Wendy McClure went to her first literary reading as a freshman at the University of Iowa in 1989. The Oak Park native had come to hear poet James Tate. But first she had to listen to Meg Wolitzer read from her novel This Is Your Life, which was being made into a film directed by Nora Ephron.
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“At the time I was at Iowa I thought the stuff I was doing was really important,” says McClure, who got her MFA in poetry from the Writers’ Workshop there. “But I don’t think it was anything different from what a lot of other people were doing. I think I have much more of a sense now that the stuff I’m writing fills a need. Just saying things about weight-loss culture that haven’t really been said before–there wasn’t really anything. There were Cathy cartoons and the whole Oprah culture, but I couldn’t relate to that.”
McClure, who works as a children’s book editor, planned to write poetry and teach writing after graduation. Then, in the fall of 1998, she bought a 13-inch TV for her tiny Lincoln Square apartment. “I’d just given up on the idea I was going to be a poet and wouldn’t have a TV,” she says. She wound up in a love-hate relationship with Dawson’s Creek, and after scouting the Internet, started posting on a fans’ bulletin board called Dawson’s Wrap. When the site sponsored an essay contest about the show, she submitted an entry on a whim. “I thought, ‘This is so stupid. Why am I doing this?’ Because it wasn’t going to get me anywhere that was going to pay me money or anything. But it was fun being funny, and I hadn’t really tried that before. The poetry I’d written at Iowa was not funny.”
McClure made some halfhearted stabs at the book, but not much happened until the middle of March 2003. That’s when she got ahold of her parents’ old scanner and posted some of her mother’s Weight Watchers recipe cards from the 70s: Fluffy Mackerel Pudding, Frozen Cheese Salad, Liver Pate en Masque. By the end of the week her cards and wry commentary had been mentioned on Dave Barry’s blog and in USA Today. Soon she was fielding offers from ad agencies, TV producers, and greeting-card companies.
McClure suspects her twentysomething self would not be entirely pleased with where her blog has taken her. “I’d thought I’d do more critical essays and be writing a lot about body image in our culture and stuff like that. But I think the whole thing with the Weight Watchers cards pushed it over into the category where people were going to want the funny stuff.
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