From 'Revenge Book' to Love Story: A Mother-Daughter Journey Through Weight and Healing
"Don't worry, you can write about your mom when you get older. She did a whole revenge book about me," my mother said to my teenage son, laughing so hard she had to wipe tears from her eyes. This moment, just before my son left for college, captured the complex humor and history that defines our relationship.
The Family Punchline That Held Truth
My kids and I were visiting when this exchange occurred. My son had shaved his head completely bald, and I was gently expressing my preference for his usual haircut. He shrugged with that teenage look that clearly said, "Mom, please stop talking." My mother watched from the couch, grinning at the familiar dynamic.
"She used to do that to me all the time," she told my son, "get so angry at me for things I said to her. And now she's written an entire book telling everyone how bad I was."
This has become our family punchline—her calling it my "revenge book." We all laugh, but the joke lands because it contains a kernel of truth that resonates through decades of our shared history.
The Book That Was Decades in the Making
Five years ago, after dreaming about it for decades, I began writing a book about growing up with a mother who desperately wanted me to be thin. As I wrote, I shared details with my family, including her. Everyone understood the book would echo our complicated, sometimes dark relationship. When I secured a book deal two years ago, the excitement about its publication became intertwined with jokes about it being my "revenge book."
Though not technically a memoir, the emotional skeleton of the book is my life. The shame, the weight obsession, the impossibly high expectations—they're all real. So is the mother who believed thinness equaled beauty, and the daughter who believed she had to earn love by achieving it.
The Crack That Changed Everything
When I was thirteen, my mother told me, "I love you, Rebecca, but I don't like you." We'd been fighting for months. I ran to my room, pulled out my diary, and wrote I HATE MY MOTHER in all caps, followed by a page full of exclamation points. That moment marked a fundamental crack between us. I wasn't the daughter she wanted, and she wasn't the mother I needed.
She grew up in a world that told women their worth was found in their body shape. To her, one of the worst things a woman could be was fat. Unfortunately, that's exactly what I was. She put me on diets, held weigh-ins, tried bribes, threats, and tears. I understood all of it as a single message: You're too much. Too big. You're not lovable like this.
The Long Road to Acceptance
I never got thin. Instead, I settled into my average-American-size body and learned to love and accept myself as I was. Remarkably, my happiness changed her. It didn't erase the past, but it reframed it. She stopped looking at my body as a problem and began seeing me as a woman she admired. I became a lawyer, got married, had children. We found ways to talk about our past without judgment, working to heal our wounds and love each other in ways that felt expansive and true.
Two decades later, I started writing my novel. Then something happened that felt like the opposite of revenge.
The Viral Essay That Shattered Our Peace
An essay I wrote about our relationship was published on the "Today" show website and went viral. Thousands of comments poured onto their social media pages. I answered a FaceTime call from my mother, expecting to share the exciting news about how our story was resonating. Instead, the screen filled with her red, puffy eyes and trembling mouth.
"Don't do that again," she said through sobs. "Don't ever... do that again. Don't write about me."
Friends had called her, saying the piece made them feel sad for her—like she was some kind of monster. They asked how a daughter could write such terrible things about her mother.
"But we've talked about me writing about us for two years," I reminded her. "I read you the essay. You were okay with it. I've written about this before—"
"That title," she cried. "It's horrible. Why did you write that?"
The title was, "As a Girl, My Mom Taught Me That Being Fat Was the Worst Thing a Woman Could Be." It stayed at the top of the "Today" show homepage all day, but none of that mattered to her pain.
"I never said that," she insisted. And she was right—she never had to say it. She showed it through her disappointment, her desperate efforts to change me, the sadness that filled rooms when I stepped on scales. But this wasn't the time for rehashing our past.
The Breakthrough That Changed Everything
"I didn't write the title," I told her. "And if they'd actually read the whole piece, they'd know it's not about you being the bad guy. It's about you being human, doing the best you knew at the time, about us coming back together. It's a love story."
"I... I'm not a monster," she sobbed.
Her pain gutted me. I'd been writing the book for two years already—not as payback, but to understand myself and help women who grew up in the same system, women taught their worth depended on body size. I thought we were on the other side of this—healed, safe. Now we were both shattered again.
"Okay," I said. "I won't write about you."
"Good," she whispered, wiping her face. "I don't want to talk about it anymore." Then she hung up.
The Unconditional Love We Both Needed
Hours later, my phone rang again. It was her.
"I don't care what anyone says. Don't worry about me. I'll be fine. Go after your dreams," she said. "I love you. Keep writing."
"Are you sure?" I asked, stunned.
"I'm a hundred percent sure. After I read the piece again, I realized what hurt me the most wasn't the story or the title. It was when you wrote that I didn't love you unconditionally. That's not true. I always loved you unconditionally."
"You've never told me that," I whispered, a lump growing in my throat.
"Well, it's true. You're my daughter. You're my life. My love for you was always unconditional."
There it was—the sentence I'd waited my whole life to hear.
The Messy, Hard-Earned Love That Survives
That's real love—the messy, hard-earned kind that keeps showing up, even after damage. Even when the damage becomes the story.
I told her what I truly believe: no matter how much the struggle wounded us, no matter how much heartbreak lived inside that child and that mother—who was herself, in many ways, a child when she had me—there is always the possibility of healing. There is hope for reconciliation. For love.
If either of us had refused to step beyond our own egos, if we'd stayed stubborn, we wouldn't be here now, able to joke about something that was so hard, so serious, and somehow, so beautiful.
From Revenge to Understanding
She still calls it my revenge book. And I'm okay with that. But we both know better.
I didn't write it to get back at her. I wrote it to understand us. To trace the damage and see what was left. I wrote it because she let me. She gave me the space to tell the truth, even when it stung. That's a powerful kind of love.
So yes, maybe it started as a revenge book. But it ended as a love story.
