Free Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life by Kelsey Miller

makes your dreams come true in a cramped converted apartment. But they had head shots on the wall, and I recognized some of those heads, which was all that mattered.
    “We think she’s just a breath of fresh air.”
    Maureen spoke to my mother first. We were seated across a large, circular table in what would have been a dining nook. Maureen and her partner, Dave, constituted the bulk of this small management company, handling around fifty child and teenage performers (“Mainly film and television but a few on Broadway, too. And we heard that voice, Kelsey, don’t worry!” Dave said with a wink, becoming my favorite person ever, in the world). Mom smiled at Maureen then at me, suddenly put in the hot seat.
    “Well. Yes! She’s always been a performer.”
    “I bet she has.” Maureen gave me a small smile and looked back to Mom.
    “When she was little and couldn’t sleep, she’d stand on top of her bed and sing Annie . In the middle of the night, I mean.”
    Dave guffawed with laughter, and I swore further allegiance to him. Maureen held the same smile-nod, trained on my mother, and held her silence for a moment as if waiting for Mom to deliver some stage-parent code word. Or, maybe she just hated me. Did she hate me? Was there any way I could try to die, right that second?
    At last, the staring contest ended.
    “Look, we’d like to consider representing Kelsey. Ideally, we’d put her under contract for a year and see how it goes,” Maureen explained. “But she could be a girlfriend type or a best-friend type, and that’s a nice flexibility.”
    “A girlfriend type?” Mom asked. “She’s eleven, you know.”
    Maureen leaned in just a hair. “But she’s developing. She’s at least a B cup, right? Obviously, she can still be cast as a daughter, but we’re past the point of ‘cute’ here.” She looked at me at last. A smile. “You don’t want to be the daughter, anyway.”
    Dave jumped in: “We think she’s just great, super funny and talented. Lovely face, of course.” He turned to Mom. “But obviously, in this business, there are certain unavoidable realities.”
    Mom tilted her head and drew in her breath just slightly. I nodded hard, businesslike.
    “No one’s saying there’s anything wrong with her, but it would make things so much easier if we lost a little weight.” Maureen folded her hands and sat back, news delivered.
    “Not a lot. Maybe ten pounds would make all the difference,” Dave concluded. He raised an eyebrow at me. “I mean, you want the leads here, right?”
    At this point I realized I was nodding along with their every word and made a conscious effort to stop bobbing my head. But I couldn’t. I wanted them to know that I got it. If I hadn’t seen this coming now, I’d known it would eventually happen, for in my fantasies I was thin like Daisy and Sam. That was part of the deal with being a famous actress, and I was thrilled to have someone tell me so directly just to do it—just be skinny and everything will be fine. At the same time, I was awash with an unspeakable shame. Maureen and Dave had called me out as a fat girl, unsightly and unlikable, and they’d done so in front of the person I most desperately wanted to like me: my mother. But maybe I needed that. Maybe this was the eleven-year-old, chubby-girl version of hitting bottom. And they’d given me the greatest incentive to get up and do the work. Lose ten pounds and I’d get a professional acting career? I’d be “the girlfriend”? Sold.
    “No problem!” I jumped in. “I can do that.”
    My mom looked over at me, a tight smile I couldn’t read. But Maureen turned to me at last.
    “Great. So, come back and see us in two weeks.”
    Ten pounds in two weeks. No problem at all.

    When I look back at photos of myself from that period, I realize that losing ten pounds would have taken me from plump to flat. I didn’t have a weight problem; I was just this side of pudgy—the kind of adolescent who went