For twenty-eight years, things have been tripping along nicely for Cannie Shapiro. Sure, her mother has come charging out of the closet, and her father has long since dropped out of her world. But she loves her friends, her rat terrier, Nifkin, and her job as pop culture reporter for The Philadelphia Examiner. She's even made a tenuous peace with her plus-size body.

But the day she opens up a national women's magazine and sees the words "Loving a Larger Woman" above her ex-boyfriend's byline, Cannie is plunged into misery...and the most amazing year of her life. From Philadelphia to Hollywood and back home again, she charts a new course for herself: mourning her losses, facing her past, and figuring out who she is and who she can become.

Twenty-eight year old journalist, Cannie Shapiro, has recently taken a 'break' with her boyfriend of three years. The opening pages of the novel depict Cannie's reaction when she finds that the ex, Bruce, has written a national magazine article (complete with intimate details) about loving Cannie, a larger woman. The article spurs on Cannie's desire to lose weight and ultimately get Bruce back. Uncomfortable yet hilarious situation after situation (some involving Bruce) occurs, even ending in Cannie making an unexpected connection and friendship with celebrity Maxi Ryder. All of this while Cannie deals with a troubled childhood and insecurities of her body.

The writing was fantastic, the characters endearing and I don't think that Jennifer Weiner could have created a more entertaining first novel. I think this is a perfect summer read and definitely worth your time and money!


Witty, funny, fun and surprisingly moving debut   May 14, 2001
 68 out of 72 found this review helpful

I must confess that I was predisposed to like "Good in Bed," since I've been a big fan of Jennifer Weiner's newspaper columns for some time. I wasn't, however, prepared for how fine a first novel she has produced, or how moved I was by Cannie's story. The book begins with a hilarious hook: protagonist Cannie Shapiro, entertainment columnist for a large Philadelphia newspaper, realizes that her recently-ex-boyfriend has been hired by a Cosmo-like magazine to write a [adult] column. To her horror, Cannie realizes that the pseudo-anonymous woman "C." in Bruce's first article is her. To make this invasion of privacy even more humiliating, the column is an unexpectedly perceptive treatment of Cannie's weight problem and its effect on their relationship. At first glance, one might assume the snarky tone of the first few pages would continue as the novel spun out in a kind of lightweight revenge fantasy. But Weiner uses Cannie's heartbreaking invasion of privacy as jumping off point for so much more. We see Cannie grow and change, exorcising childhood demons (mostly), getting over Bruce (at last), and most moving of all, finally coming to terms with her place in life (and yes, her weight, too). If the plot is moved along by a few too many incredible coincidences, if the book seems almost too jam-packed with characters and subplots, well, these are minor criticisms of a finely-written and sensitive first novel. Just promise me, Jennifer, you won't let Camryn Manheim star in the movie version.......


I'm missing something.   December 6, 2002
 32 out of 43 found this review helpful

The shame of it is that after reading the reviews, this was a book I really wanted to love. I guess this is either a brilliant book that I simply didn't get, judging by the reviews here, or it's a terribly depressing...fairy tale that makes me contemplate suicide. Either way, I'm disappointed. Space prohibits me from a line-by-line analysis of this problematic tome, but I'll try to hit the high points:

1. As others have pointed out, she's 5'10" and a size 16. This is a problem?... Maybe I should check again.

2. The narrator makes so much of the parent's painful divorce that one wants to say: Enough already! Yes, Daddy was a creep who abandoned the family... Mommy's lesbian lover is a bit of a trial (and one of the most stereotypical portrayals of a lesbian I've ever read, nearly to the point of offensiveness) but for those of us who actually grew up in severely abusive families, thank God you had one parent who truly loved you. Cannie also has loving siblings and friends, plus an education and career most 20-somethings would envy (even before the screenplay sale, itself quite a stretch) yet apparently all this love and achievement pales in comparison to her "weight problem." Oh, please.

3. The "weight doctor," Peter, that she goes to see is so taken with her that he takes up jogging at her favorite haunts and practically stalks her simply to have a conversation with her (and be her pack mule at the mall all day, despite the fact that she is pregnant with another man's child. Even more than that, he talks about how "funny" and wonderful she is. Clearly I'm not getting something here. She's got ripostes, put-downs and one-liners, but not much I'd consider really "funny." He proposes to her at the end of the book despite the fact that they haven't really been dating and don't really seem to know each other. Needed a happy ending, I suppose.

4. The pregnancy by her nasty ex-boyfriend (who's already written the infamous "Good in Bed" article when she sleeps with him!) could have been the subject of some real soul-searching and good writing. Instead, it's used as an opportunity to go shopping, whine even more, and--well, go shopping. Only the end of the pregnancy in the NICU touches on the poignant, and even then it seems more of a plot device to bring Cannie, her family, and the doctor closer together (especially the doctor.) Bruce's non-reaction to the whole thing also seems a tad suspect, since she broke up with him (for what seemed like good reasons). He has no opinion on the subject whatsoever? Not to mention that his girlfriend (whose name Cannie does not even know) pushes Cannie down on her way home from LA, causing the premature birth and hysterectomy. Again, does anyone else find this out of proportion?

5. Yes, the whole impromptu-friendship-with-movie-star in bathroom is a bit contrived, but seemed cute, but I was willing to go along with it. The idea that Minnie Driver (whoops, Maxie Ryder's) loved it enough that she wants to play the lead role (the movie seems to be about a chunky reporter who falls for a comic actor who magically loves her back--'nuff said?) does tax suspension of disbelief. When Cannie gets to meet her movie-star hero, he seems not the least fazed by her eight-months-pregnancy and takes her out to the beach, saying "Kiss me." Then he passes out, which I guess explains something. Oh, and the screenplay is called "Star Struck." My, how original.

6. So Cannie is now a rich screenwriter, decides she can live with her thighs, has a beautiful if premature baby...snags a doctor husband, and even makes up with mom's lesbian lover. Not to mention that Maxi the movie star spends what must be thousands to fix up Cannie's apartment for her and the baby--but despite being lavished with love and gifts, Cannie doesn't seem to come to close to being something other than bitter until oh, about the last ten pages. A good beach read is one thing, and could have been fun. This privileged whining is maudlin to the point of neurosis.

As I said, this was a book I really wanted to like. It ended up depressing--we should all be so lucky as this bitter, self-hating "heroine."


Unbearable, Brainless Beach Read   April 28, 2003
 32 out of 41 found this review helpful

This novel was written on automatic and it shows. Characters, plot, you name it, all of it is typical, by the numbers, fill in the blanks fiction. It smacks of cashing in on a trend, and it doesn't even have the decency to do it very well.

Cannie is lovelorn and overweight (because all heavy women in these novels *must* be lovelorn), a gifted writer whose potential is wasted at a dead-end newspaper job (because all lovelorn, overweight women have to have a job in the journalism field), with no one to turn to except her insane dog, Nifkin (Because all pets of lovelorn, overweight and overlooked women must have some quirk only she can find bearable). None of these cliches would be too damaging if only Cannie had some sort of engaging personality and a decent story to tell.

Alas, she does not. Her sarcasm- which we are no doubt meant to find endearing and humorous- comes off as unfunny and grating, and what the author tries to pass off as self-depreciation is more like long, irritating wallows of self-pity. At one point, Cannie goes out for dinner with a man, nauseatingly throwing herself at him at every opportunity, only to dine and dash when she finds out he has a girlfriend back home. So, what's the message here, a woman can only interact with a man if there's a potential for a sexual relationship? Instead of feeling sorry for her, I wanted to slap her for being so man-hungry she wasted a perfectly good chance at a friendship.

Cannie is feeling particularly 'poor pitiful me' these days because an ex wrote a magazine column about her, the gist of it being "Loving the Larger Woman". I won't go into her getting perplexingly angry and making things worse by telling absolutely everyone that the woman mentioned is her, knowing from personal experience about getting irrationally irritated about things an ex has done. And if the book were about that, about Cannie dealing with her feelings and learning how to be strong and confident and eventually moving on to be a better person I probably would have enjoyed it. Instead, we are suddenly jettisoned into magically impossible land, where mice in feety pajamas frolic with frogs wearing gumdrop hats. Cannie meets a famous actrress in a restroom who spontaneously decides to be her bestest friend and buy her lots of things and take her to expensive places. She's whisked away to LA where she charms a drunken, famous actor and eventually discovers she's been knocked up by the aforementioned ex. It's at this point where my head began to throb, but I stupidly ignored it and pressed on.

How everything is wrapped up is so treacly and trite your teeth will hurt. Absolutely every person Cannie meets goes out of their way to set things right or give her stuff so we never see any growth or maturity on her part. Cannie has neither the brains nor the inner resources, apparently, to deal with a single one of her of her self-inflicted problems. Alone and bitter? A baby will fix everything! Poor and pregnant? Your amazing friends and estranged family will funnel vast amounts of cash into solving everything! The idea that being weak, single and saddled with a child will somehow win you a man is especially insulting.

This isn't a book, it's Cinderella on cocaine of the cheapest variety.


Nothing I expected   August 8, 2005
 28 out of 29 found this review helpful

I read many reviews here on Amazon about how great this book was so I decided to give it a shot...big mistake. The first part of this book was funny at times, clever, and made me want to read more. The farther along this book progressed I found myself hating the main character more and more. She was whiney, self absorbed, and rude to everybody she wasn't friends with.

The character of Cannie was so utterly bitter that I found myself actually hoping she wouldn't get the fairy tale ending we all knew she would get. I'm all for the idea of having a plus size main character, but she was absoultey horrid to anybody who wasn't plus sized in this novel. The writer made you sympathize for Cannnie with all of her weight struggles, but the way she made thin people into evil beings made me like Cannie even less. She went too overboard with the "woe is me, because I'm fat" issue. For instance, the thin nurse in the doctors office who was trying to be pleasent to everybody, the author made her out to be this horrible character all because she was thin. I really had it with this issue when she was at some ridiculous Hollywood party and she told some "size 0" movie star she liked her music and the lady responds with "If I had a nickel for every fat girl who said that to me..." *NOBODY* is going to be that rude, and that is the way all thinner people are portrayed in this book. I have no problem with having the main character be larger, and showing that bigger people can be successful and elaborating on the hardships and mean spirited ways people can be just because of a bigger size, but it's extremely condescending that the author turns around and does the same thing to thin people throughout the entire book.

The BIGGEST complaint with this book was the complete and total lack of realism. Meeting a multi-millionare actress in a bathroom and becoming best friends over a night of drinking? Having your movie script which nobody would touch all of a sudden being turned into a movie? Having a rich, handsome doctor fall madly in love with you? Going out to a lake with an incredibly attractive movie star who you've been lusting after for years? And then having him leave his sports car there for you to drive for the weekend??

This book went from starting off fresh and clever, to quickly becoming stale and repulsive by the amount of whining and constant references to her ex boyfriend on every other page, to becoming such a ridiculous fairy tale that not many would enjoy.
By the end of this book I couldn't stand Cannie and understood why Bruce didn't want her back.