What sorts of books inspired you as��a��child?
I loved reading the anthropology textbooks in my father’s university office and my mother’s Arthur Conan Doyle collection. Like many children, I��longed to visit Narnia, loved Roald Dahl and obsessively reread books such as The Twenty-One Balloons, Harriet the Spy and all the Oz��books.��

Your new book explores the complex mythologies��that��have grown up around fat. Which books initially piqued your interest in this topic?
In the early 1990s, I��discovered Hillel Schwartz’s Never Satisfied: A��Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies, and��Fat and was immediately fascinated that it was possible that fat and its corollaries such as weight-loss dieting could have a��history. Around the same time, in a second-hand bookshop, I��found Frederick Drimmer’s book from the 1970s, Very Special People: The��Struggles, Loves, and Triumphs of Human Oddities,��which had a��chapter about circus fat��ladies. That led me to start reading and thinking about fatness and performance and the politics of being seen when one has an uncommon body.��

Which books best illuminate the stereotypes about fat people and how these have changed?
I am fond of my friend and colleague Sander Gilman’s books – Fat: A��Social History of��Obesity, Fat��Boys: A��Slim Book and so on. Peter Stearns’ Fat��History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West is also good, as is Christopher Forth’s Fat: A��Cultural History of the Stuff of��Life.

Where can one find good analyses of dieting and its cultural meanings?
In the realm of academic history, I��am fond of Rudolph Bell’s Holy Anorexia, Caroline Walker Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The��Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women and Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s Fasting��Girls: The��History of Anorexia Nervosa, which are very insightful and instructive with regard to the cultural meanings of eating and not-eating in the West. The historiography on weight-loss dieting is oddly small, but includes Gilman’s Diets and Dieting: A��Cultural Encyclopedia and Walter Gratzer’s Terrors of the Table: The��Curious History of Nutrition. In the realm of popular history, I��liked Louise Foxcroft’s recent Calories and Corsets: A��History of��Dieting over 2,000��Years and Susan Yager’s The Hundred Year Diet: America’s Voracious Appetite for Losing Weight.

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What is the last book you gave as a gift, and to whom?
Just yesterday I��gave my spouse a copy of Shonna Milliken Humphrey’s delightful book Gin.

What books do you have on your desk waiting to be read?
Keith Wailoo’s Pain: A��Political History; Jen Manion’s Female Husbands: A��Trans History; Thavolia Glymph’s The��Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for��51�Թ�, Freedom, and Nation; and Mab Segrest’s Administrations of��Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum are at the top of the stack.

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Hanne Blank works in the Faculty for Women’s and Gender Studies at Denison University in Ohio. Her latest book, Fat, appears in the Bloomsbury Object Lessons series.