For their valuable editorial feedback, I would like to thank Susanna Jones, Michelle Walker, and my French editor, Aurélien Masson.
During my London years, which were equal parts exhilarating and traumatizing, three scribbling women—Lindsay Catt, Theresa Lee, and Carol McGrath—provided friendship and support when I needed it the most. I would also like to thank the Fat Studies community in the U.K., whose ideas and fellowship enriched my life and work immeasurably.
Callie Khouri used the term “crossed over” in her brilliant screenplay for Thelma & Louise, which I shamelessly adapted for my own purposes in the spirit of sisterhood and consciousness-raising.
The Virginia Woolf line “It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality” appears in her essay “Professions for Women.”
This book owes a debt to second-wave feminists, those women who changed the world in such a profound way. I don’t have space to list the writers who have been so important to me, since that would require pages and pages, but I would like to make two acknowledgments: Sandra Lee Bartky, whose essays completely altered my reality, and the feminist novelists from the 1970s and early 1980s, whose work I turned to when I feared I might lose my nerve.
An early and important source of inspiration for Dietland was Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk’s novel and the film adaptation directed by David Fincher. I would like to think that Dietland would exist even if Fight Club hadn’t provided that initial spark of an idea, but I’ll never know.
Big love to my family, especially my parents, J2, and my late maternal grandparents, and to all the friends and mentors I don’t have room to mention here. Thanks to the many kindhearted people—some of whom I have never met—who offered encouragement and research help during the millions of years it took me to complete this novel.
Finally, thanks to Alicia Plum. She never abandoned me.