San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Candid cross-cultural look at fat shaming
If you don’t know the name Rabia Chaudry, you should.
From April 2015 to March 2022, Chaudry, a lawyer by trade, was the co-host of “Undisclosed,” a riveting podcast that turned a sharp eye on the U.S. criminal justice system by investigating wrongful convictions and examining important evidence that never made it to trial.
In 2016, “Adnan’s Story,” her debut book about the case of Adnan Syed, a family friend who was then serving a life sentence for the murder of his high school ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, was published to much-deserved acclaim. (Syed’s story was first broadcast to the world in the hit podcast “Serial,” and Chaudry’s book was adapted into an HBO documentary.)
In the coming years, Chaudry was still heavily involved in helping Syed’s attorneys get his conviction overturned. But she was also hard at work on a new project, one closer to home — a memoir about growing up in a tight-knit Pakistani immigrant family, relationship pressures and, yes, being fat.
Aside from deserving an award for having the best title ever, “Fatty Fatty Boom Boom” thankfully doesn’t fall into the woe-is-me trap of some weight-issue memoirs. Equally a relief, there isn’t a whiff of you-go-girl!-style evangelizing anywhere in its pages. In its place, Chaudry’s engrossing look back at her life and the decisions she’s made thus far is full of honest introspection about what it feels like to be heavy, frank reporting about the difficulties associated with losing weight, and — perhaps unexpectedly — glorious celebrations of food and mouthwatering
descriptions of everything from “creamy, buttery saag” to naan pakoray (the Urdu plural of pakora) that are bound to make your tummy rumble.
Born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1974 and raised by her Muslim parents in the United States, Chaudry’s love affair with food started early. On a tip from her mother’s friend, she was fed two bottles of half-and-half per day, in addition to a few sticks of butter to help with teething. According to family lore, by the time she was 2 and visiting Pakistan for the first time, she weighed 50 pounds. “My thighs stuck together, love handles jiggled, my tummy hung in a soft brown mass over the straining elastic of my undies,” she writes.
From there, it was all processed food and Dairy Queen to the horror of Chaudry’s Pakistani relatives, who were worried about her marriage prospects (“Girls should have a kamar, not a kamra” — kamar means waist; kamra means an entire room). Chaudry’s pound-piling predicament only got worse. From hiding snacks in her bed during her teenage years, when she was “a brown fleck in a sea of hundreds of white children,” to trying out bulimia in college, to her first marriage to an abusive husband where she grew to 200 pounds, to a gastric sleeve in her early 40s, Chaudry’s weight — and her desire to not be defined by it — were always at the forefront.
For more than 350 pages, Chaudry’s memoir aims to tell it like it is without much cushioning. Even after a loving second marriage, a successful career and the birth of her third child at age 43, Chaudry’s
preoccupation with her weight still reigns supreme. But “Fatty Fatty” is also lovingly spiced with equal parts humor and insight, perhaps to humanize the struggle. Of particular interest are the rich passages describing her Pakistani heritage and opinionated relatives, as well as her commentary on the social media response after she lost some of the weight (a mix of “Everyone should feel wonderful and love themselves as they are …” and “Why are you undermining body positivity …?”).
First and foremost, “Fatty Fatty” is an engrossing read that attempts to reckon with two disparate cultures’ shame surrounding body image and obsession with looking thin. But don’t miss the tantalizing recipes for Lahori fried fish, chicken salaam and others at the end. Like everything else in this book, they’ll keep you coming back for seconds.