Time to break through that barrier, even if I have to drag myself through this review bodily.
13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl is my book club's selection for this month. I ran into another member of the club a few weeks ago, and he asked if I'd started the book yet, which I hadn't. He said it was a difficult book. Heavy. So when I sat down to read it, I was expecting this book to weigh on me, but I never really ended up feeling it in that way.
I mean, the character is buried under a large portion of self-loathing, but I didn't feel like I tapped into that myself, I didn't feel like there was that much fat phobia in the book that didn't come from the main character herself (and maybe her mother), I didn't feel like the issues with weight were transitive, if that makes sense. I'm far from a thin person myself, but I didn't take on any of the main character's issues as I read. (However, one person in my book club who had struggled with disordered eating found that it was strongly resonant with her own experience.)
Writing the previous two paragraphs, I'm aware of how many of our words for difficult or traumatizing are connected to weight. Huh. I suppose that shouldn't shock me.
As the title suggests, this book is made up of thirteen short stories. Over half of them are from the point of view of the main character (I honestly can't remember her name, but I'm bad with character names), the others scattered ones from men she has slept with.
So, is it good? Does this book do what it's trying to do? What is it trying to do?
It's examining how this one woman moves through life, as an overweight teenager, and then as a woman who pushes her body into thinness through self-deprivation and excessive exercise. Who never believes that anyone could be attracted to her just as she is, even as her husband is wistful for a wife who knew how to let go and enjoy herself instead of being brittle all the time. For more than half the book, she is, it sounds like, quite skinny, but always sees herself as the fat girl from her childhood. Which, apparently, was so awful that she'd do anything to escape it.
It's heavily insinuated she inherited this from her mother, who was overweight, died too young, and measured everything by what size clothes her daughter could fit into. But although the young woman's early relationships are complicated, she doesn't seem to have nay trouble finding men who are attracted to her.
It's also about the female friendships she doesn't have, in addition to the relationship with the husband she pushes away, because anything soft smacks of weight? I guess? Awad doesn't really let us that far into the character, even though the stories are largely written in the first person. Maybe the character doesn't let herself see that far into what she does either. But all the women around her are competitors, either those who are effortlessly thin to spite her, working as hard as she is and thus rivals, or failures who haven't conquered their bodies.
There is little didactic in this book, for which I am grateful. It doesn't hit you over the head, but once you've seen how she reacts to all the other women around her, like everything in life is a zero-sum game centered around weight, it's not hard to pick up the theme. She hates herself, she hates all other women, she's not too fond of men. She is, quite frankly, miserable. But there's no self-awareness there. There's no glimmer of hope. Even at the end, when she starts eating more again (right at the very end), it's not out of an epiphany that all that misery isn't worth it. It's, yet again, as a failure.
So yeah, this is a bleak world. This character has issues on top of issues on top of issues, all dressed up in a fat suit. No progress is made towards addressing them, and the main character never seems to really see them as issues. It's not really fun to read, but I didn't find it particularly traumatizing either.
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