Goodbye Jumbo...Hello Cruel World - Softcover

Anderson, Louie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140233687 ISBN 13: 9780140233681

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1994

Synopsis

Louie Anderson, celebrated comedian and author of the bestselling Dear Dad, returns with an inspiring, insightfully funny exploration of his relationship with his mother and of his physical and psychological battle to overcome his addiction to food. Satellite TV tour.

About this title

About the Author:

Standup comic LOUIE ANDERSON is also an author and game show host.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Weightless epiphanies about losing weight from Anderson, professional comedian and bestselling author of Dear Dad (1989). Anderson's earlier surprise hit was low-key but effective as he faced his dead alcoholic father with unmailed letters that relieved his low self-esteem. Dad usually called him ``lard-ass,'' a memory that kept Anderson walled up in food until he joined Adult Children of Alcoholics and entered therapy. The present book focuses largely on Anderson's life before therapy and ACOA, with the prosperous but unhappy young comic having to stand on side-by- side scales to weigh his 360-plus pounds (he suggests at one point that he topped 400). Anderson bemoans the failure of diets to keep his weight off--weight he has lost repeatedly--and determines that his entire family of 11 siblings became dysfunctional (nine of them overweight) not only because of Dad but also because of Mom, who covered over the family pains with food. Anderson was grossly fat when he began school and only got worse. Throughout, he presents us with a laundry list of discoveries about food being a defense against you-name-it. Meanwhile, he feeds a mania for antique furniture that eventually finds him renting three storage cubicles for his excess chairs and a lifetime's gathering of junk. We follow him into a few fat farms and hospitals, give him a half-cheer when he buys a treadmill, and spend some binges with him. His final epiphany is a love-bearing letter-writing campaign to his siblings as he tries to unite them into a happy family. And he sells his antiques and million-dollar home in hopes of uncovering the bare bones of his inmost being. Thin, even surly, vaporings that will sell like buttered hotcakes. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0140233687
• ISBN 13: 9780140233681
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272