I am not sure what if any real impression this book made on me. The second story was kind of a throw-away one altogether, but I thought the main story was a perfectly interesting and adequate one.
When I was a teenager, I was fat. And as an adult, I was too for a long time. Just like maybe I do now with money-issues, even though I get by, I would spend a lot of time thinking about what would happen if all my weight-issues would be solved in one fell swoop. I tried to lose weight about a 1000 times in about 1000 different ways. Of course, I was missing the core issue: I was unhappy in my family and I used food as medication to that unhappiness. I still do, but I am better at recognizing my patterns and somewhat better at moderating what I decide to gorge myself on when it happens. So all told, even if I had been able to magically make my weight disappear I would have simply transferred my unhappy feelings onto something else. I wasn’t a musician and I am terrified of drugs (of course, except weight loss drugs), so who knows what that would have been. Actually, I do know because that’s what happened when I got older and did lose weight.
Anyway, what this story is is a good exploration about what would happen if you were able to give into those dark impulses to “fix” the things you hate about yourself, the cost be damned.