You'll Laugh, You'll Cry
These days most of the people I know have a list of a few--or a few dozen--blogs they read faithfully. I'm no different; I've got a Live Journal "friends list" some fifty names long, and nearly thirty more favorites listed on my own blog. Some of the best writing I've come across in the past couple of years is on other people's blogs, and it all started with Pound.
It must have been around four years ago that I discovered Wendy McClure's website, when someone linked to it on a weight-loss message board that I used to frequent. I was hooked immediately, drawn in in equal measures by her laugh-out-loud humor and her gut-wrenching honesty. Having spent more years than I care to count worrying about and struggling with my weight, it was refreshing to come across a woman who wrote so publicly and fearlessly about the body-image issues I knew and understood all too well.
After years of following McClure's figurative and literal ups and downs, I was delighted when I learned that she would be putting out a book based on her blog. I pre-ordered it as soon as I could and when I finally got it in the mail several weeks ago I read it in two days. It did not disappoint.
Having read Pound avidly, I found that I was already familiar with much of the background information and many of the stories in I'm Not the New Me. In the re-telling, however, McClure sheds new light on almost everything by delving deeper into her past and spending more time going into often-painful detail. She allows herself to be much more vulnerable in her book than I ever perceived her to be on her website, and in sharing the details of her personal life she creates an almost-suspenseful feeling that kept me turning pages long past my bedtime.
Don't let me mislead you into thinking, though, that this is purely a "serious" book. There are just as many laughs as faithful readers of McClure's blog have come to expect (complete with never-before-seen Weight Watchers recipe cards!). In short, I'm Not the New Me has all the best of Pound with enough new and improved content to keep it feeling fresh and entertaining. Other writers aiming to turn their blogs into books would do well to follow McClure's example.