Quote: “One of the most vulnerable memoirs I’ve ever read, Jonathan Wells’ The Skinny is the story of surviving the long, brutal gauntlet toward manhood that many boys who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s endured. An important cautionary tale illuminating the devastating, lifelong harm caused by rigid gender rules and the parents who try to enforce them.”

— Bill Clegg, author of Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and The End of the Day

“A poetic remembrance of pain and forgiveness that rivals Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life in its power to enthrall.”

— Airmail Weekly

“Jonathan Wells's extraordinary coming-of-age memoir, The Skinny, is not only startling and heartbreaking, but each page seems somehow even more riveting and moving than the last. If you want the skinny — I mean, the real skinny — about growing up in a male body in this country it's time you read this deeply compelling and eminently wise new book.”

— David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour

“With a poet’s grace, Jonathan Wells has written a harrowing memoir about growing up severely underweight, about surviving sexual abuse by a schoolmaster — and about his tyrannical father’s determination to transform his son’s body into his own ideal of masculinity. The Skinny is a deeply haunting account of the lasting effects of emotional and physical bullying. I couldn’t put it down.”