Book Review: Fat Girl by Judith Moore

This is a memoir by a woman who grew up fat as well as abandoned by her father and emotionally and physically abused by her mother and grandmother. In other words, it's not light reading! In fact, it's sort of torture reading it. She drew me in with her first sentence. Out with a man who she had a crush on, drinking, he said to her, "You're too fat to f__k." Hearing similar incidents from her adulthood told so directly made her feel to me, as another fat woman, like a friend. For instance, she told of a time when a picture was taken of her while she was out and about and feeling pretty. She then saw the picture and had a panic attack. She was shocked at how fat she looked. Ms. Moore is an excellent writer and her vivid descriptions of the reality of fat phobia, internal and external, are likely to resonate with anyone fat. After getting to like her and feeling comfortable with the book, she took me inside her horribly abusive and terribly lonely childhood. If the book had started out with this, I don't know if I would have continued, but I already liked her, so I joined her as she detailed a very nice girl with lots of bad luck. It's a fascinating story, and I particularly liked the descriptions of her father, Ham, another fat person who struggled in life because of his weight. She details the trauma of an early childhood divorce, parental abandonment, life with a narcissistic mother, and a tormented school experience. It's a great generational family history, very engaging and well-told. There is only one happy time in her life and that it is a brief period in which she is sent to her gay uncle's home due to her grandmother's illness. Here she is for the first time in her life treated kindly, and she loves it! Her intensely detailed description of helping her uncle prepare for a gay dinner party is wondrous, moreso because it is a moment of beauty in an otherwise awful childhood. Of course, when her mother returns, the abuse is back, much worse than before. While Ham and her uncle -the men- are likable interesting characters, the women, Grandma and Mom, are cruel and evil. This doesn't seem to be the spin of Ms. Moore; it just seems to be the way it was. After desribing her worse and worse childhood, Ms. Moore never returns to telling us about her adulthood, and at the end of the story, we find out that she has two grown daughters and that she lives alone in California with her dog. She is still fat and a successful writer. This book was given very positive reviews by David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs and was also reviewed in the NY Times Book Review. At the end of the book she also asks the reader not to feel sorry for her. I felt more angry at her than sorry for her. Others in the phat community have expressed some similar sentiments. Her self-hatred, especially of her body, is unbearable at times and an insult for other fat people to read. Furthermore, if a memoir of a fat woman were to become popular in the mainstream, I would prefer it to be something more size-positive. While this book is said to be darkly funny, it really isn't. The author is witty but it's too tragic to be anything that I would think of as funny. Some say that the book is so popular in the mainstream because the general public prefers to hear of a fat woman who hates herself, rather than one who is fat positive in any way. I don't plan to save this book but do think it's worthy to give to a fat friend. One of the reasons that Ms. Moore said that she wrote this book is because there aren't books out there about being fat that tell it like it is, lots of pain and no happy ending. I do agree that she fills a niche but the humorous, uplifting memoir, "Skinny Women are Evil" by Mo'nique, is the book that finds a permanent place on my bookshelf.