Product Description

As a seven-year-old child, Hilary Liftin poured herself a glass (or two) of powdered sugar. Those forbidden cups soon escalated to pound bags of candy corn and multiple packets of dry cocoa mix, launching the epic love affair between Hilary and all things sweet. In Candy and Me: A Love Story, Liftin chronicles her life through candy memories and milestones. As a high school student, Hilary used candy to get through track meets, bad hair days, after-school jobs, and her first not-so-great love. Her sweet tooth followed her to college, where she tried to suppress the crackle of Smarties wrappers in morning classes. Through life's highs and lows, her devotion has never crashed -- candy has been a constant companion and a refuge that sustained her.

As Liftin recounts her record-setting candy consumption, loves and friendships unfold in a funny and heartbreaking series of bittersweet revelations and restorative meditations. Hilary survives a profound obsession with jelly beans and a camp counselor, a forgettable fling with Skittles at a dot-com, and a messy breakup healed by a friendship forged over Circus Peanuts. Through thick and thin, sweet and sour, Hilary confronts the challenges of conversation hearts and the vagaries of boyfriends, searching for that perfect balance of love and sugar.

Written with a fresh dry humor that will immediately absorb you into Liftin's sweet obsessions and remind you of your own, Candy and Me unwraps the meaning found in the universal desire for connection and confection. Treat yourself to Candy and Me -- being bad never read so good.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #583103 in Books
• Published on: 2004-05-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

From Amazon.com
Hilary Liftin's Candy and Me (A Love Story) is not only a love story, but also the story of an otherwise normal, slender, strong-toothed woman's lifetime obsession with candy and all things sweet. With brutal honesty, Liftin exposes herself as insatiable. As a child she indulged in cups full of powdered sugar mixed with just enough water to make a paste which she ate in front of the TV, and multiple packs of hot chocolate mix, licked from her finger on her way home from school. She is a connoisseur of every candy you've ever tasted or even heard of, and of many candies you've never (and might never) come across. The friendships, love stories, and heartbreaks that make up her life story evolve through tales of candy consumption. Her memories of all major and minor life events are tightly woven with Necco Wafers, Snickers, Bottle Caps, Conversation Hearts, Circus Peanuts, Twizzler, Tootsie Rolls, Fireballs, Nonpareils, and countless others. Either you'll relate a little, or you'll relate a lot. You might be shocked by the volume of sugar she's ingested, but her story is familiar. She's made friends and lost them, she's fallen in love and had her heart broken. And then she's fallen in love again. Liftin's story is as sweet as her candy cache. --Leora Y. Bloom

From Publishers Weekly
In this charming book, Liftin, who co-authored the epistolary memoir Dear Exile, uses the intriguing conceit of telling her life story through candy. She begins with her childhood indulgence-Dixie cups of confectioner's sugar-and continues through serious connoisseurship of Smarties, Lemonheads, Fireballs, Marshmallow Eggs and dozens of other candies. Liftin is a cheerful addict, and like most addicts, she is very specific in her tastes. She loves chalky, cheap, artificially flavored dime store candies. Dark chocolate is too sophisticated for her: "If I were a dark chocolate eater, my whole life and personality would be different. I would know how to dress `office casual.' I would be better at wearing hats." Liftin describes her beloved treats so sumptuously that even those who don't relish Conversation Hearts or Candy Corn will grasp their appeal. In the chapter "I Know What You're Thinking," she blithely dismisses questions of tooth decay, diabetes and weight gain with, "I don't want to talk about any of those things." Under chapters named for candies, she details the joys of each particular sweet and what it represents about a specific time in her life. Lovers and friendships come and go, but candy never fails her. Indeed, when she meets the love of her life, the bag of hard-to-find Bottle Caps he presents her with is almost as pleasing as the engagement ring he's hidden in it. But candy finally takes its proper place-45 pounds of it, decorating tables for the couple's wedding. Liftin's writing is fluid and engaging, inviting consumption at one sitting-and, for some, instigating a mad rush to the closest candy counter.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
An entire memoir structured around the author's relationship with candy sounds like so much fluff. But Liftin turns her lifelong obsession with sugary confections into a surprisingly touching and interesting story. Her addiction began in childhood when she and her brother made a pact that, when home alone sans baby-sitter, he could postpone bedtime another hour for each sugar serving she ate, and neither would rat the other out. Most chapters are titled after a particular candy, and Liftin uses her remembrance of that treat to recall life events and reflect on what such abnormal sugar consumption has meant to her. Liftin's sugar lust has not led to either a weight problem or an eating disorder, but it has been a source of considerable joy and has helped cement bonds with friends. Along with the personal remembrances, she discusses the possibility of a genetic predisposition to sweets and how food is used to cope. Remarkably, Liftin seems to have acquired a balanced view about how to combine the joys of candy with life's sugar-free delights. Beth Leistensnider
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

The Truth Never Tasted So Sweet
Funny, sometimes wistful, and surprisingly thought-provoking. For Hilary and me it's candy; for others it's various substances that fortify and amuse. This well-written self-examination packs a much bigger message than you might expect.

I enjoyed reading it while killing a couple of half-pound bars of Cadbury Milk Chocolate.

This book is a yummy delight!
A humorous yet at times poignant account of one woman's life, loves, and confectionary favorites, from her childhood addiction to a homemade sugar paste, to junior mints, to Petite Fruits, Jelly Fruit Wedges, and frosting eaten straight from the can (I thought I was the only one who did that!) A factual account that is as entertaining as any fiction story i have come across. I recommend it highly. A real sweetie of a book!

NOT recommended.
This is such a dopey, pointless book. Some people want their names in print, regardless of how trivial the reason, and this is a good example of that. Maybe this would have been an okay magazine article but to try and stretch it into a whole book is tedious. You end up saying, who cares, and why did I bother? The author's feeble attempt to link her family history and romantic foibles with her love of candy is basically ridiculous. I can't recommend this book to anyone. Eat some candy instead.