MY CONFECTION

She doesn’t drink or do drugs, but like millions of others, Lisa Kotin has a substance abuse problem. A problem that she can indulge by walking into any corner store in the world or simply by walking to her pantry. Lisa Kotin is addicted to sugar. MY CONFECTION is a darkly funny and candid memoir of where sugar took this teenage mime when she left her San Francisco Bay Area home in pursuit of artistic greatness.

From the strict macrobiotic house where she is kicked out for smuggling Snickers, to her early days of Overeaters Anonymous meetings where she is bewildered by the idea of submitting to a higher power, to the stylish shrink who suggests she figure out how many minutes of tennis equal the calories in one jelly donut, to the men she unwraps and consumes like cheap chocolate bars, Kotin careens from romantic disasters to caloric catastrophes. Original and surprisingly affecting, this is a portrait of a sugar addict that has nothing to do with losing weight or getting fit but rather with coming out of the (sugar) closet, finding allies who understand, and learning how to live healthfully, in spite of her compulsion. Lisa Kotin is a writer, director, actor, and performance artist based in Los Angeles. She graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and went on to perform original shows combining physical comedy, monologues, and short films in the United States and United Kingdom. Kotin’s show Temporary Girl, which drew upon her experiences at 100+ temp jobs, is about a dysfunctional family as seen through the eyes of an office temp, and was adapted into a movie that Leonard Maltin praised as “bright and original, with the definite ring of truth.”