BOOK

My first book, Mirror, Mirror OFF the Wall: How I Learned to Love My Body by Not Looking at It for a Year is available to purchase via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Indiebound, iTunes and wherever books are sold.

DESCRIPTION

Mirror, Mirror Off the Wall: How I Learned to Love My Body by Not Looking at It for a Year tells the story of Kjerstin Gruy’s quest for personal growth and self-acceptance.  She swore off mirrors (and all reflective surfaces) for a whole year, just months before her wedding, even forgoing a final once-over before her walk down the aisle.

Written in Gruys’s hilarious and very relatable voice, Mirror, Mirror Off the Wall is her keenly observed memoir of personal growth merged with timely social commentary on our culture’s unhealthy obsession with beauty. As a recovered anorexic whose flair for fashion and curiosity about body image led her to pursue a career as a fashion merchant and later as a PhD candidate in sociology, Kjerstin Gruys found herself in a predicament as “a body-image expert with a body-image problem.” So she took matters into her own hands in a society that both prizes and stigmatizes physical beauty. Her story offers a refreshing take on what it means to cultivate a positive body image. 

REVIEWS

“Kjerstin Gruys writes with honesty, insight, and humor about her struggle to maintain sanity and self-confidence in a world where women are besieged with messages about the importance of beauty and image. Kjerstin’s story will speak to anyone who is seeking to make peace with what she sees in the mirror and discover her own inner beauty.”
—Peggy Orenstein, New York Times bestselling author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter

"Kjerstin nimbly deconstructs the internal struggle between the desire to accept ourselves and the desire to be accepted by others. Her story is an important reminder that what we see in the mirror is not just our reflection but a reflection of the society in which we live."
—Golda Poretsky, author of Stop Dieting Now: 25 Reasons To Stop, 25 Ways To Heal

“Mirror Mirror off the Wall is not just about Kjerstin Gruy's 365 day mirror-less odyssey. It's also about the psychological cataclysm that results when So-Cal bride meets feminist sociologist inside the mind and heart of the same person. Gruys grapples with the ubiquitous wedding ‘shoulds’ and puts her own body image advocacy to the ultimate test. She emerges with powerful lessons about trust, friendship, love, and being at peace with your own body.”
—Cynthia Bulik, Ph.D., FAED, Director, University of North Carolina Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders

“Would you have the courage to give up looking in the mirror for a year—including your wedding day? Kjerstin Gruys did, and in doing so, learned to question her assumptions about appearance, trust, feminism, and the wedding-industrial complex, all of which she shares in this thought-provoking and honest account of her year without mirrors.”
 —Lynn Peril, author of Pink Think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons

“Kjerstin Gruys holds a critical mirror up to weight prejudice, revealing how it distorts our lives and our society. Her year-long experiment and powerful insights point the way for people of all sizes to reject such distortions in favor of already-available fabulousness.”
—Marilyn Wann, author of Fat!so?: Because You Don’t Have to Apologize for Your Size