Interior Passages - Francine Saillant

Anthropologist, nurse and writer Francine Saillant interweaves her personal experience and scientific knowledge to create a unique and moving account of one women's struggle with obesity and transformation. Alternating between an analytic tone and one that is much more personal and poetic, Saillant documents her story. She relates how, as a sixteen year old, she was put on her first diet by her doctor and how, at that moment, the word obese entered her vocabulary and haunted her life. Saillant describes the dieting struggles, the hunger and shame that have been part of her daily experience and the suffering many women endure to meet North American standards of beauty. In "Interior Passages" Saillant shares with the reader her experience of transformation and the complex reality that is part of her story. In doing so she creates an account that is at once provocative and enlightening.