I expected Hungry to be a memoir: story of a fat childhood, and then a narrative of fatness to thinness, which is the way all weight-loss memoirs go, right? But instead, Zadoff tells his story in short and pithy chapters that are deceptively snappy and witty, often horribly funny (hilarious, his secret campaign to personally demolish the two-pound chocolate Easter bunny sitting in the office break room, and so sad). In precisely-titled mini-essays, he talks about everything that he tried in order to not be fat, every reason he thought he might have flew up the scale over the course of his life, all the things people told him and all the things he told himself. And then, his epiphany, and he is heading back down the scale, and this is what he learned, and this is how he fought, and this is what he knows about disordered eating.

It's not a memoir, and it's not a self-help book, and it's not a diet book--it's more of a personal rumination on how he diagnosed himself as a food addict, and what he had to do to overcome that. Even if you're not a compulsive overeater, even if you do not have the same issues with food in the same way that Zadoff does, you'll admire his strength, his determination to get a handle on the compulsion that was destroying his life, and you'll be impressed at his fortitude. The near-relentless cheeriness, the very pithy remarks that feel boiled down into soundbytes can be frustrating and make the book feel a little like an infomercial, as if he's trying to sell you on the idea of compulsive overeating as a disease. But if you recognize yourself even a little bit in his stories, your own knee-jerk reactions to food and eating situations, the way you eat and the way you think about it, I think you might find the book startling, and maybe a little revelatory.