Me: “Listen up Fatty, I really do not like you. I was hoping you’d be flat by now. I mean Jesus, how long have I been running, and chomping on lettuce trying to flatten you out?”
Belly: “Hey, I gave your two kids a fine place to grow.”
Me: “That was my uterus.”
Belly: “Well, I made room for your uterus! I tried to snap back into shape after the babies, but I do not have that genetic makeup.”
Me: “I just want you to be flat. I want to be like fit people I see in the gym, like the perfect bodies in magazines.”
Belly: “Magazines? Really? You know that is some serious re-touching, right? I can’t compete with that! And what people at the gym? Twenty-year olds?”
Me: “Then what about when you were younger? Huh? Why couldn’t you be flat then? What was your excuse then?”
Belly: “My excuse? I think you know…”
From the very first pages, Lorinda Boyer’s pile of confessions moved me. Lorinda is a master with a pen. She incomparably describes what it feels like to be a Christian woman who must comply with fulfilling the role of being a perfect, dutiful wife and mother at any cost. No saints exist in the pages of this exceptionally written memoir, yet what stands out is the way Lorinda writes about how much her beliefs, confusion, and other people’s actions or lack of them affected her behavior. Overall, Straight Enoughby Lorinda Boyer is a triumph of embracing one’s identity, redefining love, expressing one true self, and freeing oneself from feeling unworthy of love. It portrays a flawed, loving woman who repetitively struggles with excruciating guilt and thoughts that say she deserves to be punished by God.
