Books

NEW YORK — No one likes fat girls.

Stephanie Klein had that statement imprinted on her brain from an early age, the unskinny adolescent daughter of a skinny mother with her own image problems and a father whose notions of "helping" were a bit too bounded by convention.

When Klein's parents sent her to a nutritionist at 8 and then a weight-loss camp at 13, they couldn't have known they were providing the burgeoning young author with rich material for an expanding oeuvre.

Klein vented her personal travails on a blog, Greek Tragedy, that became one of the Web's most trafficked sites. Then, jolted by a doctor's command to gain more weight during her pregnancy, Klein decided to relive the agonies and ecstasies of a "rotund" childhood.

The result is Moose: A Memoir of Fat Camp (William Morrow, $24.95).