About the Book

“Everyone had a clearer vision of my body than I did. It didn’t feel as if my body was really mine.” At fourteen-years-old, Jonathan Wells weighs just 67 pounds, igniting a scrutinizing persecution of his body that follows him into adulthood. 

As a boy in preparatory day school in upstate New York in the 1970s, Wells’s teacher abuses and humiliates him for his size, forcing Wells, for the first time, to question his right to take up space in the world. Wells’s father, reading his weight as a clear deficit of masculinity, and perhaps sexuality, creates a workout regimen meant to bulk him up. When that doesn’t help, he has Wells seen by a slew of specialists, all claiming he is in perfect health, and yet the problem cannot be denied: he is simply too skinny. 

Wells’s complicated relationship with his charming but elusive mother does not help matters. As the eldest son, he is privy to the struggles of a fraying marriage in which he, however slight, plays a divisive role. Wells is sent to boarding school in Switzerland, where his size continues to generate controversy, from the merely rude to the violently abusive. And yet, even as he manages to establish an identity of his own, one which must invariably contend with gender norms and conventions, his father’s obsession with his size follows him to Europe, threatening to destroy the space he has painstakingly won for himself.  As he grows into an adult, combating the intrusive liberties others take with his body, Jonathan must define masculinity for himself, ultimately coming to terms with the damage of a father’s love. 

Praise for The Skinny

“One of the most vulnerable memoirs I’ve ever read, Jonathan Wells’ The Skinny is the story of surviving the long, brutal gauntlet toward manhood that many boys who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s endured. An important cautionary tale illuminating the devastating, lifelong harm caused by rigid gender rules and the parents who try to enforce them.”

—Bill Clegg, author of Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and The End of the Day

"This touching memoir of growing up in suburban New York in the ’70s and ’80s reads a bit like outtakes from Mad Men, if told from the perspective of a teenager with a more nuanced point of view on the overwhelming tropes of masculinity that dominated that era… This coming-of-age chronicle is lushly rendered and touchingly intimate, a critique that is loving and unsparing at the same time." 

—Chloe Schama, Vogue, Best Books of the Summer

"A poetic remembrance of pain and forgiveness that rivals Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life in its power to enthrall."

—Airmail Weekly

"Layer by layer, Jonathan Wells unravels the father-son knot in ways both troubling and uplifting. I was gripped by The Skinny, a remarkable portrait of the most tangled of relationships, written with a poet's eye and grace."

—Roger Cohen, author of The Girl from Human Street: A Jewish Family Odyssey

"Jonathan Wells's extraordinary coming-of-age memoir, The Skinny, is not only startling and heartbreaking, but each page seems somehow even more riveting and moving than the last. If you want the skinny—I mean, the real skinny—about growing up in a male body in this country it's time you read this deeply compelling and eminently wise new book."

—David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour

"With a poet’s grace, Jonathan Wells has written a harrowing memoir about growing up severely underweight, about surviving sexual abuse by a schoolmaster—and about his tyrannical father’s determination to transform his son’s body into his own ideal of masculinity. The Skinny is a deeply haunting account of the lasting effects of emotional and physical bullying. I couldn’t put it down."

—Besty Bonner, The Book of Atlantis Black

“Jonathan Wells was small as a child—short, but also quite thin. That trait, the way others reacted to it, and its nonconformity with perceived male norms led to a painful chain reaction of events… The Skinny is gripping in its wonderful articulation of an underrepresented perspective on masculinity."

—Jeff Fleischer, Foreword Reviews

"The Skinny is a poignant account of what it is like to grow up as a diminutive boy in a world that prefers its men big and strong. In precise and poetic prose, Jonathan Wells explores the intersection of wealth, sexuality, and body image, peeling back the glittering layers of privilege, searching for his father's approval, and examining the assumptions made about male size in a culture of toxic masculinity. Ultimately, The Skinny is an illuminating memoir of one man's search for meaning, acceptance and love."

—Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover and Me

"Here's the skinny on The Skinny. Wells has written a memoir that's lean without being gaunt, rawboned without being fleshless. It's an elegant work of curving contours and sharp-edged insight that captures a world long gone in voluptuous prose that nonetheless, is delightfully devoid of flab or excess."

—Allen Kurzweil, author of Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year Old Bully

“[A] moving body-image memoir.”

—Dave Simpson, The Guardian

“An enthralling and deceptively small book… Family life chez Wells is never over-analyzed in psychological or sociological terms, but rather presented as a mosaic of snapshots—reflecting an observant and unhappy child’s eye-view—that coalesce into a family album of variegated and largely unintentional abuse.”

—Jane Haile, New York Journal of Books

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