Laughing through tears
Mona Awad’s debut story collection, “13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl,” should come with a trigger warning for all the fat girls, skinny girls, ugly girls, slutty girls and every other current or former girl who might pick it up: One minute you’ll be laughing along with Awad, the next you’ll be crying into chilly bathwater. As a portrait of the body-image issues and low-level eating disorders that afflict almost all American women, it is devastatingly thorough, its 13 short stories as addictive as potato chips and as painful as the prospect of eating nothing but 4-ounce portions of steamed fish for the rest of your life.
For me, the moment came somewhere around the third story, “Full Body,” a portrait of protagonist Lizzie’s relationship with skinny, gothy and annoyingly confident China. Lizzie sits on a closed toilet in the high school bathroom while China applies her eyeliner: “No color is black enough for China except for this one kind she says she gets at Target that I can never find. I feel it now as a cold stabby stream across my waterline. Sharp feathery strokes like little knife swipes that make me flinch every time.”
The fierce hopefulness of having found that magical friend who can make your life happen, combined with the physical intimacy of the moment and the implicit cruelty of comparison, brought tears to my eyes. Or maybe I was just remembering how sharp those little eyeliner pencils can feel in a world where the most important thing about your eyes isn’t how they see but how they look.
The early stories in the collection are rife with these moments but also
with beauty and humor, as wry, introspective Lizzie shares her taste in indie music and velvet corsets with her best friend, Mel: “The universe is against us, which makes sense. So we get another McFlurry and talk about how fat we are for a while.” Young Lizzie really is fat, but, as the first-person narrator informs us, “Later on I’m going to be really (expletive) beautiful. … I’ll be hungry and angry all my life but I’ll also have a hell of a time.” By the final story, Lizzie has, indeed, dwindled to a sharp shadow of her former self, a transformation whose rewards are complicated at best and do not include pleasure.
Together, these stories do more than follow one woman’s “weight-loss journey,” to use the ghoulish euphemism. They aim for something like a phenomenology of the fat girl, a portrait of the contexts, both internal and external, that make her fat or skinny.
The “fat girl” of the title is more than a flesh-andblood girl; she’s a specter most women learn to fear from an early age. (I can’t be the only child of the ’80s who heard “a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips!” a dozen times before hitting puberty.) The totem of female enjoyment, the fat girl haunts skinny Lizzie even after she loses the weight, not just in Lizzie’s constant fear of backsliding, in her suspicions that a fat manicurist is enjoying her own life more (she is), or even in the anxiety that her husband may have preferred her former pillowiness to her current angles, but in the dawning realization that maybe, just maybe, her problems were always more than skin deep. Several stories exploring Lizzie’s relationship with her ailing, overweight mother drive this point home with heartbreaking efficiency.
All this pain would be too much to bear if the book wasn’t so funny. Awad’s prose is voice-y and appealingly detailed — one story opens, “So I’m eating scones with the girl I hate.”
Still, her best lines cut both ways, as in “Your Biggest Fan,” a booty call narrated in second person: “Oh! Oh! How you have made her night no her week no her month no her year!” This story, paired with a third-person foray from the point of view of Lizzie’s husband, Tom, gives us our only outside perspective on Lizzie. Perhaps it’s too little variation to support the title’s winking allusion to Wallace Stevens’ famous modernist poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” If her clinical self-assessments do get a little grueling by the end, it’s nothing we women aren’t used to.
This story originally appeared in Printers Row, the Tribune’s digital book review.
Amy Gentry is a freelance writer.