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The Skinny Audiobook
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“Everyone had a clearer vision of my body than I did. It didn’t feel as if my body was really mine.” At fourteen-years-old, Jonathan Wells weighed just 67 pounds, igniting a scrutinizing persecution of his body that followed him into adulthood.
As a boy in preparatory day school in upstate New York in the 1970s, Wells’s teacher abuses and humiliates him for his size, forcing Wells, for the first time, to question his right to take up space in the world. Wells’s father, reading his weight as a clear deficit of masculinity, and perhaps sexuality, creates a workout regimen meant to bulk him up. When that doesn’t help, he has Wells seen by a slew of specialists, all claiming he is in perfect health, and yet the problem cannot be denied: he is simply too skinny.
Wells’s complicated relationship with his charming but elusive mother does not help matters. As the eldest son, he is privy to the struggles of a fraying marriage in which he, however slight, plays a divisive role. Wells is sent to boarding school in Switzerland, where his size continues to generate controversy, from the merely rude to the violently abusive. And yet, even as he manages to establish an identity of his own, one which must invariably contend with gender norms and conventions, his father’s obsession with his size follows him to Europe, threatening to destroy the space he has painstakingly won for himself.
As he grows into an adult, combatting the intrusive liberties others take with his body, Jonathan must define masculinity for himself, ultimately coming to terms with the damage of a father’s love.
The critically acclaimed poet and author of the collection Debris, Jonathan Wells gives us a thoughtful, candid, and powerful memoir about the universal exploration of adolescence and self-image, the frailty of masculinity, and all the places we seek comfort in a world trying to redefine us.
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“One of the most vulnerable memoirs I’ve ever read, Jonathan Wells’s The Skinny is the story of surviving the long, brutal gauntlet toward manhood that many boys who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s endured. An important cautionary tale.”
— Bill Clegg, New York Times bestselling author
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“Each page seems somehow even more riveting and moving than the last. If you want the skinny—I mean, the real skinny—about growing up in a male body in this country it’s time you read this deeply compelling and eminently wise new book.”
— David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour -
“Jonathan Wells has written a harrowing memoir about growing up severely underweight, about surviving sexual abuse by a schoolmaster—and about his tyrannical father’s determination to transform his son’s body into his own ideal of masculinity.”
— Betsy Bonner, author of The Book of Atlantis Black -
“Here’s the skinny on The Skinny. Wells has written a memoir that’s lean without being gaunt, rawboned without being fleshless. It’s an elegant work of curving contours and sharp-edged insight that captures a world long gone.”
— Allen Kurzweil, author of Whipping Boy -
“In precise and poetic prose, Jonathan Wells explores the intersection of wealth, sexuality, and body image.”
— Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game -
“Layer by layer, Jonathan Wells unravels the father-son knot in ways both troubling and uplifting. I was gripped by The Skinny, a remarkable portrait of the most tangled of relationships, written with a poet’s eye and grace.”
— Roger Cohen, author of The Girl from Human Street
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About Jonathan Wells
Jonathan Wells has published the poetry collections Debris, Train Dance, and The Man with Many Pens. His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, AGNI, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, and many other journals. The Skinny is his first book of prose.
About Arthur Morey
Arthur Morey has won three AudioFile Magazine “Best Of” Awards, and his work has garnered numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards and placed him as a finalist for two Audie Awards. He has acted in a number of productions, both off Broadway in New York and off Loop in Chicago. He graduated from Harvard and did graduate work at the University of Chicago. He has won awards for his fiction and drama, worked as an editor with several book publishers, and taught literature and writing at Northwestern University. His plays and songs have been produced in New York, Chicago, and Milan, where he has also performed.