Andie Mitchell

I don't think I like memoirs very much.

Or maybe I just don't like the authors, that could be it.

I really wanted to like this book. As someone who also binge eats and has always had a volatile relationship with food, I wanted to relate to Andie, to see someone like myself. I wanted to see someone who had struggled but come out on top.

Some of it was there. Mitchell struggled with her weight for years; her emotional struggles fueled her food addiction, and at least in that respect, I could relate to the author.

Ultimately, though, there are a few things that I just can't get past.

First, the poor writing was really distracting. Mitchell has a communications degree and (I think) her primary "job" now is maintaining a blog and writing books. Still, though, the writing seemed forced and unnatural. It felt like she was trying too hard.

Second, and I hate to say this because she is a real person who could read this one day, but Mitchell did not present herself as someone who was very likable. She spends a large portion of the book talking about how hard her mother worked while she was growing up. Her mom clearly sacrificed a lot, yet Mitchell - at somewhere around 21 or 22 years old - felt okay with having her mom take out a sizable chunk of her retirement account to pay for Mitchell's skin-removal surgery. I know, I know, it's not my place to judge other people's life choices, but still... she was only in her early 20s. She could have worked for a few years to save up the money herself instead of relying on her mom yet again. She did say that she, her mom, and her boyfriend had a long discussion about it, but that seems to me like the kind of decision that could have waited until a time when her mom wouldn't have to dip into her retirement fund. It seems like quite a rash decision.

Other decisions that Mitchell made seemed very selfish as well. She got a degree in communications with no real idea what job she might want after graduation, and predictably, after graduation she sort of floundered for a while until she lucked into a job on a movie set. It worked out well for her, and she was offered a job on another set several states away. She told her boyfriend about it and seemed to have already made up her mind to move, so of course, he agreed to move, too. They moved again for Mitchell to take a third job on a movie set before deciding (rather randomly) to settle in Seattle. Mitchell’s boyfriend Daniel supported her throughout all of her moves, and during her dramatic weight loss. She describes the depression that she felt after losing weight. Perhaps Mitchell’s lowest point in the book, in my opinion, was when Daniel lost his job and his motivation, became depressed, and she broke up with him. (Those events weren’t presented as being directly related, but that’s the way it came across in the book.)

From what I’d seen on social media, I expected to really enjoy this book, but I just couldn’t see past Mitchell as being spoiled and selfish, and it made it really hard to be empathetic towards her. I was glad to come to Goodreads and see that there were plenty of others who felt the same way.

So maybe it’s not just that I don’t like memoirs.

Maybe I just don’t like bad ones.… (plus d'informations)