In the spirit of the upcoming holiday Allen Zadoff, author of Food, Girls, and Other Things I Can’t Have, graciously agreed to write a guest post for us to enjoy.  My review of the aforementioned is slated for tomorrow but I’ll let you know that I enjoyed it tremendously and am so pleased that Allen was generous enough to share some of his wit and insight with us today.

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The Miracle of Halloween

azIn my novel Food, Girls, and Other Things I Can’t Have, my hero Andrew Zansky has a little weight problem.  More than a little. He’s really fat.  Andy’s  a sophomore and he already weighs 306.4 pounds.  People ask me where I got the inspiration for the novel.  Honestly, I did not weigh 306.4 when I was a sophomore in high school.  I only weighed 275.  Gulp.

I was a really big kid, and like my hero, I was crazy self conscious about it. All year long, I tried to fit in—to the desks at school, to the cool cliques, and especially into my pants. Today you have a choice between skinny jeans, slim fit, relaxed, or even baggy jeans. Thank god for hip hop culture, the savior of big kids everywhere. But when I was a kid, clothes were tight! Especially pants.  It was the era of the designer jeans, jeans so tight you had to lie on the floor and yank at them for ten minutes to get them on. Brooke Shields was a teenage model then, and she had a famous commercial where she said, “Nothing comes between me and my Calvin’s.”  (YouTube it. You’ll get a good laugh.) To be in, you had to wear those skin-tight designer jeans.  My high school years were absolutely miserable. I was a fashion failure.

That’s why Halloween was so special to me. It combined two of my favorite activities:  hiding my body and eating enormous amounts of food.  On Halloween, being a big kid was not necessarily a disadvantage.  For example, I could wear a ghost costume.  I looked good in a sheet, and best of all, they were one size fits all. I could be a big Frankenstein. I could be an ogre or a giant.  One year I cut holes in a cardboard box and said I was a walking refrigerator.  People loved it.

And then there was the candy!  Most of the year I had to hide my love of food and my need to eat huge amounts of it, but on Halloween I could flaunt it.

“How many bags of candy did you get?” my friends would ask.

“I got four!” I said.  “Giant bags!”

Unlike the rest of the year when people were careful with food, on Halloween everyone ate like me. My parents would try to ration the candy (“You can have ten pieces tonight, then five tomorrow.”), but they ultimately failed to keep my brother and I from attacking our horde of candy like hungry Vikings.  For two or three days, everyone talked about food and ate until they were sick.  I was in heaven.

Years later I would learn the word “binge” and find out that I had an eating disorder.  I’d learn that it wasn’t normal to eat every meal to the point of being stuffed, feel guilty, swear you’d never do it again, then do it again.  But for one glorious night on Halloween, I was just like everyone else, dressing up in funny clothes, running around the neighborhood begging for candy, and eating without limitations, without worrying that I was fat and getting fatter.  Halloween was like freedom to me. And then, sadly, life would go back to normal, and I was once again the fat, weird kid who ate too much and couldn’t fit into his pants.

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Thank you Allen for taking the time to share this with Galleysmith readers.  I’ve greatly enjoyed hosting you.  If you’d like to hear more from Allen please follow him on Twitter at @allenzadoff or at his webpage at Allenzadoff.com.