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Dietland
Dietland
Dietland
Audiobook10 hours

Dietland

Written by Sarai Walker

Narrated by Tara Sands

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

()

About this audiobook

Now an AMC Original Series starring Julianna Margulies.

Plum Kettle does her best not to be noticed, because when you're fat, to be noticed is to be judged. She is biding her time at a job answering fan mail for a popular teen girls' magazine until she can afford weight-loss surgery. But lately she is being followed by a girl in outlandish clothes and combat boots. When Plum finally confronts her, she finds herself falling into the mysterious world of Callie House, where an odd collection of women orbit around Verena Baptist, daughter of a famous diet guru. Verena offers to give Plum the money for the surgery, will force her to confront her past, doubts, and the real cost of becoming "beautiful."

Dietland is a scathing and revolutionary debut that takes on the beauty industry, gender inequality, and out obsession with weight loss-from the inside out, and with fists flying. 

Editor's Note

On the screen…

This dark comedy debut is one of the biggest books of the past decade. Sarai Walker spent her whole career observing how society thinks about women’s bodies, and it shows in this critique of beauty culture. The TV adaptation stars Joy Nash and Julianna Margulies.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 26, 2015
ISBN9781622316137
Author

Sarai Walker

Sarai Walker is the author of the novel Dietland, which has been published in more than a dozen countries and adapted as a television series for AMC. She has lectured on feminism and body image internationally, and has spoken about these topics widely in the media. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian and elsewhere, and she worked as a writer and editor on an updated version of Our Bodies, Ourselves. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College and a PhD in English from the University of London. She lives in Philadelphia.

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Reviews for Dietland

Rating: 3.6004016064257027 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

249 ratings24 reviews

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Seriously good. I know there's a show based on it and I'm trying to find it online.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I just really didn’t like this book. It felt like it was lacking character development, and the story unfolded like a trainwreck.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    It was a Surprisingly riveting book... I think some parts may be better to read vs. listen to, but I definitely recommend it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Alicia 'Plum' Kettle is a 30 year old woman waiting for her life to start. Morbidly obese, Plum hides from the world as much as possible while she quietly earns money writing as an anonymous advice columnist for a teen magazine so she can pay for weight reduction surgery. Just a few months away from her goal, Plum realizes that she is being followed by a strange young woman. Plum then finds herself drawn into the world of Calliope House. A place for women who want to live their lives on their own terms and no longer feel ashamed for not meeting societies expectations for how a female should look or act. While Plum finally begins to learn to love herself, a guerrilla group begins to terrorize those who would mistreat women, both physically and culturally. This forces Plum to finally decide if she wants to conform to societies expectations or truly accept herself as she is.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Sorry, I can’t even slog through to the end. All the characters are unlikeable, but in not the clever way the characters in Succession were unlikeable. The main character Plum is especially unlikeable. She wallows in self-pity and is resentful of anyone trying to help her. (Why are they trying to help her? She has displayed absolutely no admirable attributes. ) yet filled with resentment and mistrust, she decides for no apparent reason to move into Calliope House which is some sort of enclave of victimized women.
    Hey I feel sorry for women who are human trafficked into porn, but otherwise they chose that path and can similarly choose to leave it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Loved this book!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A fiercely angry satire on the misogyny that's still so prevalent in society, Dietland is smart and readable, if occasionally a bit obvious and heavy-handed. The pivot from a book about a woman's struggle to lose weight to an underground revolutionary war against rapists, sexists and jerks is breathtaking and well handled, and Plum (the main character) is nicely drawn.

    The politics are laudable*, but there was little room for nuance or subtlety amongst the overly busy plot. The secondary characters were ciphers, and Plum's connection to Leeta felt a bit forced to me, so I wasn't completely won over by this, but it was pretty fun to see such a strongly political book packaged up like light summer fiction. Hopefully it's widely read.

    * Two minor concerns politically: the anti anti-depressant message and the attitude towards porn and sex-work were both a bit simplistic and troubling.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Holy f**k! This was a good book. I'll admit I was inspired to read the book because AMC had adapted into the series, but it stands on its own merit.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Three stars for its sometimes choppy construction and rather weak denouement. Four for the topics it tackles—misogynistic violence and the ubiquitous objectification of women—and overall cleverness.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Walker captures a lot of what being fat and internalizing hatred is like, though Plum is taken to an extreme. The plot doesn't quite gel, though, especially towards the end.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Dietland could be called a fairy tale about obesity and self-acceptance. Like many fat people, thirty year old Plum believes that her "real life" will begin once she sheds her excess pounds. She even plans on having bariatric surgery to kickstart the process. But then she attracts the attention of diet-program heiress Verena, who, like a fairy godmother, leads her through a series of tasks to help her adopt a more positive approach to food and weight.I liked the parts about Plum's journey to self-acceptance, but the book almost lost me when the violent Jennifer subplot took over in the second half. I recommend this novel with reservations.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This book is all over the place, and not in a good way. It can't decide if it's serious or a parody, if it's a lesson plan or an inspirational makeover. The anti-diet message is a good one, but the feminism is a mess. The author states in the acknowledgements that she owes a debt to second wave feminism. Unfortunately, this book doesn't seem to have made it past the second wave.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    There are books that are angry, and then there are books that think they're angry when they're just sour and mean.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Fat feminists fight back against the way they are treated in society. Not a book for those who are turned off by explicit descriptions of pornography and some language that would not be used in polite society! Having said that, the book gives much pause for thought about how western society objectifies women and girls, I will be less judgemental about very fat women after reading this.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Okay, there are parts of this book that I absolutely loved. And I loved most of the message, of empowerment and living your life as it is now – not waiting until you’re thinner / have a partner / have the perfect job. But man, were there some parts that I found to be ill advised at least.

    Plum works for a major magazine aimed at teen girls, responding to “Dear Kitty” letters, offering advice. Plum is also around 300 pounds, and will be having stomach stapling surgery in a few months. She does her work in a café, where she notices a young woman is following her.

    Then things start to happen for Plum, possibly changing her worldview. Meanwhile, across the US and the UK, a movement is rising, targeting misogyny. Rapists are murdered; magazine editors are blackmailed to replace images of naked women with images of naked men. The public is wondering who is behind this – and the reader is wondering if there is any connection to Plum’s new friends.

    That’s the basics, and I won’t spoil the rest. But I will take issue with a few things:
    •Part of Plum’s empowerment involves weaning herself off of antidepressants. Which is fine, but the way Ms. Walker (the author) treats this topic, it feels vaguely … Scientology – esque in its disdain for antidepressants. There isn’t even a throw-away line about how some people really need them, but Plum doesn’t anymore; it’s just accepted that clearly the medication she is taking is bad. I’m not sure if Ms. Walker meant to give this impression, but it’s the one I got.
    •One target of the “Jennifer” movement is the way women are depicted in music videos, as shown by blackmail that shuts down a hip hop video station. That just seemed a bit … well, racist. Rock and country videos all have their own share of misogynistic undertones – and overtones, but the fact that our society chooses to only call out an art form that is made up of primarily Black artists is telling. Once again, the author made a choice, and where she could have chosen a broader music video station, she chose one that has some racial undertones. I don’t know if she was even aware of the implications of that choice, but it really stood out to me.
    •There are obviously real moral implications about the “Jennifer” movement of vigilantism. But one of the targets is a female porn star and that, coupled with myriad other statements made me wonder whether Ms. Walker is a SWERF (sex worker exclusionary radical feminist). I appreciate the focus on how porn can skew one’s view of what healthy sex is, but my goodness Ms. Walker seems to think that all sex workers are the devil and deserve death. I can’t get on board with that outlook at all. I think there could be a more interesting discussion here, but it’s just accepted as fact in the book, and it really took me out of the story I was reading.

    Okay, setting those glaring issues aside, I do think it’s an interesting book, and one that is definitely worth a read for men and women alike. It explores our ideas of misogyny, and it looks at our feelings about vigilante justice. If society creates a world where women are objects, and men treat us that way without repercussions, is it only a matter of time before women literally fight back?
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    In many ways this is a woman's version of Fight Club. I loved the protagonist and the story. The title does not do this story justice and probably turns away those who otherwise would find this story inspirational. There is so much more to life that being pretty and skinny, such as saving women's lives and fighting for women's liberation. I love the way the story takes an unexpected turn. That unexpected ending is the reason I don't want to put too many details into this review. This isn't a basic story about a woman on a diet. This is a story about a woman who escapes dieting, who escapes the need to be thin, who finds love for herself, who finds strength and a community where she belongs. And isn't this what we all long for?
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Plum (aka Alicia) Kettle is an obese young woman employed by a women's magazine to answer letters from teenagers. She lives a lonely, constricted life, thinking only of her planned weight-loss surgery. Everything changes when she discovers she is being followed by a odd, punkish woman in colorful tights, who draws her into a feminist collective fighting media-induced body image problems. Meanwhile, a feminist terrorist group called Jennifer is leading a vendetta against abusive misogynists.This is an interesting and timely read which would probably make for a good book discussion. The author contributed to the latest iteration of Our Bodies, Ourselves, and she thanked second-wave feminists in her acknowledgments. For me personally, it didn't pack as much punch as it could have, possibly because I'm older and completely over any agonizing over my appearance. But it was engaging, sometimes funny, and not heavy-handed in its Message.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The weight loss industry as a whole in the US rakes in roughly 60 billion dollars annually. With fully one third of Americans qualifying as obese, many of those paying into this vast industry are women. They are searching for a thinner, healthier life. But they are also searching for acceptance, visibility, and a release from the shame and humiliation of being fat in our thin obsessed culture. Just as the real women paying into the diet industry, Plum Kettle, in Sarai Walker's subversive, thoughtful novel, Dietland, is also searching for the thin woman inside her, the real life she's supposed to live, and ultimately an appreciation for herself.As the assistant to the editor of a teen magazine, Plum writes off the record advice letters to young girls and teens who are suffering from a variety of problems and who are all clearly hurting emotionally. Plum got this job because she was supposed to have good insight into the angst suffered by these girls. After all, Plum is, to her eternal shame, fat. In fact, she's more than 300 pounds and works from home so that her boss Kitty doesn't have to see her everyday, this gross anomaly in the rake thin world of fashion. But Kitty isn't the only one who looks away from Plum, Plum herself wants to look away. She knows that people in public stare at her and make rude, hurtful comments, that she does not fit the societal construct of beauty or even just of normal and she's internalized these values too. After a lifetime in the clutches off the weight loss industry, having tried every diet out there, Plum is determined to have bariatric surgery. She knows that there is a thin woman named Alicia (Plum's real name) inside her just waiting to come out and start living her life instead of continuing in this overweight and unhappy holding pattern.Just one month out from her much anticipated surgery, Plum notices she's being followed. Normally timid and self-effacing, Plum confronts the young woman who is stalking her, a move that will lead her to a fundamental change in her entire world view. Given a copy by Leeta, the young woman who oserved her for so long, she reads a book, Adventures in Dietland, an expose of a harsh and restrictive diet plan which Plum followed when she was younger, written by the daughter of the diet's founder. Then she gets to meet Verena Baptist, the author, and is welcomed into Calliope House, the home that Verena runs, a place where women can be true to themselves and to their feminist goals. Concurrently with Plum's gradual awakening to her own potential and to an acceptance of her body as it is, the media jumps on a gruesome story. Two men who went free, their brutal crimes against a young military woman officially brushed under the rug, are discovered murdered, stuffed in sacks, and dumped off a highway bridge. Each of them has a piece of paper with the name Jennifer written on it and stuffed down his throat. As Plum transforms herself mentally and emotionally, more gruesome acts of violence, retaliations against men and other exploiters of women, with responsibility claimed by the person or persons behind Jennifer, occur. On a grand scale, with these attacks, society scrambles to stop objectifying and blaming women while on a smaller scale, Plum stops accepting the fat-shaming and invisibility that has always been her lot.The ills that Jennifer, the generic name of everywoman, wants to rectify are larger than Plum's but even her negative body image is a small piece of those ills; it is symptomatic of an image obsessed, patriarchal privileged society. Walker is clearly making a point here with an initially powerless main character taking over her own life, living on her own terms, and becoming empowered, and with a guerrilla group demanding justice for women. The two plot lines start off mostly unrelated but come together in ways both anticipated and unexpected and they mostly work together although the guerrilla plot line with its bigger, more encompassing issues, takes something away from Plum's more personal struggles, trivializing them to a degree. Plum's character changes substantially between the first and second parts as well. Jennifer's tactics start to be over the top unbelievable and Plum too goes beyond decent human being-hood to being constantly angry and antagonistic. The ending is a bizarre one but perhaps in keeping with the fantastical psychological warfare of the previous 300 pages. The novel is definitely uncomfortable, disturbing, and directly confrontational, and some readers will be uncomfortable with the militancy of some of the characters' actions but it is wonderfully discussable with issues of societal norms, unrealistic media portrayals of women, the commodifying of the female body, self-esteem and what drives self-worth, the ubiquity of dieting and the continued profitability of the diet industry, and the need to be something appealing, sexy, enviable, something less than real.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    As a fat person this was a fabulous thought provoking book. Complicated and interesting. It will be on my top 20 for this year but I doubt any of my friends will appreciate or like this book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I recommend Dietland by Sarai Walker. While it is not a perfect book (not all of the characters are well developed and the B plot requires some serious suspension of disbelief to the point I might label it speculative fiction), it has a number of great things going for it. It's compelling and well written. It's a perfect satire of the dieting industry -- because it is a money-grubbing, capitalist, take-no-prisoners industry. It takes issues of body image and fat-shaming straight on, and it has original, interesting things to say about the way that fat-shaming is one of many things existing only to keep women down. Although it is clearly a novel with A Message, I didn't find it overwhelming (but that may partially be because I am so sympathetic to that message -- a person in favor of the status quo might find it heavy-handed). One of the interesting elements of the book was, in my opinion, that for a feminist book, the feminist collective is not full of amazing, perfect women. Some of them are weird and paranoid and at least one is expressly a bad person. This ends up connecting to the B plot which, as I noted, isn't as strong as the A plot and in some ways detracts from the book (no spoilers), but it's still an unusual and refreshing style.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    * I received this as a free eBook from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. *

    Alicia (Plum) Kettle was a chubby child, a heavy adolescent and now as an adult she tips the scales at the 300-pound mark. She is convinced that Plum is not the “real her” and that “thin Alicia”, living inside her, needs to be released. Having, unsuccessfully, tried all kinds of conventional and not-so-conventional ways to shed the extra weight Plum has scheduled a bariatric-bypass procedure and only has one month more to wait.

    She doesn’t know it yet but it is going to be a heck of a month.

    While sitting in her favorite coffee shop answering Dear Abby type letters from teenage girls – Plum’s job is to do this anonymously for a popular teen magazine – she notices that she is being following by a rather unusual looking young woman. Never one for confrontation, Plum never the less does feel the need to confront her and this is the beginning of her adventures. When Leeta, the stalker, leaves a book called “Dietland” which debunks Plum’s favorite, and now defunct, diet plan from her younger days, Plum knows this is no random stalking. Through an unusual happenstance related to the book Plum finds herself living in a house full of diverse women who accept themselves as they are and try to teach Plum to do the same. Can she give up the dream of allowing her “inner Alicia” to come to the surface?

    That’s the synopsis of the book I was expecting to read. It’s all there in the book so I was not disappointed; in fact I enjoyed it very much. It was very honest, poignant and often-humorous portrayal of what it is like being overweight in a “skinny” world. But woven into Plum’s story is a secondary story that starts with the rape and consequent suicide of a young girl, which leads a group of vigilante women to undertake a deadly hate campaign against men who they feel are victimizing women. Re-enter Leeta, who draws Plum into the peripherals of this group calling itself “Jennifer”.

    There were so many aspects in the “Plum storyline” that I absolutely loved … both to do with Plum herself and her weight loss trial and tribulations. There were so many aspects in the “vigilante storyline” that I found disturbingly true. That story line tackles so many serious issues that need to be brought to people’s attention such as fat shaming, objectifying women, violence against women and the unspoken acceptance of those things as “that’s just the way it is”.

    Do the two storylines work together? Surprisingly Ms. Walker did make them work.

    Will everyone who reads this book enjoy it? Probably not, but I believe it will lead to some lively thought-provoking discussion, so it would be an excellent book club selection.

    I was hemming and hawing about how to rate this book. I wanted to give it four stars because it made me think and I like that in a book, it made me laugh sometimes and it broke my heart at other times and I like that in a book too. After mulling the book over for a couple of days I decided there were some definite flaws mostly to do with the characters. I know I could have done without some of them while wishing that others were a little more fleshed out. I’m going to settle on three stars, but don’t let that deter anyone from picking up this book, Dietland is definitely one of those “You-gotta-make-up-your-own-mind” kind of books.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Not what i expected, i'm glad i decided to read it. Some problems with credibility, but not insurmountable if you keep the humour and frustration in focus.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Reading the Amazon reviews of this book is kind of hilarious. Some readers just so completely miss the point and complain that it's an angry screed narrated by a bitter fat (horrors!) woman. Well, um, yeah.It's the story of Plum, an obese woman who basically hides from life, dreaming of weight loss surgery and the new person she will become once she's thin. But Plum gets involved "in the world of Calliope House, a community of women who live life on their own terms. Reluctant but intrigued, Plum agrees to a series of challenges that force her to deal with the real costs of becoming “beautiful.” At the same time, a dangerous guerilla group begins to terrorize a world that mistreats women, and as Plum grapples with her own personal struggles, she becomes entangled in a sinister plot. The consequences are explosive" (from Amazon).I'm not sure "explosive" is the right word, but Plum's eventual awakening and the subversive nature of the story Sarai Walker is telling make for a compelling read. I did have some issues with the book that have me struggling with what rating to give it, but I do hope more people will read it. Just don't look at the candy-colored cover and expect a frothy read.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Bleak, Thoughtful But Ultimately - Predictable, March 22, 2015This novel is as I said in the title, a bleak but mesmerizing look into feminism, the weight loss industry and one woman’s dissatisfaction with her rotund body. To top it off there is a fascinating and mysterious side story about a group called Jennifer who are in the business of revenge and avenging mistreated and exploited women around the world.This is not a frothy story with a typical happily-ever-after; this is the real deal –alternately depressing and eye-opening. This novel is written in a rather unique style, more like and auto-biography than a fictional novel. The characters are well fleshed 9no pun intended) and mostly depressing or down-right dislikable, at times that will include the main character Plum AKA Alicia. Plum will run the gamut from a whiney, overly self-involved egotist. I can sympathize with her at times because I too am a fat woman, but only at times. Sometimes I just want to smack her hard with a turkey and wake her up out of the dream that dieting ( if skinny is all she really wants) is going to be a piece of cake –that a program will do it for her, that she doesn’t need to change, that dieting is easy. Other times I want to laugh with her.Some of this book just doesn't seem as if it really needed to be included.It may take you a while to get into this book; it took me quite a few chapters to do so. Sometimes while reading this, I would think that I should be scouring my toilets instead of reading this (I thought I might not be able to finish this book) so I wouldn’t be forced to continue reading it then there are many moments later on where I don’t think I could have put it down even if my hair had been on fire.The ending is a bit predictable.