She has also designed plus size clothing under her own label. 'Café Eighties' began as a photocopied 'zine that Brittingham laid out on her living room floor when she folded the publication, it was a nationally-distributed glossy sold in most bookstore chains. Also during the '90s she published 'Café Eighties' magazine, for which she tracked down and interviewed entertainers from her favorite pop culture decade. In the 1990s she founded and operated 'Philadelphia Dial-a-Poet', a free service providing recordings of poetry by telephone. She wrote the book on her lunch break - on a second-hand laptop, in 45-minute increments, in the office lunch room.įor most of her adult life, Brittingham has made a habit of launching creative projects. 'Read My Hips', Brittingham's first published book, was written when she worked as a patent prosecution legal assistant. She co-authored her first novel with her best friend in junior high school - a thriller about an English pop group with a curious resemblance to Duran Duran. Brittingham wrote, illustrated and stapled together her first picture book at the age of six. Her memoir 'Read My Hips' was inspired by an essay of the same name that appeared on iVillage.

She wrote about her experience in 'Read My Hips'.Īlthough she's been publishing her creative writing in literary journals since the early 1990s, Brittingham's writing first gained widespread attention when she started writing for the internet - personal essays for web sites like iVillage, Salon and Fresh Yarn. She created a mock self-help book jacket with the title, 'Fat is Contagious: How Sitting Next to a Fat Person Can Make YOU Fat', wrapped it around a real book, and pretended to read it while riding the buses of New York City. Kim Brittingham is the author of the memoir, 'Read My Hips: How I Learned to Love My Body, Ditch Dieting and Live Large' (Three Rivers Press, May 2011) and 'Write That Memoir Right Now! (AudioGo, January 2013).īrittingham was first interviewed on the Today Show and NPR in February 2008 after she conducted an informal social experiment on public transportation.

Read My Hips by Kim Brittingham