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By Joyce Millman

May 17, 1999 | When Camryn Manheim accepted her Emmy for best supporting actress last September, the co-star of ABC's courtroom drama "The Practice" punched the air with the trophy and shouted, "THIS is for all the FAT girls!" And all the fat girls watching at home -- and all the girls who aren't really fat, but think they are -- wept sisterly tears into their Ben & Jerry's, because Camryn Manheim was standing up there onstage, triumphant and glowing and fat, living one of those prom queen/Cinderella moments usually reserved for skinny girls. Manheim wore a low-cut black velvet gown that dipped in at the waist; her long hair was upswept like Audrey Hepburn's around a sparkly band; serious jewels dripped from her throat and earlobes. She looked Hollywood-goddess gorgeous, but more than that, she looked like she belonged.

Overnight, the outspoken Manheim -- who also happens to be a terrific actress -- became the unofficial poster child for fat acceptance, a role she has performed with grace, humor and really good quotes. The 38-year-old Manheim's just-published memoir "Wake Up, I'm Fat!" -- she reclaims that particular "f" word the way Richard Pryor reclaimed the "n" word -- is the heartfelt and ballsy story of how she learned to be comfortable in her own skin. And that's no small feat for a size 22 (yes, she admits it) in a profession (and a society) that usually regards women over size 8 as circus freaks.

She was born Debra Frances Manheim (you didn't think her parents named her "Camryn," did you?) in Peoria, Ill., the younger daughter of good Jewish liberals with a long family history of labor activism and civil disobedience. When she was 11, her family moved to Long Beach, Calif., where her father had accepted an administrative position at the state university. Unfortunately for young Debi, this was the exact moment that puberty kicked in and her body betrayed her. She got fat, and shame swiftly followed.

In "Wake Up, I'm Fat!" Manheim engagingly describes a rebel-misfit adolescence as a chub in a town "where people shop for groceries in bikinis." She armored herself in Levi's and baggy shirts, endured disapproving clucks of "such a pretty face" from relatives and fantasized about being a willowy hippie chick with a bearded, guitar-strumming lover. Her soul was saved by rock 'n' roll (her older brother bought her the guitar she'd coveted), motorcycles (she now rides a Honda CB650) and the Renaissance Faire. Hey, it may be a kitsch festival to you, but to the teenage Manheim, the Faire was a revelation: "Fat women with their breasts bowing to the sun, women of all shapes and sizes kissing men and singing harmonies. Wenches and princes and strolling minstrels ... Have you ever wanted something so badly that to have just a little bit of it made you want to have none of it at all?"

As soon as she could, she got a job at the Renaissance Faire, where she spent four unself-conscious summers frolicking merrily (and, after hours, naked) with ye olde show folk. "I learned to love my body ... Who knew that what I had accomplished at age 16 would be systematically taken away from me until I learned to hate myself?" she writes. (OK, so she reads too much Naomi Wolf.) Manheim's free-spirited feminism led her to UC-Santa Cruz (the quintessential California hippie school) as a theater arts major. At Santa Cruz, she fell in with the radical feminist Praying Mantis Brigade, which staged colorful protests of the Miss California pageant. She also tried her best to be a lesbian, but there was only one problem: She was straight.

After Santa Cruz, Manheim (she was "Camryn" by then) was accepted to New York University's Master of Fine Arts program, and the place nearly broke her spirit. She was humiliated in front of classmates by professors who told her she needed to lose weight, and put on probation until she did. Manheim ended up dropping 80 pounds -- and almost killing herself -- with crystal meth. "I don't get it," she writes. "If Art is supposed to imitate Life, why do they want all the actors to be thin? There are fat people in the world. Shouldn't there be a few of us actors to represent them?" In her student theater work at NYU, Manheim was never chosen to play a romantic lead; she was repeatedly cast as motherly characters over the age of 50. She only got to play an ingénue once, in a senior production of Caryl Churchill's "Fen" that was guest-directed by a pre-"Angels in America" Tony Kushner, a pioneer in non-stereotypical casting.

After graduation, and rejection by every casting agent who came to audition the Master's class, Manheim put the weight back on and went home to her parents hoping for sympathy. Instead, there were disappointed sighs and disastrous attempts at "subtle" persuasion. Remembering an ill-fated shopping trip with Mom, Manheim writes, "My mother thought that if she brought me a smaller size, she'd throw it over the door, I wouldn't notice the size, I'd put it on, it wouldn't fit, I'd be so frustrated that I'd beat myself up, and that would be the day I would miraculously decide to lose all the weight ... I checked the dress tag again to be sure, swung open the door and in the middle of the fat-girls' section of Bloomingdale's, I screamed, 'Mom, WAKE UP ... I'M FAT!'"

Manheim's story of how she peeled herself from the depths of depression and self-loathing is inspiring without being soap Oprah-ish. Manheim is a natural writer; she has fine powers of description (her chapter on Emmy night is at once dishy and spellbinding), she's tart and funny and she's smart enough to know that interludes called "Conversations With My Fat," which are exactly what the title says, are best written with self-deprecating wit, not self-help earnestness. After reading and watching that spoiled rotten whiner Monica Lewinsky blaming her chubby childhood for everything, Manheim's dignity and self-reliance are downright refreshing.

Next page | Camryn and Calista: Two girls, fat and thin