I just finished reading 703 by Nancy Makin and I highly recommend it to everyone.
This book is a memoir about the disparate life of the author, Nancy. Written in first person, this book leads us through her life and all of her thoughts. Through her childhood and the journey that packed on 703 pounds we see her struggle as an outsider. She has a unique story to tell and the reason she wrote the book is to help others like herself overcome self-detrimental thoughts and actions and how to recover from them. Anyone can benefit from the life lessons of this tale, plus I found it quite entertaining.
It is an easy read, nothing too deep. I listened to it as an audiobook that I obtained from my county's online library service.
Here is a clip of an interview with ABC news in April 2010. She weighed 703 lbs in May 2000.
Here is an excerpt from the book to show you her writing style.
"703: How I Lost More Than a Quarter Ton and Gained a Life," by Nancy Makin
Preface: A View From the Crow's Nest / My Turn
No one could be more surprised than I to find myself here tapping on this keyboard, pounding out these characters, building words, telling a tale that could never be; it is too fantastic. But I am tapping, and it did happen. I am alive, and that revelation still stuns me. This was not the plan, the blueprint that I saw lying there before me. Life is for the living; I was not alive, only went through the motions, and even those were streamlined to the very barest function necessary to keep my heart pumping and lungs filling in a heavily encumbered chest. My vacant eyes were still activated, watching all that bustled about me, all I had no part in. I marked time, waiting for the end.
My death would come; either slowly, incrementally, a wasting sort of degeneration, or in a swift manner, suddenly, taking me away in one fell swoop and releasing my misused body, my brain's unspent currency and saddened spirit.
My incarceration crept up on me over years, built not in a day, but in millions of moments, one upon the next, as if each were a single brick in some ominous structure of my own design. In every moment, I pressed firmly down each sturdy rectangle, applying a liberal layer of the mortar of worthlessness, then another and another heaped upon the last, till the walls of my prison were erected solidly around me.
I was a fine mason. There were no gaps between bricks, no air pockets in which to find a fissure, some defect that could later be exploited, tearing down my encasement and letting daylight shine upon my prisoner's face. There would be no escaping this mind-numbing cell. Yet this is the story of one woman's unlikely prison break. There alone in my confinement, I felt helpless to find a way outside. My liberation would come from the most unexpected source, and in my wildest imaginings, I never contemplated its arrival. I had resigned myself to this life sentence, although that was surely a misnomer. For truly, it was a death sentence I faced. And I ought to know, it was I who was prosecutor, judge and jury. I had imposed a sentence, the harshest possible. And those outside the dank walls would be my improbable liberators. I did not even know them, nor were they aware of me, not yet. Let me take you back to when it all began.
It's a great read worth your time.
