‘Fat Girl’ novel distresses book panel
The Vancouver Sun’s book club is discussing 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, by Mona Awad. It tells of Lizzie, an overweight young woman in 13 instalments at different points in her life. It’s shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and the panel will be chatting live with Awad at noon on May 28 at vancouversun.com.
Monique Sherrett: I found this book to be a fast, enjoyable read but it was also uncomfortable. The titles screams politically incorrect and the first few chapters had me wondering what I’d got into. The main characters have all the schoolgirl angst I remember feeling but with an extra dose of laissez-faire, yet sexed up, sense of identity. It was unclear to me whether it was a commentary on society’s perceptions of obesity or a melancholic look at poor decisions and the self doubt that can cripple relationships and self esteem.
Like Martin John, there were many funny moments but on the whole this wasn’t the funny, sarcastic read I thought it was going to be. I’m keen to know what others thought.
Melanie Jackson: 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl is very clever. It’s about a fat girl with a thin girl inside, longing to get out. Eventually she does. Russian-doll problem: turns out there’s a fat girl inside the thin girl inside the fat girl.
I’m with Monique. 13 Ways tosses off a lot of funny, acerbic lines, which makes it a fast read. But Lizzie the protagonist’s obsession with her appearance, demeaning and cheapening herself when fat and ruining her personal life when thin, veers the story into near-gothic horror. Weight and looks are all she thinks about. I did enjoy the book. But sometimes I really wished Lizzie would adopt another interest. OK, maybe not baking. Low-stress cross-country skiing, say. I mean, there has to be something besides fat/thin.
Ian Weir: Me three. I think Mona Awad is a truly terrific writer — and I hasten to say that I’m hardly the ideal reader for this novel. But I really found myself conflicted.
On the one hand, it’s on its own terms quite brilliant and compelling. But it’s also a vision of a world in which we’ve all — regardless of age and gender — reduced ourselves to sexualized commodities, to be bartered, envied, competed with, and discarded. The men seem pretty much beyond redemption, which is fair enough comment. But there doesn’t seem to be any possibility of friendship, either.
I certainly appreciate that satire relies on comic exaggeration, and — as I say — I think Awad is a splendid talent. But I confess that I read with both admiration and a kind of existential horror.
Julia Denholm: Thirteen Ways was a terribly uncomfortable read for me because it felt far too familiar. Recently someone said “I wish I was as thin as I was when I started worrying about being fat.” I’m intimately aware of the connection between negative self-image and hyper-sexuality; as a teenager I made terrible choices based on my need for intimate connections to serve as evidence that I was desirable despite being fat. The truth? I’m not particularly fat, nor have I ever really been fat (more appropriately obese, I guess), but my life has been a cycle of fat times, thin times, fat times. And although I’ve never really mapped my sexual history against my weight history, I’m pretty sure the fat times coincided with the promiscuous times. I’ve worried about weight my whole life. Every day. Lizzie’s inability to escape that obsession is a widely shared and endemic problem in our sedentary and over-fed soci- ety so if reading this book is uncomfortable that’s a good thing. I’m still not comfortable with my weight and probably never will be. I have, however, figured out how to be happy despite my weight. I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing, and Awad certainly makes me think more deeply about the relationship between body weight and self-worth. Uncomfortably. Our book club panel includes Ian Weir, author of the novel Will Starling; Vancouver young adult author Melanie Jackson; Julia Denholm, dean, arts and sciences, Capilano University; Daphne Wood, director, communications and development, Greater Victoria Public Library; Monique Sherrett, principal at Boxcar Marketing and founder of somisguided.com; Trevor Battye, a partner in Clevers Media; Tracy Sherlock, Vancouver Sun Books editor; and Bev Wake, senior executive producer sports for Postmedia Network.