13 Ways Of Looking At A Fat Girl
Among the many noteworthy things about this powerful debut novel from Mona Awad is that the publisher agreed to keep the word fat in the title.
Fat is a word that is verboten in polite society. It is considered an insult, not a description of reality. We have contorted ourselves in all sorts of ways to avoid using this three letter word. Full Figured. Zaftig. Plus-size. Curvy. Full figured. Rubenesque. Buxom. Full bodied. Plump. Well built. Portly. Big.
There has been a movement to encourage “fat acceptance.” Commentator Lindy West has talked frankly about her weight and how she came to accept it and, in fact, “come out” as fat. Writer Roxane Gay has written and talked extensively about weight. And her forthcoming book Hunger tackles the issue further. Despite these efforts, fat is probably still not looked upon as a word that would enhance the potential for commercial success. So kudos to the title, 13 Ways Of Looking At A Fat Girl.
You don’t need me to tell you that society is obsessed with women’s bodies. From a young age girls are bombarded with images that purport to be the idealized version of a woman. And, of course, there is that battle raging in our heads, of what we think our perfect is.
In her deftly constructed debut Mona Awad takes fat head on. We are introduced to the many personas of Elizabeth, whose identity changes depending on her weight. Lizzie, is a chunky teen, Beth is a college student who loves food, Elizabeth is married and svelte and struggles in her relationship with food and thus her husband. Finally, she is Liz. Liz is thin but her life is empty.
The thirteen stories read like stand-alone short stories, but in fact also serve as the narrative arc of Elizabeth and her weight from adolescence to adulthood. In each phase of her life she confronts different aspects of how her body affects who she is and her relationships with others. As a fat teen she fantasizes about how her life would change were she thin. “Later on I’m going to really fucking beautiful. I’m going to grow into that nose and develop an eating disorder. I’ll be hungry and angry all my life but I’ll also have a hell of a time.”
Elizabeth’s constant examination of her body image has the potential to be sad and depressing, her obsession with food, from her pendulum swinging consumption from Dairy Queen Blizzards, to her “Tupperware forest of spring greens” that she carefully parcels out between lunch and dinner. But the book is also wry and sometimes genuinely funny.
Our relationships to our bodies are, of course, so strongly influenced and driven by our relationships to people and things in our lives and Awad does a superb job of fleshing out how that fact affects Elizabeth, Lizzie, Beth and Liz and the people around her.
Elizabeth’s friend and fellow weight loss traveler “Ruth’s only a hair thinner than I am, she’s way on the other side of the fat girl spectrum, looking at me from the safe, slight smug distance of her own control and conviction.”
“My father has always felt that being fat was a choice. When I was in college I would sometimes meet him for lunch or coffee, and he would stare at my extra flesh like it was some weird piece of clothing I was wearing just to annoy him. Like my fat was an elaborate turban or Mel’s zombie tiara or some anarchy flag that, in my impetuous youth, I was choosing to hold up and wave in his face. Not really part of me, just something I was doing to rebel, to prove him wrong.”
For her husband who married Beth, it is hard to remember that she is now Elizabeth, “Even though he himself has borne witness to her transformation over the past three years, he is still getting used to the severely pared-down point of her chin, the now visible web of bones in her throat, how all the once-soft edges of her have suddenly grown knife sharp. How they seem pointed at him in perpetual, quiet accusation.”
From the sexual fetishization of larger women, to the obliviousness of her scone scoffing office mate upon whom food never sticks, to the well-meaning shop assistant who actually makes shopping for any clothes a living hell, the stories are so recognizable that you feel you are sharing intimacies with a very close friend.
As someone who hates to shop for clothes her meditations on shopping for clothes is masterful. “One of these days I’m probably going to kill Trixie. I have my reasons.” Trixie, the ever helpful sales assistant who sees everything as cute, the one who asks, gratingly, “how are we doing in here?” as if the act of trying on an outfit is a team sport, that they are in it together. We all have experienced a Trixie at some point in our lives. All I will say about the chapter titled “The von Furstenberg and I” is that it is a masterpiece.
Awad has taken on one of the most challenging topics for women and written a book that is clever, funny, true, wise and above all empathetic. Perhaps one of her many triumphs is that we never know Elizabeth’s size. Is she a couple of sizes above the average dress size of 16, or is she morbidly obese? How much does she weigh? What is the size of “The Girl I Hate” or the manicurist Cassie, who is large but happy in her body or Char, the LifeCycle obsessive? We never know much detail about Elizabeth’s fluctuating weight gains and losses. This, perhaps, is the most powerful part of this story. We don’t need to know this particular information about Elizabeth, because as the book so astutely defines it, so much of our body image is in our mind and whatever Elizabeth does, she will always see herself as fat. For such a small word, it packs an extremely heavy punch.
Length: 212
Genre: Fiction
Themes: Weight, Food, Relationships
Commitment: Short read, engaging and profound
Support Independent bookstores AND this site by buying here
