Frances Kuffel's autobiographical book Passing For Thin follows the usual addict-in-recovery arc: overindulgence, depression, self-hatred, confrontations with friends, bottoming out, emotional breakthrough, self-improvement, backsliding, new personal discoveries, new personal plateaus. The differences in Kuffel's story mostly come from the nature of her addiction. A self-described glutton, she was obese from childhood, and in her late 30s, she weighed 338 pounds. Over the course of two years, she lost half that weight, entering what her book repeatedly characterizes as a new world. Passing For Thin isn't a how-to manual or a diet book–Kuffel skims past the details of her food intake, focusing instead on the milestones and boundaries she hit while coming to terms with a body she couldn't hide behind. Some of the changes in her life are positive, as she revels in the aspects of femininity she had avoided, and learns to stand up for herself in ways that extend beyond her eating patterns. At the same time, her physical and emotional alterations threaten some of her relationships, forcing her to redefine how she deals with her family, her boss, and men in general. Passing For Thin is rife with snappy anecdotes and mordant humor; Kuffel's anthropomorphizing of food and her descriptions of cataclysmic childhood binges are distinctly creepy, but her frankness disarms much of the tension. At the same time, it often reveals her as selfish, snobbish, and even cruel. She ruthlessly rejects, judges, or uses other overweight people, both in her fat days and in her thin stages, when she instantly rejects a computer-match date who's gained weight since taking his sample picture. At the same time, she glosses over some of her story's most human parts, zipping past her first post-weight-loss love affair in order to wallow in the post-relationship depression, and bringing her family into the story only in order to blame her failures on them, take advantage of their charity and support, or use them as mirrors to reflect her pain and her personal development. (The book's most horrific moment by far comes from Kuffel's one adult acknowledgement of a mean childhood sibling as "the older brother whose corpse I was glad to see 13 years ago.") But in its blunt ugliness, Passing For Thin reveals itself as an intimate and honest story, as fascinating in its grotesque insight as in its inspirational uplift.