Author(s): Lisa Ann Walter

Humour

What do you get when you drop a longtime self-loather into the glitz and glamour of Hollywood? This is a hysterical, and brutally honest look at the impossible standard of perfection for which so many of us strive. Actress and comic Lisa Ann Walter boldly, and poignantly, shares her life-long struggle with self-esteem - which, in her case, includes plenty of failed auditions, awkward celebrity encounters, and plastic surgery, injections, and impossible diets. Along the way, the ‘celebrity adjacent’ Walter also tells her sometimes warm, often cringe-worthy, and always funny Hollywood stories (including the reason she’d kill for Richard Gere). Nothing is sacred as Walter reveals all the stops on her bumpy journey to self-acceptance - from the marathon Italian family dinners of her youth to her first Weight Watchers meeting at the age of twelve, from the disorientation of young motherhood to those first years on the stand-up circuit. Always the ‘chubby girl’, Walter never imagined she could be a Hollywood star. And yet there she is, appearing alongside the likes of Jennifer Aniston and Katherine Heigl. Still, Walter is just one of the girls - not one of the Hollywood elite - and THE BEST THING ABOUT MY ASS IS THAT IT’S BEHIND ME always rings achingly true. (Okay, not every story here fits the everywoman mold: so few of us can say we’ve taken marriage advice from Whoopi Goldberg!)