By Jonathan Kirsch, Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles
Food can be a weighty issue, literally and figuratively, as we discover in My Fat Dad: A Memoir of Food, Love, and Family, with Recipes by Dawn Lerman (Berkley), which began as a blog on The New York Times website and has emerged in print as a fully realized autobiography, a work of joy, candor, insight and poignancy.

Although the book’s title may strike the ear as a bit hurtful, Lerman allows us to see that her father figured crucially in her coming of age and her chosen profession as a nutritionist and nutrition educator.

Lerman will talk about her relationship with food, over dinner on Nov. 7 at El Meson as part of the JCC’s Cultural Arts & Book Fest.

Indeed, she surely inherited some of her own gifts as a writer from her father, an advertising copywriter responsible for coining such immortal slogans as “Fly the Friendly Skies” and “Leggo My Eggo.” But her father’s eating issues were just as influential on young Dawn.

“My dad felt in order to create a good campaign, you needed to believe in the product you were selling,” she explains. “And he was always the best customer for the products he advertised, testing them excessively — especially when working on Kentucky Fried Chicken, Schlitz beer, Sprite and Pringles potato chips.” Lerman’s mother, too, conveyed a troubling message about food. “My mom was never good with certain words, like ‘I love you’ and ‘I am sorry,’ but when she wanted to apologize, she would dash out in her red Mustang and appear shortly after with the massive chocolate chip cookie from Old Town.”

The real hero of My Fat Dad is the author’s maternal grandmother, an unforgettable woman with a thematically appropriate nickname: “Beauty.” The author shows us how much she learned from Beauty, including many of the traditional Jewish recipes that ornament her book so richly.

But it was the lesson of love that mattered most. “My only glimpse into a nourishing, normal environment, my only model of healthy eating, was the weekends I spent with my beloved grandmother,” Lerman writes. “It was in her kitchen where I learned what love and happiness were — one recipe at a time.”

The story of how her grandma got her name tells it all. Every Friday night, Lerman showed up at her grandparents’ house, where her grandmother would greet her: “My little beauty, my little beauty!” Young Dawn jumped to a conclusion that was not entirely wrong. “I thought when I heard her say ‘beauty’ over and over again, she was trying to tell me her name — so Beauty is what I called her. The name stuck, and soon everyone in her small neighborhood of West Rogers Park in Chicago knew my grandmother as Beauty.” And Beauty was a source of inspiration for her granddaughter’s love of cooking and writing.

It is a measure of Lerman’s honesty that she evokes the pain as well as the pleasure of childhood. A childhood baby sitter scolded her: “You are a bad girl. I am going to tell your grandmother that you are always hurting your sister. You are an evil child.” Young Dawn had an acute sense of family politics: “Beauty was fond of Bubbe Mary” — her paternal grandmother — “even though she thought she was a little bit of a phony.” Not surprisingly, childhood fears manifested as stomachaches and an occasional incident of vomiting.

A move to New York coincides with Lerman’s coming of age. Along the way, she bravely recalls the most difficult moments in her family history and always comes up with an appropriate recipe to underscore the narrative. That’s why My Fat Dad is both a rich and evocative memoir and a fully functional cookbook, a reading experience that is pleasurable in itself, but also invites the reader into the kitchen again and again.

The JCC’s Cultural Arts & Book Fest presents My Fat Dad author and nutritionist Dawn Lerman at El Meson, 903 E. Dixie Dr., West Carrollton at 6:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 7. $36 includes dairy dinner, autographed book, and non-alcoholic beverages (alcohol available for purchase). Kosher meals available with advance request. R.S.V.P. by Nov. 1 to 610-1555 or at www.jewishdayton.org/my-fat-dad.

Related: Grandmother Beauty’s Chicken Soup With A Kick.

To read the complete October 2016 Dayton Jewish Observer, click here.