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Published 9/20/05

Adolescence is awkward enough without being seen as "the fat kid" in high school.

Peter Marino of Saratoga Springs knows from personal experience how hard life can be for a young overweight kid, and he's tapped the memory of his teenage angst to write a compelling novel for young adults.

"Dough Boy," Marino's first book, is written in the voice of 15-year-old Tristan, a perceptive, sarcastic kid who is trying hard navigate his way through 10th grade without being noticed. He's overweight, and heavily self-conscious about it. What he doesn't realize is that he's also quite funny.

"I wanted to try to capture that sense of a kid who's very self-conscious because he doesn't look the way he's supposed to look, but through his experiences he starts to develop a sense of individuality," Marino said. "He learns about what individual truth is, versus generic truth."

Tristan's parents are newly divorced, which adds another emotional layer to the plot. He lives with his mother and her boyfriend, an affable guy named Frank whose own carefree attitude toward his weight is a relief to Tristan.
But then Frank's hyper-nutrition-conscious teenage daughter, Kelly, joins the household. And things get worse when Kelly starts dating Tristan's best friend.

Kelly's exuberance for fitness and tactless comments about Tristan's weight are painful to read, but Marino's not pulling them out of thin air. He created Kelly's character as a composite of real people he's encountered, Marino said, and an incarnation of the "war on childhood obesity" that he sees in popular culture.

"Very often, when we hear doctors and nutritionists talk about obesity, they make it sort of black and white," he said, "and there doesn't seem to be any sense of the idea that people come in all shapes and sizes."

He's concerned, he said, that campaigns against obesity are actually "making it harder for fat kids, by making them more anxious and more conspicuous."

Marino, 45, has tried writing books before, but he couldn't get published, he said, because he was approaching the process in the wrong way. After reading a book on writing by Anne Lamott a few years ago, Marino said it hit him that: "Writing is important for its own sake, not because it might sell." He needed more than a good idea; he needed a subject that contained a personal truth.

"I started thinking back, and remembered that I was never more self-conscious than in the last few years of high school," Marino said. "It seems to me that it's how a kid looks that most affects how he is treated by his peers, more than political persuasion or even sexual orientation."

Reflecting on his own embarrassing experiences as a teen gave Marino a window into Tristan's fictional world.

Marino wrote the "very, very rough" first draft of "Dough Boy" in four weeks in 2001, over a winter break from his job as an English professor at Adirondack Community College. It took four more years before the book became a printed reality, but "Dough Boy" was published this month by Holiday House and will be released in bookstores Oct. 15.
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