Yet, during the 353 pages, Shriver makes the reader see all the problems of the obese: how they got to their obese weight; what a devastating life it is; how society treats the obese; how truly difficult it is to lose weight. But when he invites himself to stay for a couple of months, she fails to recognise him at the airport. But I just about abandoned the book early on because an editor failed to slice out a huge boring and pointless discussion about a TV series that the main characters’ father starred in.

That is, I pick him up at the airport and he is so-- so FAT that I look straight at him and don't recognize my own brother, and now we're all acting as if this is totally ordinary. It doesn't sound good now that I'm typing it, but I tend to favor books with complex or unexpected protagonists. It appraised whether I was strong, whether I was self-possessed, whether I was someone anyone else would conceivably wish to be. Shriver begins the book with a quote: The dieting industry is the only profitable business in the world with a 98 percent failure rate" And it gets funnier and wittier from there……….Her decision—choosing between her birth family and her created family—needed, in my opinion, needed a bit more fleshing out. Shriver decided to go the route of Reconstructing Amelia in imposing highly unlikely attributes on a subject she probably knows little about. The main character, while admitting that she herself has an extra thirty pounds to lose, doesn't hold back on the criticism of her fellow Americans, whom she accuses of forgetting how to eat and gorging themselves while blissfully ignorant of their expanding middles, but the worst treatment is reserved for Edison, the morbidly obese character, who is little more than a caricature of every cruel stereotype of an obese person (lazy and busy stuffing their face whatever unhealthy food is in reach. When her older jazz musician brother, Edison, moves in with them for a couple of months, her family life deteriorates further. And then they finally wind down and sit down and you are watching the special again, and just as you start getting into the special, s/he gets back up again and does it all over again.

Pandora puts her marriage on hold and moves into an apartment with her brother and becomes his weight-loss coach. And really, much of this book is funny, especially when the family dialogue comes out, which always make for a good laugh, in and outside the pages of a book.

And, when it finally became available, even though I have FOUR KIDS, including a newborn, I sacrificed precious free time, sleep time, and even not-so-free time (read: lots of take out around here lately) to read it. I thought she took this issue and heightened it to be dramatic and funny and sympathetic and challenging. She comes at this huge subject through a sister torn between saving her morbidly obese older brother, who has "buried himself in himself," and an unsympathetic, belligerently fit husband — a situation that raises questions about divided loyalties and whether blood is thicker than water. Pandora decides to help her brother lose the weight -- even though he hasn't really indicated that he wants to -- and being, like the author, a striver, for awhile it appears that she may be successful. At the airport, she fails to recognize him—in the time they’ve been separated, her brother has gained several hundred pounds!

There is no precise wrong/right answer in my opinion, per se, only vaguely times where it seems blatantly obvious that one should do something.Sentences that read like Couldn't have done it; wouldn't have made sense are deadening in large, repeated doses. I absolutely love Lionel Shriver - yet there are still many books of hers I haven’t read - even though over the past few years - I’ve purchased several of her books I’ve missed.