This Is Big: How the Founder of Weight Watchers Changed the World -- and Me

The true story of a cross-generational, beyond-the-grave and beyond-the-scale friendship that led to the first breakthrough Marisa Meltzer ever had in her quest for self-improvement.

Marisa Meltzer began her first diet at the age of 5. Growing up an indoors-loving child in Northern California, she learned from an early age that weight was the one part of her life she could neither change nor even really understand.

Fast forward nearly four decades. Marisa, a contributor to The New Yorker and the New York Times, comes across an obituary for Jean Nidetch, the Queens, NY housewife who founded Weight Watchers in 1963.

Weaving Jean's incredible story as weight loss maven and pathbreaking entrepreneur with her own journey through Weight Watchers, Marisa chronicles the deep parallels, and enduring frustrations, in each woman's decades-long efforts to lose weight and keep it off. The result is funny, unexpected, and unforgettable: a testament to how transformation might begin with weight, but it certainly never ends there.