Has that diet got you down? Maybe you need to develop a healthy fear of food.

It can be done—thanks to Alison Lurie’s ghost story “Fat People.” Lurie has taken an every day struggle that most of us have experienced—the desperate diet—and cooked up something terrifying. One of the ways she achieves this level of terror is making her dry-humored, frank heroine, Ellie (“The salads all started to have sour low-cal dressing, and there was never anything but fruit for dessert: watery melon, or oranges cut up with a few shreds of dry coconut on top, like little undernourished white worms”) someone with whom we can identify: she’s the dieting side of all of us, that voice we hear in our heads. Read this and you definitely won’t put that donut in your mouth.

“Fat People” is found in Lurie’s 1994 collection, Women & Ghosts. Click here to purchase: http://amzn.com/0385518315