Limited by Body Habitus, Jennifer Renee Blevins
Limited by Body Habitus, Jennifer Renee Blevins
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Limited by Body Habitus
An American Fat Story

Author: Jennifer Renee Blevins

Series: Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize

Narrator: Jack Katz, Jennifer Renee Blevins

Unabridged: 5 hr 19 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/20/2025

Synopsis

Winner of the Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize, Jennifer Renee Blevins’s debut memoir, Limited by Body Habitus: An American Fat Story, sheds light on her experiences living with the emotional and psychological struggles of taking up space in a fat-phobic world. Bringing together experiences of personal and national trauma, Blevins adeptly weaves the tale of her father’s gastric bypass surgery and subsequent prolonged health crisis with the environmental catastrophe of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Blevins looks to each of these events as a “leak” of American society’s pitfalls and shortcomings. These intertwined narratives, both disasters that could have been avoided, reveal points of failure in our systems of healthcare and environmental conservation.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Kathy

Wow, this book is a page-turner of a memoir, beautifully written and utterly absorbing! If you think you are not interested in the obesity epidemic or in medical horror stories, this book will change your mind. It’s really about all of us, struggling to make peace with our bodies and our families.......more

Goodreads review by Jill

Very compelling and touching memoir of a daughter facing her parents' mortality complicated by the baggage of fatness in American society. Her father's disastrous gastric bypass surgery is the catalyst for the author to learn about the social, medical, economical, political, and personal mess that is......more

Goodreads review by Lisa

I didn't really have time to read this when it arrived on a Wednesday, but I allowed myself to check out the first chapter. Then I kept one-more-chaptering myself. Blevins's memoir about her father's gastric bypass surgery offers so much. I thought about the 'obesity epidemic' in new ways. I saw wha......more

Goodreads review by Nicole Fitzpatrick

This book is so much more than a “fat story”. Although laden with research on the obesity epidemic and the subsequent prejudice fat Americans face, particularly by our current medical system, this story is a deeply personal meditation on family, the nuances within the relationships we hold most dear......more

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