GIVEAWAY & REVIEW: You Don’t Sweat Much for a Fat Girl by Celia Rivenbark

August 16, 2011 By Mary 93 Comments

Description (from Goodreads)

From the bestselling, award-winning author of You Can’t Drink All Day If You Don’t Start In The Morning, comes another collection of hilarious observations that will resonate with women, mothers, and girlfriends everywhere

In her newest wickedly irreverent humor collection, Celia Rivenbark cracks up while getting her downward facing dog on, pines for a world in which every mom gets to behave like Betty Draper and wonders why everybody’s so excited about the Science Fair when there aren’t even any rides. In it you’ll find essays on such topics as:

-Menopause Spurs Thoughts of Death and Turkey
-I Dreamed a Dream That My Lashes Were Long
-Twitter Woes: I’ve Got Plenty of Characters, Just No Character
-Movie To-Do List: Cook Like Julia, Adopt Really Big Kid
-Charlie Bit Your Finger? Good! And other thoughts on the virus that is YouTube

And much more! For any woman who longs for the good old days when Jane Fonda in legwarmers was the only one who saw you exercise, YOU DON’T SWEAT MUCH FOR A FAT GIRL is comfort food in book form.

About the Author (from Goodreads)

Celia Rivenbark was born and raised in Duplin County, NC, which had the distinction of being the nation’s number 1 producer of hogs and turkeys during a brief, magical moment in the early 1980s.
Celia grew up in a small house in the country with a red barn out back that was populated by a couple of dozen lanky and unvaccinated cats. Her grandparents’ house, just across the ditch, had the first indoor plumbing in Teachey, NC and family lore swears that people came from miles around just to watch the toilet flush.
Despite this proud plumbing tradition, Celia grew up without a washer and dryer. On every Sunday afternoon of her childhood, while her mama rested up from preparing a fried chicken and sweet potato casserole lunch, she, her sister and her daddy rode to the laundromat two miles away to do the weekly wash.
It was at this laundromat, where a carefully lettered sign reminded customers that management was “NOT RESONSIBLE” for lost items, that Celia shirked “resonsibility” her own self and snuck away to read the big, fat Sunday News & Observer out of Raleigh, NC. By age 7, she’d decided to be a newspaper reporter.
Late nights, she’d listen to the feed trucks rattle by on the highway and she’d go to sleep wondering what exotic cities those noisy trucks would be in by morning (Richmond? Atlanta? Charlotte?) Their headlights crawling across the walls of her little pink bedroom at the edge of a soybean field were like constellations pointing the way to a bigger life, a better place, a place where there wasn’t so much turkey shit everywhere.
After a couple of years of college, Celia went to work for her hometown paper, the Wallace, NC Enterprise. The locals loved to say, as they renewed their “perscriptions,” that “you can eat a pot of rice and read the Enterprise and go to bed with nothing on your stomach and nothing on your mind.”
Mebbe. But Celia loved the Enterprise. Where else could you cover a dead body being hauled out of the river (alcohol was once again a contributing factor) in the morning and then write up weddings in the afternoon?
After eight years, however, taking front-page photos of the publisher shaking hands with other fez-wearing Shriners and tomatoes shaped like male “ginny-talia” was losing its appeal.
Celia went to work for the Wilmington, NC Morning Star after a savvy features editor was charmed by a lead paragraph in an Enterprise story about the rare birth of a mule: “Her mother was a nag and her father was a jackass.”
The Morning Star was no News and Observer but it came out every day and Celia got to write weddings for 55,000 readers instead of 3,500, plus she got a paycheck every two weeks with that nifty New York Times logo on it.
After an unfortunate stint as a copy editor – her ass expanded to a good six ax handles across – Celia started writing a weekly humor column that fulfilled her lifelong dream of being paid to be a smart ass. Along the way, she won a bunch of press awards, including a national health journalism award – hilarious when you consider she’s never met a steamed vegetable she could keep down.
Having met and married a cute guy in sports, Celia found herself happily knocked up at age 40 and, after 21 years, she quit newspapering to stay home with her new baby girl.
After a year or so, she started using Sophie’s two-hour naps to write a humor column from the mommie front lines for the Sun News in Myrtle Beach, S.C. The column continues to run weekly and is syndicated by the McClatchy-Tribune News Services.
In 2000, Coastal Carolina Press published a collection of Celia’s columns. A Southeast Book Sellers Association best-seller, Bless Your Heart, Tramp was nominated for the James Thurber Prize in 2001. David Sedaris won. He wins everything.

Details

Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin; Original edition (August 16, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0312614209
ISBN-13: 978-0312614201

SOURCE: PUBLISHER

MY THOUGHTS
ABSOLUTELY LOVED IT

I love Celia Rivenbark’s writing even though I don’t live in the South, it is fun to travel there through her books. She covers such topics as Twitter and her take on menopause is worth the price of the book alone. My favorite term of hers is for her husband, who she lovingly calls “duh-hubby” — you can infer what you like from that reference. I admit I troll the internet looking for her essays while I wait for another one of her books to be released. I think my favorite one is where she pretends to be a trailer trash version of Midge who writes a Happy Birthday letter to Barbie on her 50th! There is almost a snark overload with this one. If you enjoy Dave Barry, you will more than likely enjoy this as well!

WANT TO WIN A COPY OF THIS BOOK?

Contest is open to anyone over 13 years old with a reliable mailing address (PO Boxes OK)

Contest ends on 9.1.11 Winner will be chosen by Random.org on 9.2.11

Winner will have 48 hours to respond to email or a new winner will be chosen.

This giveaway is sponsored by ME and ONE ARC copy is available.

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