Limited by Body Habitus

An American Fat Story

By: Jennifer Renee Blevins

Narrated by: Jennifer Renee Blevins, Jack Katz

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.

Incorporating pieces from her life, such as medical transcripts and quotes from news programs, Blevins composes a mosaic of our modern anxieties. Even through despair, she finds hope in mending broken relationships and shows us how we can flourish as individuals and as a nation despite our struggles. Fierce and haunting, this memoir creates a space of narrative through body, selfhood, family, and country.

©2020 Jennifer Renee Blevins (P)2021 Autumn House Press

Critic reviews

“Limited by Body Habitus is a searing and honest memoir that made me reconsider everything I thought I knew about the ‘obesity epidemic’ in the United States. Blevins masterfully brings together cultural criticism, hard numbers, and her own family’s story to reveal the extent to which the obesity epidemic continues to be manufactured and misunderstood. This is no manifesto, however. Blevins takes herself to task, too, and readers are left with a poignant memoir about a father who becomes a best friend, a family that is forever altered by a medical crisis, and a daughter who wonders if, as Blevins writes: ‘our bodies remember what we do to them.’” (Daisy Hernández, author of A Cup of Water Under My Bed)

"While many readers will be familiar with her argument that fat people are unfairly pathologized and held liable for their fatness, her father’s medical records (used with his permission) offer new and concrete examples of how discrimination against fat patients occurs at the level of grammar, how those tiny building blocks add up to a wall of disparagement." (Times Literary Supplement)

Powerful

So many of us can identify with this powerful book. It uniquely weaves data driven analysis with a deeply personal and emotional journey. I learned a great deal and was moved.

Now I want to see the movie!

I fully expected this to be somewhat informative but probably a bit dry. I was anything but!! Blevins weaves a story that tackles FAT more personally and more perfectly than I could ever imagine someone doing. The narration is true storytelling in its most personal form. You can feel the author’s heartache and hope without it overwhelming the poignant tale of what actually happened to one AmericaN Family in a broken healthcare system. I was angry when we the book came to an end and I look forward to the next Blevins offering.

Entertained me while making me think

The narration is excellent and I was hooked from “butterball.” This tragic exploration of our approach to fat is deeply insightful. As a medical professional, I had to re-examine my approach to fat patients after listening to this book. This will make you think about your own views about fat and the feelings of the fat people around us.

Missing content. Ends mid sentence in surgery #5

This was a wonderful well told story with no ending because because the recorded content doesn't even conclude the outcomes of the 5th surgery and jump to straight to the epilog. I tried downloading it redownloading it doesn't fix it so I'm going to have to spend additional money to purchase the print copy of the book in order to find out what happened to Jennifer and her family this is an unfortunate quality control issue