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T A B L E++T A L K

Did you go to an all-girls or all-boys school? Would you send your child to one? Discuss single-sex education in Mothers

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R E C E N T L Y

Sound and sexuality
By Ros Davidson
Is lesbianism physiological?
(03/10/98)

Vanity, thy name is pukestain
By Carol Snow
There's nothing like a (fleetingly) sick kid to highlight the humiliating flexibility of your maternal code
(03/09/98)

Time for One Thing
By the Salon staff
A guide to fast-forwarding to the most sensuous moments on film
(03/06/98)

Confessions of a video-renting junkie
By Kate Moses
Before she had kids, she could handle two or three movies a night. Now just one leaves her with bleary eyes and a pounding head in the morning
(03/06/98)

The price of eggs in America
By Cynthia Joyce
Which comes first, the donor or the egg?
(03/05/98)

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Why it's time
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BY LEORA TANENBAUM | Lara Ardreche, the protagonist of the young adult novel "Life in the Fat Lane," is a beautiful 16-year-old who, from a teenage girl's perspective, has it all: beauty pageant titles, including Miss Teen Pride of the South, and a gorgeous boyfriend. Lara is charming and friendly, liked by just about everyone in her Nashville high school, but then most beauty queens are -- if you want to win, congeniality goes hand in hand with curves and carefully applied makeup. Her successful parents (her father is an advertising executive, her mother the owner of an upscale catering business) adore her and are thrilled when she is, of course, crowned homecoming queen.

But then Lara develops an obscure metabolic disorder and gains weight. A lot of weight -- within a few months, 100 pounds. Before, she had joked that she'd rather be dead than fat. Now she begins to grapple with how obesity reshapes her life. She loses control over her main source of power, her body, gaining weight even on a monitored semi-starvation diet. No more size 4 dresses -- now she drives to the other side of Nashville, where nobody knows her, to shop at Lane Bryant. Her parents accuse her of sneaking food into her room late at night, eating when they aren't looking. Though her boyfriend says he still loves her, it's obvious he's no longer attracted to her. Her classmates call her "lard ass."

Along the way, however, Lara comes to see things that were hidden in the shadows of her thin, picture-perfect life. For the first time, she recognizes that her parents care more about appearance than anything else -- and that her father is having an affair with a younger woman. She throws away her pageant persona and learns to speak what's really on her mind, even at the risk of standing alone with her opinions. But she discovers that even that's not so bad -- as outcasts, she realizes, fat people have a freedom that insiders rarely possess.

Lara becomes a stronger person, but still, she's only human. She continues to look down on obese people -- after all, she has a metabolic disorder while other fat people are slovenly overeaters. At the book's end, Lara is beginning to lose some of the weight, although neither she nor her doctor knows if she will ever lose it all. By then it doesn't even really matter: She has come to accept herself and a new group of friends, many of whom are overweight.

"Life in the Fat Lane" is sure to strike a chord among teen girls and young women. Author Cherie Bennett knows what's on girls' minds: Her teen advice column "Hey, Cherie!" is syndicated and she has written numerous young adult novels, including the award-winning "Did You Hear About Amber?" and all 40 installments of the wildly popular "Sunset Island" series. Her address is printed in the back of most of her books with a note telling readers that they can write her. And do they. After a new book is released, she receives an average of 150 letters a week from girls and boys ages 9 to 18. One wall of her office is covered with photographs of kids who have sent her their pictures. But Bennett's novel will also enlighten parents. As she has discovered touring the country speaking to groups of mothers and daughters, the issues of weight and looks never fail to create household tension.

Salon spoke recently with Bennett, who lives in Nashville.

What prompted you to write "Life in the Fat Lane"?

It was a combination of things. One is that I'd gotten around 10,000 letters over the last seven years from kids, and second only to the letters about love and sex were those about weight and body image. I have a whole stack of them. They would just break your heart. I've gotten everything from "I weigh 250 pounds and school is a living hell and I want to kill myself" to "I'm in the binge-and-barf club at my school and we're the popular girls but what people don't know is that every day we go to the bathroom and barf together." These binge-and-barf clubs of the cool girls are a trend that's going around the country.

You mean these girls are out about it?

In some places nobody knows about it, and in others people know about it but it's considered cool. The weight and body image letters are the scariest letters I've received. Girls who wear a size 12 or 14 or 16 refer to themselves as "disgusting fat pigs" -- and they mean it. It's become such a cultural obsession, and it is killing -- literally and figuratively, spiritually and emotionally -- a generation of young women.

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