Author Talk: Jen Larsen

We're thrilled to have our first Author Talk for 2015 on the books! Mark your calendars for February 19th at 6 PM, when we'll have Jen Larsen, author of Stranger Here with us at AMPL.

Jen Larsen is a writer and editor living in Madison, WI. She was born in the Bronx, has lived in all the boroughs of New York City, and moved to San Francisco for grad school. Four years ago she ended up in Ogden. It’s a long story, but one of the best moves she’s ever made. She’s wanted to be a writer since the day she realized that books were actually written by real people, but she only recently realized that she could be one of those real people too.

Larsen spent her whole life anywhere from overweight to fat to obese, and at her heaviest was 316 pounds. Though she believed passionately, desperately, in health at any size and self-acceptance, and wanted to be a body image warrior more than anything, she wasn’t able to deal with the physical and emotional issues engendered by being fat in a world made for skinny people. In 2006, she underwent weight loss surgery and lost almost 200 pounds. She found out that being considered skinny by society’s standards didn’t do much to fix her depression, her anxiety, her insecurity. Now 168 pounds and six years later, she's still struggling with her self-image, but feels lucky to have experienced the full spectrum of weight and size issues on either end of the scale.

For two years Larsen was the featured blogger at Condé Nast's Elastic Waist. Her columns have also been syndicated on Yahoo!'s Shine Network for Women. She was a contributor to Big Fat Deal, a blog about weight in media and popular culture, and her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Word Riot, Emprise Review, and South Loop Review, among other publications. She is obsessed with tattoos as a way to transform your body, and has an MFA in creative writing from the University of San Francisco. She continues to work at being one of those real people who write books. Find her at jenlarsen.net, strangerhere.com, and on twitter @jenfoo.

Jen's book, Stranger Here: How weight-loss surgery transformed my body and messed with my head is available through the MORE Catalog.

Jen Larsen always thought that if she could only lose some weight, she would be unstoppable. When diet after diet failed, she decided to try bariatric surgery, and it worked: she lost 180 pounds. As the weight fell away, though, Larsen realized that getting skinny was not the magical cure she thought it would be—and suddenly, she wasn’t sure who she was anymore.

Stranger Here is the brutally honest, surprisingly hilarious story of one woman’s journey from one extreme of the weight spectrum to the other, and of the unexpected emotional chaos it created. Insightful and unsparing, Larsen depicts the exhilarating highs and devastating lows she experienced as a result of her weight loss—the incredible joy of finally beginning to look like the image of herself she’s always carried inside her head, and the crushing pain and confusion of feeling like a stranger in her own body after losing the weight that had always defined her.  

(Biography and book summary from jenlarsen.net) 

If you have questions, please contact Samma at Johnson@augustalibrary.org. We look forward to having Jen in the library and hope you can join us!