“Let’s talk plainly. Your child is fat and you would like to help your child lose weight.” – Camp Stanley founder Gussie Mason.

A teenaged Moira Dann was blindsided by her parents’ suggestion that instead of a regular vacation with her family, she spend part of her summer at a weight-loss camp for girls in the Catskills. They laid out a colourful brochure. She protested, but ultimately attended the famous Camp Stanley, featured in the award-winning documentary, A Matter of Fat.

Fat Camp Summer is an amusing, poignant, and vulnerable memoir of the author’s experience of a forced makeover and her often fraught relationship with the parents who insisted on it. Dann tackles issues common to overweight children, including bullying, peer pressure, parental judgement, food obsession and eating disorders, body-image issues, the torment of clothes shopping, and many more. The book is also a journalistic investigation into the research and mythologies surrounding chronic obesity, one of the most tenacious, emotionally difficult, and still misunderstood health issues of our time, affecting almost 20 percent of American children today.

Moira Dann is a writer, editor, speaker, and current president of the Craigdarroch Castle Museum Society board. She has a Master of Fine Arts in creative non-fiction from the University of King's College and is a former editor of the Globe & Mail's Facts and Arguments page. She lives with her husband, Sam Bufalini, in Victoria, BC.

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