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Don't Buy What I'm Selling
Part memoir, part manifesto, this is the story of a woman determined to go deep inside a business she was raised to hate, so she could save the world – and herself – through advertising. What could possibly go wrong?
As a high-level advertising creative director for 14 years, Lu Chekowsky willed inanimate objects to life and made people want to buy stuff they didn’t need. Her colleagues called her “Mary Manifesto” because she could whip up an emotional ad campaign like no one else. Need someone to channel Michael Jordan so people will line up and buy his latest sneaker? That’s Lu. Need to convince a cranky teen heartthrob to take his shirt off for an ad designed to get teenage girls across America to swoon? That’s her too. It was a regular workday when she made same-day cross-country trips between New York and LA to satisfy the CEOs who counted on her to pump up their profits—ignoring her own voice and using it in service of their company’s bottom line. Chekowsky was great at her job because she’d trained for it her whole life. She'd gotten the memo about how worthless her body was at moving products—because she was the one who wrote it.
As someone whose body was always far from what the world held up as ideal, Chekowsky grew up trying to find a place where she could fit in. Everywhere she looked, the images she saw were designed to make girls feel terrible. The only person who could make her feel worthy was her larger-than-life mom; but even that was complicated when her mother got sick with cancer when she was just eleven years old. For years, Chekowsky tried to look past what it felt like to be underestimated by her male colleagues, the 14-hour work days spent satisfying the demands of the latest celebrity/boss/pop star/social media app, and her work that required her to, every day, perpetuate unrealistic beauty standards, before she went home and binged alone on bags of takeout.
Don't Buy What I'm Selling is a dishy peek behind the curtain of a billion-dollar industry, but it's also the journey of one former ad executive who lived a life of contradictions—until she couldn't anymore. With honesty and heart, interspersed with behind-the-scenes looks at the real-world tactics brands use to prey on consumers, it is perfect for readers of Roxane Gay, Aubrey Gordon, and Lori Gottlieb—and anyone who’s bought a product from an Instagram ad and instantly regretted it.
As a high-level advertising creative director for 14 years, Lu Chekowsky willed inanimate objects to life and made people want to buy stuff they didn’t need. Her colleagues called her “Mary Manifesto” because she could whip up an emotional ad campaign like no one else. Need someone to channel Michael Jordan so people will line up and buy his latest sneaker? That’s Lu. Need to convince a cranky teen heartthrob to take his shirt off for an ad designed to get teenage girls across America to swoon? That’s her too. It was a regular workday when she made same-day cross-country trips between New York and LA to satisfy the CEOs who counted on her to pump up their profits—ignoring her own voice and using it in service of their company’s bottom line. Chekowsky was great at her job because she’d trained for it her whole life. She'd gotten the memo about how worthless her body was at moving products—because she was the one who wrote it.
As someone whose body was always far from what the world held up as ideal, Chekowsky grew up trying to find a place where she could fit in. Everywhere she looked, the images she saw were designed to make girls feel terrible. The only person who could make her feel worthy was her larger-than-life mom; but even that was complicated when her mother got sick with cancer when she was just eleven years old. For years, Chekowsky tried to look past what it felt like to be underestimated by her male colleagues, the 14-hour work days spent satisfying the demands of the latest celebrity/boss/pop star/social media app, and her work that required her to, every day, perpetuate unrealistic beauty standards, before she went home and binged alone on bags of takeout.
Don't Buy What I'm Selling is a dishy peek behind the curtain of a billion-dollar industry, but it's also the journey of one former ad executive who lived a life of contradictions—until she couldn't anymore. With honesty and heart, interspersed with behind-the-scenes looks at the real-world tactics brands use to prey on consumers, it is perfect for readers of Roxane Gay, Aubrey Gordon, and Lori Gottlieb—and anyone who’s bought a product from an Instagram ad and instantly regretted it.
- GenresNonfictionMemoir
556 pages, Paperback
Published June 9, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
Did Not Finish
June 25, 2026Me on This Book in Eight Ironic English Words: Food doesn't make fat people sick; trauma does.
Rating: DNF @ p186
"Suddenly, a country I’d never visited—my body— declared war, and I didn’t know how to fight back, because I knew nothing about it. I never learned my body’s national flower or song. I never studied its terrain or learned its number-one imports or exports. The country existed right under the border of my neck, but I was fully ignorant of its laws and governance. I was sure we existed in two different places entirely and in different time zones." p183
In Short: This is a very sad book. Not that I'm against sad books, but the author's pain and her sharp humor combine to make her mean and judgmental. I can relate, but I didn't find it a pleasant read. She oddly feels the need to point her sarcasm out at times, but it's not necessary. Her humor is consistent.
(TW: cancer, fatphobia) I stopped reading when the author started blaming an entire bankroll of health disorders on her fat body. And blamed her mother's fat body for killing her, when it was actually breast cancer. Someone doesn't understand how pathology works.
Also, it's a memoir. It does not need to be over 400 pages. It drags. Here it is in a capsule: Successful marketer judges everything that moves but isn't capable of self reflection. Glad I could save you some time.
Preread: A marketer who talks about bodies. Worth a shot.
Thank you NetGalley and publisher for the arc!📚
"Content Warnings:"
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
internalized fatphobia, self-loathing, anti-Semitism (descriptions of), violence against children, childhood trauma, verbal abuse, fatphobia, pathologizing weight, internalized ableism,
Rating: DNF @ p186
"Suddenly, a country I’d never visited—my body— declared war, and I didn’t know how to fight back, because I knew nothing about it. I never learned my body’s national flower or song. I never studied its terrain or learned its number-one imports or exports. The country existed right under the border of my neck, but I was fully ignorant of its laws and governance. I was sure we existed in two different places entirely and in different time zones." p183
In Short: This is a very sad book. Not that I'm against sad books, but the author's pain and her sharp humor combine to make her mean and judgmental. I can relate, but I didn't find it a pleasant read. She oddly feels the need to point her sarcasm out at times, but it's not necessary. Her humor is consistent.
(TW: cancer, fatphobia) I stopped reading when the author started blaming an entire bankroll of health disorders on her fat body. And blamed her mother's fat body for killing her, when it was actually breast cancer. Someone doesn't understand how pathology works.
Also, it's a memoir. It does not need to be over 400 pages. It drags. Here it is in a capsule: Successful marketer judges everything that moves but isn't capable of self reflection. Glad I could save you some time.
Preread: A marketer who talks about bodies. Worth a shot.
Thank you NetGalley and publisher for the arc!📚
"Content Warnings:"
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
internalized fatphobia, self-loathing, anti-Semitism (descriptions of), violence against children, childhood trauma, verbal abuse, fatphobia, pathologizing weight, internalized ableism,
July 6, 2026
DNF @ 15% - For this to be a fat positive book, there is waaaay too much body hatred to continue to read this. I wanted to love this one.
June 21, 2026
Raw, honest, vulnerable, eye-opening, tragic, hilarious, insightful, wise and wonderful. Run, don’t walk, to get your copy from your local bookstore!
June 23, 2026
Want to be welcomed into someone’s life with more vulnerability and hilarity than you think you can handle? Want to get the snaky low-down on how advertising and capitalism finish each other’s sentences? The heart-breaking/heart-mending life in question that doubles as conduit to the advertising insider info you didn’t even know you wanted to know about is expertly captured in Lu Chekowsky’ Don’t Buy What I’m Selling: On Breaking Up with Advertising and Finally Learning to Love My Whole, Fat Self. This absolutely hilarious and beautifully crafted memoir will relate to so many of us on a generational level, especially us X’ers. Lu has written a gracious and illuminating meditation on the evils of our messed up world and the gorgeous power of learning how to care for yourself inside its slimy walls. All the stars—so highly recommended xo
June 18, 2026
Oh, but do BUY THIS BOOK! If the title, tagline, and cover design pulled you in, you might love this brilliant memoir as much as I did. Having grown up saturated in the same advertising-as-pop-culture landscape, I laughed out loud at her hilarious observations, vivid storytelling and adventures as a woman in advertising. And her career arc is not what you might expect – it’s a wild ride from the start. But this is also a heartbreaking story about how the grief over her mother’s death contributed to a serious eating disorder that almost killed her. The connections she makes between her self-destructive eating, her mom, and her career are deeply insightful. Many chapters seemed to end with a kind of cliffhanger – how would she manage to make it out alive this time? But you root for her the whole way. Inspiring and relatable to any woman who's dealt with self-worth issues, depression, and navigating our patriarchal culture.
June 30, 2026
There could have been a good book in here. Lu discusses being a phone sex operator while working in advertising or how she wanted to create ad space that was respectful to women. Both of these would have been a better read. The book just centered about how she was fat and she hated/judged people who weren’t fat. If I ever were to meet the author, I would love to tell her that no one cares how big she is AND that being smaller means a person is stupid.
Do not recommend.
Do not recommend.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
A Body With a Byline at Last
Lu Chekowsky’s “Don’t Buy What I’m Selling” is a funny, furious, and finely observed memoir about advertising, appetite, grief, and the long road back to one’s own voice.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | May 26th, 2026
A shoe issues a dare. A face wash offers mercy in a bottle. A cable network turns lust into scheduling strategy. A platform promises to bring the world closer together, then sells that closeness in fractions of a cent. Nobody is meant to picture the person who wrote the line, the room where it was sweetened or stripped for parts, the client who wanted more emotion but less liability, the retoucher shaving a champion athlete’s thigh into marketable femininity, or the copywriter eating dumplings alone while turning private fury into public brand courage.
Lu Chekowsky’s “Don’t Buy What I’m Selling” is about that missing byline – and about the long, costly apprenticeship required for one woman to stop lending her voice to things with no pulse.
Advertising is the baited lure; Chekowsky is after the barb. The book begins where the campaign ends: with the invoice slipped under the door. Rose, crab legs, unpaid labor, body shame, corporate belief, and copy that outlives its writer all come due. Chekowsky moves from bankruptcy, phone-sex work, and ambition without a socket into Wieden+Kennedy’s experimental school, then the agency itself, then MTV, Comedy Central, and Facebook. She helps sell sneakers, teen heartthrobs, reality-show rituals, celebrity redemption, basic-cable irreverence, branded benevolence, and the logo-lit promise that if an image shines hard enough, it might become a life.
The memoir does not linger in the glamorous backstage. It checks the trash after the shoot wraps. Its preferred evidence is the mess just outside the frame: sludge, bile, tater tots, Lucite trophies, surgical mesh, stale bagels, swollen feet, and the emotional sewage that never makes it into the hero spot.
Chekowsky’s best suspicion is not that advertising lies. That is the free sample. It is that advertising names the bruise, then sells the bandage. “LIVESTRONG” offers grief a yellow plastic bracelet. Dove opens the door to “real beauty” while SlimFast keeps the other door cheerfully operational. Lipogems, late in the book, recasts fat – the supposed lifelong defect – as a source of healing once fat becomes the thing for sale. Chekowsky can spot the con and still feel the con working on her. That double vision gives the memoir its bite.
Rose, Chekowsky’s mother, is the operating system underneath the whole book. Funny, fat, sick, profane, devotional, and spiritually louder in death than many living characters in other memoirs, Rose teaches her daughter to mistrust the pitch while leaving her with hungers no slogan can satisfy. Chekowsky grows up loving and distrusting the images that instruct her in the acceptable uses of a woman’s body. She knows the cream will not fix her. She knows the bracelet will not resurrect anyone. She knows the body in the ad is not the body anyone gets to keep. Still, she wants the talisman. Everyone does, in the right mood, under the right lighting, with the right music swelling underneath.
The Wieden+Kennedy chapters are the book’s humid initiation. Chekowsky arrives in Portland on April Fool’s Day, black-clad, broke, bereaved, and convinced that this school inside an agency might turn her life into something with a title. The office is church, gym, frat house, museum, cult compound, and creative monastery, sometimes within the same staircase. Dan Wieden becomes mentor, father figure, wizard, and dangerous source of belief. Jelly Helm becomes the high priest of risk and “culture,” that glowing office spell that can mean genuine voltage, mandatory surrender with better snacks, and a tarp thrown over mold.
Chekowsky is best on the moment virtue learns to speak fluent brand. Nike Women’s “If You Let Me Play” gives a young Chekowsky language for the possibility that an ad might honor a girl rather than reduce her. She wants to believe in advertising with a conscience and a quarterly target because disbelief would leave her with no myth, no ladder, no job, no way out. Her own grand counter-brand, Heart New York, “an advertising agency that respects women,” is half prophecy, half deck with a manifesto where the business plan should be. The dream is noble. It is also structurally doomed. Chekowsky wants to make ads that tell women they are perfect as they are, then sell them the products that will help them become that perfection. The contradiction is not a gotcha. It is the business model wearing a flower crown.
Her prose sweats through its blazer. The sentences unspool as if trying to outrun humiliation while stopping every few feet to pick up a better prop: a frozen burrito, a QVC miracle product, a bloody binder, a corporate slogan, a three-foot tarot card of The Fool. The vocabulary keeps changing outfits: office slang, therapy language, body comedy, media jargon, grief confession, commercial parody. A punchline often functions like a trapdoor. You laugh, then land in the basement.
The sentences behave like appetite: they want, confess, joke, overfill, and reach again. That spillover is also the necessary reservation. Chekowsky can be exhilaratingly excessive, but she sometimes captions her own evidence after the scene has already testified. Douglas’s exposed “Monkey Brains,” the retouched athlete’s thigh, the Jordan voiceover, Bieber’s bleeding chest, the Facebook mission film, the Lipogems brochure – these are essays in miniature. A few need less escorting. Yet even this abundance belongs to the weather of the book. A memoir about bingeing, overwork, grief, surveillance, corporate indoctrination, and commercial saturation was never going to arrive as a slim, serene object with a cucumber slice over each eye. Its excess can tire; it also tells.
The book’s ad-school skeleton is more cunning than its riffing surface first admits. The parts are organized around advertising terms: rebrand, conversion, return on investment, cut to black, postmortem. These headings turn a life into a campaign after-action report. Chekowsky is rebranded by Wieden+Kennedy, converted into a source of profit, rewarded with proximity to fame, broken by the systems she serves, and finally forced to conduct an autopsy on the whole production. The mock ads and script fragments are not garnish. They show that advertising has not merely employed her imagination; it has rewired its native tongue. Even healing becomes HEALING™, complete with side effects, subscription logic, and the voiceover sprint that tells you the cure is not available because a cure would ruin the category.
The thesis in motion arrives in the “Look Me in the Eye” sequence, when Chekowsky, long treated as too fat, too female, too unsporty, and too much herself to understand athletic greatness, helps create a Jordan campaign. She takes the rage of being underestimated and turns it into copy that sounds like competitive destiny. The ad succeeds. The line travels. It is eventually attributed to Michael Jordan. That is the book in one brutal theft with applause. Chekowsky’s words can become famous as long as they leave her body first. Her voice is valuable. Her mouth is the problem.
The MTV chapters glitter because they give Chekowsky a cleaner fantasy: not selling objects, but selling swoon. There, she learns to manufacture the teen-girl crush, to turn a young actor into a wolf-boy weather system, to watch Tumblr and Twitter light up because of a desire she helped stage. Chekowsky understands the holy unseriousness of the heartthrob from the inside. She remembers the poster on the bedroom wall, the one-sided love that can carry a lonely girl through an afternoon, the boy who will never love you back and may still help you survive. At MTV, she can believe she has left advertising behind. Cleaner words help. They are still not clean.
Comedy Central sharpens the bargain. At MTV, desire can pass as fun. At Comedy Central, cruelty keeps asking to be called humor. Chekowsky approves promos with titles like “FAT PUSSY:15” and sits in rooms where men mistake boner weather for professional rapport. Her account of making Trevor Noah laugh after an executive’s “big erections” joke poisons a meeting is one of the book’s best workplace scenes because it catches the peril of being funny in a room built to consume funny people. She wins the moment with a callback and knows she will pay for it. “Take a joke” becomes one of the memoir’s ugliest commandments. Taking the joke often means applauding your own diminishment so nobody else has to feel rude.
The Justin Bieber roast campaign pushes this logic into slapstick horror. Chekowsky helps produce an ad in which eggs are blasted at Bieber’s torso as comic punishment for his vandalism scandal. The machinery of redemption requires humiliation; the celebrity product must be damaged just enough to prove he can take it, not enough to reduce his value. Then an eggshell cuts him and blood appears. The set freezes. Bieber is no longer an image but a person, which, for everyone involved, is a crisis of production. In this business, bodies are sacred only when they are profitable.
By the time Facebook arrives, the old advertising world – bracelets, billboards, bad men in conference rooms – looks almost artisanal. Chekowsky’s Menlo Park chapters are startup gothic with plumbing trouble: free snacks, shuttles, slogans, internal feeds, health services, mission films, glassy optimism, and the eerie cheer of a company that tells workers to bring their authentic selves to work while training them to become dashboards. The company wants her imagination, attention, location, metrics, feelings, wrists.
Her hands go numb.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal enters not as a policy lecture but as pressure on the nervous system. Chekowsky has spent years making persuasion more emotional. Now she is inside a machine that has made persuasion more intimate, faster, less visible, and harder to refuse. The most telling Facebook scene may be the employee film about a family helped by the platform. It has soft music, careful light, suffering, connection, uplift, and the logo arriving like grace. Chekowsky sees the good it depicts and the lighting rig around the goodness. It is Lance Armstrong all over again: brand as redeemer, capitalism with a hand on your shoulder.
The body mutinies against the tidy recovery arc. Chekowsky leaves Facebook on short-term disability, moves upstate, imagines a tasteful wellness montage with matcha, tarot, wildflowers, and high-end pens, then lands in emergency surgery for an incarcerated hernia. A surgeon tells her that if she wants to live, she has to lose weight. In lesser hands, this could become punishment or uplift. Chekowsky makes it stranger. Her fat has broken into a room where it does not belong, much as she has been doing all her life. Her body, ignored for decades, has staged a coup. Its message is not inspirational. It is logistical, furious, overdue.
The late Lipogems episode gives the memoir one of its slyest reversals. In a doctor’s office, Chekowsky finds a brochure for a treatment that uses a patient’s own fat to help heal damaged joints. After a lifetime of being told fat is the worst thing about her, she meets an ad that recasts fat as restorative, precious, useful. Fat as medicine once fat has a SKU. Of course the revelation comes through marketing. Of course she sees through it and half-believes it anyway. That is the joke and the wound. Advertising can make anything valuable when the thing is for sale. Still, some part of her needed to hear that the supposedly worst part of her might contain repair.
Rose returns here not as memory but as matter. Chekowsky’s fatness is never allowed to be only a symbol, a diagnosis, a political position, or a self-love obstacle course. It is inheritance, rebellion, memorial, disguise, protest, armor, wound. Food is not merely excess. It is language with nowhere else to go. Crab legs, dumplings, FreshDirect boxes, ice cream, tater tots: the menu is also a transcript. The gallbladder, hands, jaw, stomach, mesh, and knees all keep the minutes.
There is no victory lap, no after photo, no body stepping from behind a curtain in white jeans. In the postmortem, Chekowsky remains fat, funny, in pain, healthier, unhealed, and alive. The change is authorship. After years of writing as if she were a shoe, a network, a platform, a celebrity, a brand with a budget and no body, she begins writing as herself. Dan Wieden’s old line about Nike discovering the power of its own voice gets turned inside out. Nike never had a voice. Companies do not. People do.
The book’s repossession is simple and radical: Chekowsky stops ghostwriting for objects and signs her own name. She writes about participation without trying to rinse herself clean. She helped make the culture that hurt her; she was hurt before she arrived; both facts remain true. The memoir earns its anger because it keeps evidence close. It earns its comedy because the jokes cost something. It earns its tenderness because it does not ask tenderness to behave prettily.
I land at 88/100, which maps to 4/5 Goodreads stars: a distinctive, emotionally forceful, formally alert memoir whose most electric passages outweigh its occasional over-explaining and repetition. Its best pages perform the old trick without the old theft: they make a feeling sticky enough to outlive the campaign. The difference is that now the feeling has a byline, a body, and a woman beside it, keeping the microphone in her own hand.
Lu Chekowsky’s “Don’t Buy What I’m Selling” is a funny, furious, and finely observed memoir about advertising, appetite, grief, and the long road back to one’s own voice.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | May 26th, 2026
A shoe issues a dare. A face wash offers mercy in a bottle. A cable network turns lust into scheduling strategy. A platform promises to bring the world closer together, then sells that closeness in fractions of a cent. Nobody is meant to picture the person who wrote the line, the room where it was sweetened or stripped for parts, the client who wanted more emotion but less liability, the retoucher shaving a champion athlete’s thigh into marketable femininity, or the copywriter eating dumplings alone while turning private fury into public brand courage.
Lu Chekowsky’s “Don’t Buy What I’m Selling” is about that missing byline – and about the long, costly apprenticeship required for one woman to stop lending her voice to things with no pulse.
Advertising is the baited lure; Chekowsky is after the barb. The book begins where the campaign ends: with the invoice slipped under the door. Rose, crab legs, unpaid labor, body shame, corporate belief, and copy that outlives its writer all come due. Chekowsky moves from bankruptcy, phone-sex work, and ambition without a socket into Wieden+Kennedy’s experimental school, then the agency itself, then MTV, Comedy Central, and Facebook. She helps sell sneakers, teen heartthrobs, reality-show rituals, celebrity redemption, basic-cable irreverence, branded benevolence, and the logo-lit promise that if an image shines hard enough, it might become a life.
The memoir does not linger in the glamorous backstage. It checks the trash after the shoot wraps. Its preferred evidence is the mess just outside the frame: sludge, bile, tater tots, Lucite trophies, surgical mesh, stale bagels, swollen feet, and the emotional sewage that never makes it into the hero spot.
Chekowsky’s best suspicion is not that advertising lies. That is the free sample. It is that advertising names the bruise, then sells the bandage. “LIVESTRONG” offers grief a yellow plastic bracelet. Dove opens the door to “real beauty” while SlimFast keeps the other door cheerfully operational. Lipogems, late in the book, recasts fat – the supposed lifelong defect – as a source of healing once fat becomes the thing for sale. Chekowsky can spot the con and still feel the con working on her. That double vision gives the memoir its bite.
Rose, Chekowsky’s mother, is the operating system underneath the whole book. Funny, fat, sick, profane, devotional, and spiritually louder in death than many living characters in other memoirs, Rose teaches her daughter to mistrust the pitch while leaving her with hungers no slogan can satisfy. Chekowsky grows up loving and distrusting the images that instruct her in the acceptable uses of a woman’s body. She knows the cream will not fix her. She knows the bracelet will not resurrect anyone. She knows the body in the ad is not the body anyone gets to keep. Still, she wants the talisman. Everyone does, in the right mood, under the right lighting, with the right music swelling underneath.
The Wieden+Kennedy chapters are the book’s humid initiation. Chekowsky arrives in Portland on April Fool’s Day, black-clad, broke, bereaved, and convinced that this school inside an agency might turn her life into something with a title. The office is church, gym, frat house, museum, cult compound, and creative monastery, sometimes within the same staircase. Dan Wieden becomes mentor, father figure, wizard, and dangerous source of belief. Jelly Helm becomes the high priest of risk and “culture,” that glowing office spell that can mean genuine voltage, mandatory surrender with better snacks, and a tarp thrown over mold.
Chekowsky is best on the moment virtue learns to speak fluent brand. Nike Women’s “If You Let Me Play” gives a young Chekowsky language for the possibility that an ad might honor a girl rather than reduce her. She wants to believe in advertising with a conscience and a quarterly target because disbelief would leave her with no myth, no ladder, no job, no way out. Her own grand counter-brand, Heart New York, “an advertising agency that respects women,” is half prophecy, half deck with a manifesto where the business plan should be. The dream is noble. It is also structurally doomed. Chekowsky wants to make ads that tell women they are perfect as they are, then sell them the products that will help them become that perfection. The contradiction is not a gotcha. It is the business model wearing a flower crown.
Her prose sweats through its blazer. The sentences unspool as if trying to outrun humiliation while stopping every few feet to pick up a better prop: a frozen burrito, a QVC miracle product, a bloody binder, a corporate slogan, a three-foot tarot card of The Fool. The vocabulary keeps changing outfits: office slang, therapy language, body comedy, media jargon, grief confession, commercial parody. A punchline often functions like a trapdoor. You laugh, then land in the basement.
The sentences behave like appetite: they want, confess, joke, overfill, and reach again. That spillover is also the necessary reservation. Chekowsky can be exhilaratingly excessive, but she sometimes captions her own evidence after the scene has already testified. Douglas’s exposed “Monkey Brains,” the retouched athlete’s thigh, the Jordan voiceover, Bieber’s bleeding chest, the Facebook mission film, the Lipogems brochure – these are essays in miniature. A few need less escorting. Yet even this abundance belongs to the weather of the book. A memoir about bingeing, overwork, grief, surveillance, corporate indoctrination, and commercial saturation was never going to arrive as a slim, serene object with a cucumber slice over each eye. Its excess can tire; it also tells.
The book’s ad-school skeleton is more cunning than its riffing surface first admits. The parts are organized around advertising terms: rebrand, conversion, return on investment, cut to black, postmortem. These headings turn a life into a campaign after-action report. Chekowsky is rebranded by Wieden+Kennedy, converted into a source of profit, rewarded with proximity to fame, broken by the systems she serves, and finally forced to conduct an autopsy on the whole production. The mock ads and script fragments are not garnish. They show that advertising has not merely employed her imagination; it has rewired its native tongue. Even healing becomes HEALING™, complete with side effects, subscription logic, and the voiceover sprint that tells you the cure is not available because a cure would ruin the category.
The thesis in motion arrives in the “Look Me in the Eye” sequence, when Chekowsky, long treated as too fat, too female, too unsporty, and too much herself to understand athletic greatness, helps create a Jordan campaign. She takes the rage of being underestimated and turns it into copy that sounds like competitive destiny. The ad succeeds. The line travels. It is eventually attributed to Michael Jordan. That is the book in one brutal theft with applause. Chekowsky’s words can become famous as long as they leave her body first. Her voice is valuable. Her mouth is the problem.
The MTV chapters glitter because they give Chekowsky a cleaner fantasy: not selling objects, but selling swoon. There, she learns to manufacture the teen-girl crush, to turn a young actor into a wolf-boy weather system, to watch Tumblr and Twitter light up because of a desire she helped stage. Chekowsky understands the holy unseriousness of the heartthrob from the inside. She remembers the poster on the bedroom wall, the one-sided love that can carry a lonely girl through an afternoon, the boy who will never love you back and may still help you survive. At MTV, she can believe she has left advertising behind. Cleaner words help. They are still not clean.
Comedy Central sharpens the bargain. At MTV, desire can pass as fun. At Comedy Central, cruelty keeps asking to be called humor. Chekowsky approves promos with titles like “FAT PUSSY:15” and sits in rooms where men mistake boner weather for professional rapport. Her account of making Trevor Noah laugh after an executive’s “big erections” joke poisons a meeting is one of the book’s best workplace scenes because it catches the peril of being funny in a room built to consume funny people. She wins the moment with a callback and knows she will pay for it. “Take a joke” becomes one of the memoir’s ugliest commandments. Taking the joke often means applauding your own diminishment so nobody else has to feel rude.
The Justin Bieber roast campaign pushes this logic into slapstick horror. Chekowsky helps produce an ad in which eggs are blasted at Bieber’s torso as comic punishment for his vandalism scandal. The machinery of redemption requires humiliation; the celebrity product must be damaged just enough to prove he can take it, not enough to reduce his value. Then an eggshell cuts him and blood appears. The set freezes. Bieber is no longer an image but a person, which, for everyone involved, is a crisis of production. In this business, bodies are sacred only when they are profitable.
By the time Facebook arrives, the old advertising world – bracelets, billboards, bad men in conference rooms – looks almost artisanal. Chekowsky’s Menlo Park chapters are startup gothic with plumbing trouble: free snacks, shuttles, slogans, internal feeds, health services, mission films, glassy optimism, and the eerie cheer of a company that tells workers to bring their authentic selves to work while training them to become dashboards. The company wants her imagination, attention, location, metrics, feelings, wrists.
Her hands go numb.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal enters not as a policy lecture but as pressure on the nervous system. Chekowsky has spent years making persuasion more emotional. Now she is inside a machine that has made persuasion more intimate, faster, less visible, and harder to refuse. The most telling Facebook scene may be the employee film about a family helped by the platform. It has soft music, careful light, suffering, connection, uplift, and the logo arriving like grace. Chekowsky sees the good it depicts and the lighting rig around the goodness. It is Lance Armstrong all over again: brand as redeemer, capitalism with a hand on your shoulder.
The body mutinies against the tidy recovery arc. Chekowsky leaves Facebook on short-term disability, moves upstate, imagines a tasteful wellness montage with matcha, tarot, wildflowers, and high-end pens, then lands in emergency surgery for an incarcerated hernia. A surgeon tells her that if she wants to live, she has to lose weight. In lesser hands, this could become punishment or uplift. Chekowsky makes it stranger. Her fat has broken into a room where it does not belong, much as she has been doing all her life. Her body, ignored for decades, has staged a coup. Its message is not inspirational. It is logistical, furious, overdue.
The late Lipogems episode gives the memoir one of its slyest reversals. In a doctor’s office, Chekowsky finds a brochure for a treatment that uses a patient’s own fat to help heal damaged joints. After a lifetime of being told fat is the worst thing about her, she meets an ad that recasts fat as restorative, precious, useful. Fat as medicine once fat has a SKU. Of course the revelation comes through marketing. Of course she sees through it and half-believes it anyway. That is the joke and the wound. Advertising can make anything valuable when the thing is for sale. Still, some part of her needed to hear that the supposedly worst part of her might contain repair.
Rose returns here not as memory but as matter. Chekowsky’s fatness is never allowed to be only a symbol, a diagnosis, a political position, or a self-love obstacle course. It is inheritance, rebellion, memorial, disguise, protest, armor, wound. Food is not merely excess. It is language with nowhere else to go. Crab legs, dumplings, FreshDirect boxes, ice cream, tater tots: the menu is also a transcript. The gallbladder, hands, jaw, stomach, mesh, and knees all keep the minutes.
There is no victory lap, no after photo, no body stepping from behind a curtain in white jeans. In the postmortem, Chekowsky remains fat, funny, in pain, healthier, unhealed, and alive. The change is authorship. After years of writing as if she were a shoe, a network, a platform, a celebrity, a brand with a budget and no body, she begins writing as herself. Dan Wieden’s old line about Nike discovering the power of its own voice gets turned inside out. Nike never had a voice. Companies do not. People do.
The book’s repossession is simple and radical: Chekowsky stops ghostwriting for objects and signs her own name. She writes about participation without trying to rinse herself clean. She helped make the culture that hurt her; she was hurt before she arrived; both facts remain true. The memoir earns its anger because it keeps evidence close. It earns its comedy because the jokes cost something. It earns its tenderness because it does not ask tenderness to behave prettily.
I land at 88/100, which maps to 4/5 Goodreads stars: a distinctive, emotionally forceful, formally alert memoir whose most electric passages outweigh its occasional over-explaining and repetition. Its best pages perform the old trick without the old theft: they make a feeling sticky enough to outlive the campaign. The difference is that now the feeling has a byline, a body, and a woman beside it, keeping the microphone in her own hand.
June 16, 2026
4.5 stars. Listened to the audiobook. Narration was very good. I don’t think I’ll ever look at advertising the same ever again. I learned a lot about the sneaky and predatory way it works. Lu tolerated a lot of crap from her male coworkers and bosses. It made me so angry to read about how they treated her. The relationship between her and her mom was complicated because I think her mother did her a disservice by making everything about food so positive. I feel like it’s sort of set up for failure.. I was also a little frustrated with Lu when she kept explaining how she would just keep overeating and binging food to the point that it made her sick and she knew it, but she just didn’t stop. In the end, I’m so glad she found peace and happiness. She deserves it.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
As I read Don’t Buy What I’m Selling I thought about Almost Famous, when Lester Bangs tells young Cameron Crowe that writing about rock stars will never make him cool — and that the only real path is to be honest and unmerciful with his work. Author Lu Chekowsky takes the same tack in her book about advertising and obesity.
With advertising, Chekowsky doesn't so much pull back the curtain as tear it down. A creative director and copywriter for Wieden+Kennedy, MTV, Comedy Central, and Facebook, she lets us know that companies and networks don't love us, but seek to make us unhappy so we'll buy things we don't need. She once thought she could change the culture by pouring her human voice into things, only to find disappointment.
With obesity, she details a lifelong struggle with her uncool body. She battled not only food, but also the fact that she was too fat and girly to truly be accepted for herself and her talent in the world of hip marketing, or the world in general.
She lays out her experiences in raw and hilarious ways; her capacity to be human on the page is admirable. I enjoyed her stories about her mother, Rose. Rose was obese, but she was wise to advertising's ways even though she and Lu binged on its content. Lu knew advertising was mostly lies, but she wasn't immune to its pull. She experienced this feeling time and again as she worked with stars like Justin Bieber and Michael Jordan. It’s interesting to note that one of Nike’s most famous Jordan commercials had to be digitally enhanced because he read the copy with so little emotion — a small reminder of the tricks of the trade.
The book weaves the subjects of advertising and obesity well. However, because both are big topics, some readers might feel the book is too much about one or the other. Occasionally, the narrative will drift away from the subject at hand without a clear transition. Still, the book needs both to understand Chekowsky's story. If you want an insider's view of advertising or an authentic take on what it's like to be human, this book won't disappoint.
In Almost Famous, Bangs says, “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.” Be proud of yourself for that, Lu.
I received an advance reading copy from NetGalley.
With advertising, Chekowsky doesn't so much pull back the curtain as tear it down. A creative director and copywriter for Wieden+Kennedy, MTV, Comedy Central, and Facebook, she lets us know that companies and networks don't love us, but seek to make us unhappy so we'll buy things we don't need. She once thought she could change the culture by pouring her human voice into things, only to find disappointment.
With obesity, she details a lifelong struggle with her uncool body. She battled not only food, but also the fact that she was too fat and girly to truly be accepted for herself and her talent in the world of hip marketing, or the world in general.
She lays out her experiences in raw and hilarious ways; her capacity to be human on the page is admirable. I enjoyed her stories about her mother, Rose. Rose was obese, but she was wise to advertising's ways even though she and Lu binged on its content. Lu knew advertising was mostly lies, but she wasn't immune to its pull. She experienced this feeling time and again as she worked with stars like Justin Bieber and Michael Jordan. It’s interesting to note that one of Nike’s most famous Jordan commercials had to be digitally enhanced because he read the copy with so little emotion — a small reminder of the tricks of the trade.
The book weaves the subjects of advertising and obesity well. However, because both are big topics, some readers might feel the book is too much about one or the other. Occasionally, the narrative will drift away from the subject at hand without a clear transition. Still, the book needs both to understand Chekowsky's story. If you want an insider's view of advertising or an authentic take on what it's like to be human, this book won't disappoint.
In Almost Famous, Bangs says, “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.” Be proud of yourself for that, Lu.
I received an advance reading copy from NetGalley.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
This is a Gen Z manifesto with a voice that feels fresh, sharp, and completely sure of itself.
Don’t Buy What I’m Selling works on two levels at once. You get the behind-the-scenes look at advertising, how campaigns are built, how desire is manufactured, and how people are pushed to want things they never needed. But at the same time, this is a very personal reckoning with body image, worth, and what it means to spend years helping create the exact standards that hurt you.
Lu Chekowsky has a very distinct voice here that pulled me in immediately. The first chapter grabbed me and never let go, and that momentum carries through the entire book. Chekowsky does not hold back when it comes to the industry. The details about the pressure, the ego, the constant demand to cause shame in buyers, to drive them to fill the void. What makes this book work so well is that she was good at it! But that great writing ability also tells a fantastic tale.
The sections on body image and self-worth are phenomenal. There is anger here, but also clarity. The connection between advertising and how women are taught to see themselves is laid out in a way that feels obvious once you see it, and hopefully changes how you see advertising and media in general forever.
There’s also humor and sharpness throughout. The tone never feels heavy for too long, which keeps it readable even when the subject matter gets uncomfortable. This feels like a fight song for women who are tired of being sold a version of themselves they can never reach. At the same time, there’s enough insight into media, marketing, and culture that it doesn’t feel limited to one audience.
A standout memoir that blends industry critique with personal story in a way that actually sticks. Keep writing, Lu Chekowsky, essays, fiction, non-fiction, I am there for it!
Thank you Netgalley for the Arc - so appreciated!
#DontBuyWhatImSelling #LuChekowsky #LittleBrownAndCompany
Don’t Buy What I’m Selling works on two levels at once. You get the behind-the-scenes look at advertising, how campaigns are built, how desire is manufactured, and how people are pushed to want things they never needed. But at the same time, this is a very personal reckoning with body image, worth, and what it means to spend years helping create the exact standards that hurt you.
Lu Chekowsky has a very distinct voice here that pulled me in immediately. The first chapter grabbed me and never let go, and that momentum carries through the entire book. Chekowsky does not hold back when it comes to the industry. The details about the pressure, the ego, the constant demand to cause shame in buyers, to drive them to fill the void. What makes this book work so well is that she was good at it! But that great writing ability also tells a fantastic tale.
The sections on body image and self-worth are phenomenal. There is anger here, but also clarity. The connection between advertising and how women are taught to see themselves is laid out in a way that feels obvious once you see it, and hopefully changes how you see advertising and media in general forever.
There’s also humor and sharpness throughout. The tone never feels heavy for too long, which keeps it readable even when the subject matter gets uncomfortable. This feels like a fight song for women who are tired of being sold a version of themselves they can never reach. At the same time, there’s enough insight into media, marketing, and culture that it doesn’t feel limited to one audience.
A standout memoir that blends industry critique with personal story in a way that actually sticks. Keep writing, Lu Chekowsky, essays, fiction, non-fiction, I am there for it!
Thank you Netgalley for the Arc - so appreciated!
#DontBuyWhatImSelling #LuChekowsky #LittleBrownAndCompany
June 25, 2026
It is well written, nicely paced, and Lu is a talented and engaging storyteller. I listened to the audiobook, and Lu's narration is very good.
Meanwhile, lu is a food addict, workaholic, pop culture junkie, talented, successful creative and a hopeful dreamer who was dazzled by the dreams sold to us that are "just one click away". And seduced by the big agencies and names that promised her big success and power and brushes with fame only to realize theres not even a human behind the curtain, just an algorithm, shoes and monkey balls.
I stayed on until the end. The way you'd never hang up on your best friend when she calls and tells you every detail about how the married man she's been sleeping with broke her heart, again.
I dunno why Lu thought work in advertising was gonna heal her soul. But, SPOILER: it didn't.
And Lu, if you're reading this, Im glad you got out and sincerely wish you the best!
Meanwhile, lu is a food addict, workaholic, pop culture junkie, talented, successful creative and a hopeful dreamer who was dazzled by the dreams sold to us that are "just one click away". And seduced by the big agencies and names that promised her big success and power and brushes with fame only to realize theres not even a human behind the curtain, just an algorithm, shoes and monkey balls.
I stayed on until the end. The way you'd never hang up on your best friend when she calls and tells you every detail about how the married man she's been sleeping with broke her heart, again.
I dunno why Lu thought work in advertising was gonna heal her soul. But, SPOILER: it didn't.
And Lu, if you're reading this, Im glad you got out and sincerely wish you the best!
July 5, 2026
Fat, fat, fat. That's the centrepiece of all the stories. Why fat? Mom was fat, early died of cancer (and obesity) and now is being carried in daughter throughout the whole life, in fat.
In the meantime, it is a story of life from teenager finding themselves to finding own needs, but only after filling the needs of others.
Going from work as phone sex talk, getting education, to copy writer, MTV to Meta, without actually finding self first.
With this lifestyle story ends in hospital bed within the US Healthcare system, acknowledging the needs of the body itself.
In the meantime, it is a story of life from teenager finding themselves to finding own needs, but only after filling the needs of others.
Going from work as phone sex talk, getting education, to copy writer, MTV to Meta, without actually finding self first.
With this lifestyle story ends in hospital bed within the US Healthcare system, acknowledging the needs of the body itself.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 18, 2026
Wow. Lu’s story is an important one. Her life experience being part of multiple industries that influence people’s purchases and beliefs about themselves are told in a humorous yet serious way. The messages about how advertising and entertainment businesses are changing our society in serious ways are important to acknowledge. Whether positive change can be made is a question we should be asking.
Lu is extremely open about her personal struggles with her weight, appearance and gender. This book really is two important stories. The first about the professions in which Lu worked and the second about her self-esteem, inability to stop the binging which she acknowledges was damaging her health and the depth of psychological damage caused by her mother’s illness and her father’s inability to support her emotionally.
There are some brilliant observations in the book about sexism in the advertising world.
I found Lu’s involvement in the phone sex business very interesting. I worked in the AIDS field for several years and thought I knew a lot of the sexual proclivities of Americans but much of this was new to me.
This is a book worth reading. I am going to hear the author do a reading in Wilton, CT on July 17th. I can’t wait.
Lu is extremely open about her personal struggles with her weight, appearance and gender. This book really is two important stories. The first about the professions in which Lu worked and the second about her self-esteem, inability to stop the binging which she acknowledges was damaging her health and the depth of psychological damage caused by her mother’s illness and her father’s inability to support her emotionally.
There are some brilliant observations in the book about sexism in the advertising world.
I found Lu’s involvement in the phone sex business very interesting. I worked in the AIDS field for several years and thought I knew a lot of the sexual proclivities of Americans but much of this was new to me.
This is a book worth reading. I am going to hear the author do a reading in Wilton, CT on July 17th. I can’t wait.
July 3, 2026
3.5+ ⭐️
I loved the insights into advertising and shooting tv shows/commercials. It takes the sheen off and you start questioning yourself if you ever really liked any of it.
The book also does a good job explaining stigma and the emotional toll from it.
However it didn’t stick the landing, the ending was very rushed and I’m not entirely sure that the author loves her body by the end as stated in the title.
I loved the insights into advertising and shooting tv shows/commercials. It takes the sheen off and you start questioning yourself if you ever really liked any of it.
The book also does a good job explaining stigma and the emotional toll from it.
However it didn’t stick the landing, the ending was very rushed and I’m not entirely sure that the author loves her body by the end as stated in the title.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
This was one of those books that I love so much that I forced myself to stop reading so that it would last longer. This possibly needs to be mandatory reading for anyone existing in modern society and will make you rethink...basically everything... in your life.
July 1, 2026
Great read! Lu’s heartfelt stories about her life and the advertising, entertainment and tech worlds were so compelling. She’s a fabulous story teller and this is the kind of book that will stay with you. Highly recommend!
July 5, 2026
I absolutely loved this book. I couldn’t put it down. Chekowsky is such a relatable & vulnerable storyteller and her insights into the advertising world were fascinating. An emotionally compelling memoir and often hilarious cultural critique rolled into one big badass burrito.
July 6, 2026
Well written, I finished this in two days. It was really entertaining to read
July 20, 2026
raw, honest, beautiful memoir
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