THEYEARIN BEAUTY.

Chubby Bubba

You might expect stories of adolescent struggles with body image to turn up in the autobiography of a soap-opera actress, not in the pages of a presidential memoir. But when the president is Bill Clinton, with his world-renowned common touch, the urge to bond with readers must have been irresistible. "I was a fat band boy who didn't wear cool jeans," he wrote in My Life. He loved to go to dances at the Y, "even though I was fat, uncool, and hardly popular with the girls." One night, an older boy "started in on me about my jeans, which were especially raunchy. They were carpenter's jeans with a right side loop to hang a hammer in. I was insecure enough without Henry grinding on me, so I sassed him back." That night, Clinton learned to stand his ground -- and take a punch. Young Bill's eighth-grade science teacher, Vernon Dokey, a particularly unhandsome man, offered a more profound lesson: "One day he looked out at us and said, 'Kids, years from now you may not remember anything you learned about science in this class, so I'm going to teach you something about human nature . Every morning when I wake up, I go into my bathroom, splash water on my face, shave, wipe the shaving cream off, then look in the mirror and say, "Vernon, you're beautiful." You should remember that, kids. Everybody wants to feel like they're beautiful.' "And I have remembered," Clinton wrote, "for more than 40 years."

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