all wishes are inverted: to feel desire is to be weak; to resist food is to be superior; to be angry at one’s parents is to cut oneself with a razor. To be is to not be.

Wintergirls, Laurie Halse Anderson’s new novel, takes us into this dark, tyrannical world through the experience of Lia, the 18-year-old narrator, who has struggled with anorexia since the eighth grade. Lia is haunted by a hallucination of her dead friend, Cassie, who taunts: “You’re not dead, but you’re not alive, ­either. You’re a wintergirl, Lia-Lia, caught in between the worlds. You’re a ghost with a beating heart. Soon you’ll cross the border and be with me. I’m so stoked….

Anderson, the author of Speak and other award-winning novels for teenagers, has written a fearless, riveting account of a young woman in the grip of a deadly illness.

Normally I wait to read a book before I write about it, but this is being a very dense period with lots of travel.  I ‘ve heard many, many anorexia stories over my years of size acceptance work, and it’s an issue that always feels urgent to me. So I’m writing about it now. Wintergirls sounds like a really valuable book.