For Immediate Release Contact: Robert Moskowitz, 818-613-7348, Robert@CrownCommunications.net;  www.RayniJoan.com

ISBN: 978-0-9624415-4-7 

Imagine You Truly Thought You Were The Only Person In The World Suffering with a Shameful Secret. Meet Rowena Gay Wine. Meet "The Skinny."

(Santa Monica, CA - December 1, 2008) Cited as a book "worthy of note" by the Southern Review of Books, and reviewed as "an escalating journey of courage and self discovery to a personal world of healing and wellness … an inevitable winner!" (Lallouz International Magazine) is the sensational new novel "The Skinny: Adventures of America's First Bulimic," by Rayni Joan. (Also reviewed favorably by The Book Review Forum, and by BookWired.com.)

 Ms. Joan, who has lived a series of exciting adventures over the past handful of decades, has penned a rollicking great story imagined from her own early life, including her landmark "outing" of herself as a bulimic in June, 1970, when she wrote the first revelatory news article describing her own bulimia and its origins and impact on women. Her article famously dominated the pages of alternative weeklies across America and was talked about by more than a million women.

 The Skinny begins with a small girl in a small town, but journeys far and wide as its central character ("Rowena Gay Wine," say Ms. Joan, "is a brave young woman who learns from an early age how to alchemize danger and difficulty into opportunity, love, revolution, and apple pie.") explores life, sex, love, business and politics with her razor sharp senses, endless curiosity, penetrating intuition, and biting wit.

 The story tumbles headlong through one adventure after another until Rowena finds a moment of contemplation in a hospital room, where a kindly stranger (an angel?) encourages her to start spilling her guts instead of the contents of her stomach.

 Never to be forgotten, Rowena's magically moving story runs the gamut of human experience, from terror to tickling, from deep love to shallow sex, from "baby whispering" to an angelic intervention in an airplane disaster, and so much that's in between, including - yes, that's right -even a car chase! Rowena's bulimia is primary to her, but not central to the story.

 As a novel, The Skinny is a flat out great read. But many will want to think of it as a "bulimia book," in which role it's an accessible object lesson to every woman who has ever contemplated or practiced intentional purging. Although it never gets in the way of the story, the message is plain: bulimia is not just a health problem; it creates shackles of slavery every bit as powerful as any addiction out there.

 "Actually," says the author, "this novel is about making choices, and about the pain and pleasure we obtain from our choices."

 Ms. Joan is a poet, musician, actor, businesswoman, mother, minister, astrologer, shaman, cultural pioneer, and writer who is available for interviews, either by telephone or (when travel arrangements permit) in person.

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Editors: Review copies available upon request.