I remember clearly how it started. I was fifteen years old. It was the middle of winter, the house hazy and yellowish with dry furnace heat. I had eaten a Lean Cuisine lasagna dinner — a dish that had fewer than four hundred calories (good for me) and required no preparation (good for my mother) — and gone upstairs to my room to finish my homework.

Let me express the rage I feel toward the word obesity. This ugly noun, with all its pejorative implications, this term for unhealthy corpulence, has been mobilized by the medical-health-beauty industry in order to stigmatize people who don’t conform to an absurdly restrictive concept of ideal weight.

My mother once told me that, during her labor with me in the living room of her Brooklyn apartment, she’d tugged on the long white drapes in her pain. The image of her on her knees, dark hair neatly tied back, mouth open, remains vivid to me.

Lessons came fast, and sometimes violently. Once, an older boy urged me to yell, “You dirty Jew!” — words that I didn’t understand. I shouted the phrase up and down the alley until a tearful woman came running down three flights of stairs to slap my face, hard. My cheek can still recall the sting. That woman did me the ultimate favor.