What is ‘ Looking at a Fat Girl’?
Veronica Tartley’s intense, caustic columns for the Montrealbased Maisonneuve magazine quickly garnered a following. Eventually, the pseudonym slipped away and behind the sharp and entertaining observations stood Mona Awad, a real live writer from Canada.
Awad’s satiric edge is on display in her debut novel, “13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl” ( Penguin Books: 224 pp., $ 16 paper). Its main character, Lizzie, grapples with body image and weight loss in a book whose humor masks darker truths.
Now getting her PhD in creative writing and English literature at the University of Denver, Awad spoke to us by phone. This novel constantly f lips between two views — the interior, or the way that Lizzie sees herself, and the exterior, the way that people engage and interact with her.
As a reader and as a writer I’m interested in characters that occupy an in- between place in the world. They’re outsiders in some way, and they don’t really have a definitive sense of home. I think there are infinite possibilities to explore when there’s some ambiguity in terms of claiming an identity or being part of a group. My father was from Egypt, and my mother was French Canadian, but they sent me to an English- speaking Catholic school, so I saw some of these interior/ exterior moments in the way that people interacted with me growing up. I think that all of those different facets of my storytelling interests definitely got explored in “13 Ways.” It informed how I approached depicting Lizzie’s interiority — her character, the feeling of being out of place, of both craving attention and wanting to be invisible, of constantly comparing herself to others. Music permeates and perhaps even drives certain stories in this collection. Who were some of the artists that you listened to?
I made playlists for every chapter/ story. I would never listen to the playlists while I was writing, but I would listen while I was cooking dinner or something. At certain times I needed Nina Simone’s urgency … there’s a desperation that’s really beautiful in her singing and in her lyrics. I listened to a lot of the Rolling Stones, especially for “My Mother’s Idea of Sexy.” I [ also] listened to a lot of jazz, people like Chet Baker, Peggy Lee, John Coltrane. When I was working on the first story, there was more rock and Goth: Nick Cave, London After Midnight, Peter Murphy, the Velvet Underground. Let’s talk about the Goth element in this book.
The gothic subculture is one that I don’t think gets explored a lot in literature and as a writer and as a person who is interested in art in the 1980s, I felt like it would be very fitting to go in that direction. Goth music is what Lizzie’s best friend loved, and Lizzie tends to be a ref lector of whatever is around her or she tries to be.
Goth and the industrial movement at the time was very subterranean and anti- establishment. For somebody like Lizzie who sees herself as marginal and underground to some extent, that subculture appeals to her, there is a kind of innate acceptance in it. My friends and I always joked that Goth is the last resort of “cool” for nerds. We totally included ourselves in that category.
There’s also a punishing aspect to the culture, to Goth’s aesthetic. I think it’s very rigid to some degree, or at least it was — the fashion and in terms of the look and the types of bodies that are hailed as the ultimate — every subculture has a type of body and a kind of fashion that’s associated with it. [ The character] China is emblematic of that, of the Goth body that both Lizzie and Mel really want. They get the music — they’re neck deep in the music but China has the body, the look and that’s just absolutely what makes her, in Lizzie’s mind, so momentous. Lizzie’s magical thinking about China is what sets up the first hopes for transformation from her current state. Lizzie often looks to these female friendships for some type of fairy- tale type transformation that sets up some interesting tensions, especially around body image. There were a couple of lines about body image that punched me in the gut because they felt so real.
I’m particularly interested how complicated female friendships can be, how fraught, and I think that side of friendship is worth exploring. I think body image is something that comes between women and shapes the dynamic between them, and that was something I really wanted to blow up in this book. I wanted to understand how friends inf luence the way that we see ourselves and the way that we are in the world, the way we feel about our bodies and the way we interact.
Body image is something I struggled with, and while this is a work of fiction I was very committed to portraying Lizzie with as much emotional honesty as I could — really committing to her way of seeing herself and the kind of damage that uneasy, uncertain internalized isolation can do. So I went all the way with it. I really wanted to dig into those moments of tension between herself and the mirror, herself and her friends, herself and her lovers, herself and a dress, herself and a meal where that body- image struggle was rearing its head. I wanted to zoom in and recount her experience moment to moment.