My book with Janette Barber, Embracing Your Big Fat Ass is due out on June 3rd. We just found out that the publisher is not printing up very many books. That sucks, but the Big, Fat Ass Bus and Road tour is gaining momentum. Now, Janette likes the idea and I got a map of all the cities I wish to meet women in to talk about their fat asses and lovng themselves.
Now all I need is a road bus. (Note to self; do not buy a bus. Stay on budget with spending this month.)
Money is tight as I await the release of my book. I’ve started to notice how I like to buy everything I see, look at touch, or imagine touching.
Banks Blog – out.
“I hate what I look like naked.” So says author Laura Banks, co-author of Embracing Your Big Fat Ass. (Atria Books, 2008) From the looks of this tall, blonde, attractive ex-movie actress, you’d never guess her true feelings about herself. Certainly her career as a writer and performer doesn’t suggest someone with low self esteem issues either. But this buried poor body image problem is the force behind her latest book. Banks says, “I was always pretty on the outside, but deep down, for most of my life, I have suffered from wishing I was someone else, and I blame it all on my mother.” The early buzz on this expected bestseller (co-authored with Janette Barber) is that it will strike that cord of truth in all women who suffer from hating the size of their asses and have subsequently suffered let downs and disappointments in their life because of it. What is this tiny goal of these two larger than life women? Not much. Just a woman’s movement like The Red Hat Society or Sweet Potato Queens. It will do what Nora Ephron did for the neck in “I Hate My Neck” or what the “Vagina Monologues” did for….well you know.
Her issues with her mother run the course of this light-hearted, yet deeply felt humor book released by Atria books, a division of Simon and Schuster. The whole book is written tongue-in-cheek with the obvious point, if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. Banks’ mother stood was petite and stood only 5’2” tall, while Laura towered over her mother by the eighth grade standing 5’11” tall. Her size was always an issue and when she moved from Kansas to California to pursue a career as an actress, she quickly learned that she wasn’t thin enough to land the movie and TV roles she so desperately pursued. Laura says, “Actresses who get work in Hollywood were and still are greyhound thin.” Laura explains, “I was an actress in Los Angeles who actually ate potatoes with a piece of meat in the morning for breakfast.”
Don’t think for one minute this former stand-up comedy and current improvisational performer is going to let this get serious for too long. The jokes are left to the professionals with these two comics, cutting to the scary edge of women’s obsession with their respective big fat backsides. The book offers up hilarious insight into hiding your fat ass behind an electrical appliance, lighting the curtains on fire so a man will be too scared to notice you from behind, or playing the music of other fat people in the bedroom, like Barry White – “You’ll look thinner to him and he won’t know why.” Or how about Laura’s Big Fat Ass Babe (abbreviated B-FAB) confessional about how she is addicted to trips to her local pharmacy?
Her co-author Janette Barber is no stranger to comedy or a fat ass either. She was able to wax poetic in this over two hundred pages diatribe on life with fat thighs and other parts, especially your butt, by discussing the various ins-n’-outs of fashion, exercise and crazy family members. (All true. Don’t miss the co-authors other real life confessionals on dating and dieting disasters. There’s also testimonials in there from complete strangers about how they’ve been tortured by excess baggage in the back, with some finding happiness…in the end.)
But what’s with the title Embracing Your Big Fat Ass? Some will find this offensive, downright smelly. Banks says, “The book needed the word ass in it, to give it the bite, a snarl. Women are angry at themselves for putting up with themselves for so long, for forcing themselves to go on yet another crash diet or squeeze into another pair of pants that don’t fit. This first step in the movement of fat ass babes everywhere is to feel all their feelings toward themselves, then laugh about it, then get over it and go have a sandwich”. These authors don’t advocate to let yourself go and get fatter than you already are. They just don’t want you to be obsessed and overly serious with that part of your body that tucked neatly behind you, that follows you wherever you go, and that more than likely you will probably never shake in this lifetime. (You may shake “it” on the dance floor, but not out of your pants. On a more serious note, another angle they take is that even if you really wanted to lose weight, you’d have to start with self acceptance and that’s the point this book hits out of the park.
How, one might wonder, does one come up with such a brilliant name for a book? It’s easy, combine thoughts about your ass with the sense of a near death experience. The actual event that led to the title, Embracing Your Big Fat Ass came about in the summer of 2002. Laura’s friend, Carol blew wildly one day into her apartment, exhausted and excited at the same time. As Laura describes Carol, “She’s beautiful woman, very turned out with gorgeous designer clothes, a luxury sports car and fancy 5th Avenue New York City job as an executive secretary. She even has a secretary. She’s a secretary with a secretary. She goes to the gym at least five days per week and has a great body to show for it.” So you get the picture that this woman is a perfectionist in many areas of her life so it couldn’t have been easy when she looked at Laura and said, “I give up. I just have to accept the fact that I have a fat ass.” Banks almost passed out from laughter while at the same time; her head became cocked like that RCA dog as she must have realized something profound in that moment was being said. (Wow, it takes a pretty outrageous person to hear your friend complain about her ass, then turn that into a book deal with a six-figure advance from one of the top publishing houses in the world. Don’t we all complain out our asses? I guess Laura, with her savvy marketing background in radio, which we may or may not get to explaining in the article, knew she had heard gold. So she called up her friend Janette, whom she had previously penned with USA Today Bestseller with back in 1997 entitled, “Breaking the Rules, Last Ditch Tactics for Landing the Man of Your Dreams.”
At the same time her snazzy friend declared such heartfelt and well spoken words, Laura was reading the book, Embraced by the Light by Bettie Edie. The book is all about Bettie almost dying and what she experienced while moving toward “the light,” being lifted above mortal concerns into a safe place of peace, understanding and acceptance. That’s when she got it; that “having a fat ass is like having a near death experience. You just have to keep breathing and move towards the light, only in this case it’s the light coming from the refrigerator.” If you want to laugh out loud, and cry a little later, don’t miss this kick in the pants humor book, due out in bookstores June of 2008. Hats off ladies – now, in that final act of liberation, to kick off that movement, go burn a big ‘ol pair of underwear !
Am I replying to myself? Is this wierd? I don’t know what I’m doing.