Fat Girl: A True Story
by Judith Moore
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Book Summary Information
Author: Judith MooreEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-02-28
ISBN: 0452285852
Number of pages: 208
Publisher: Plume
Book Reviews of Fat Girl: A True Story
Book Review: horrifying and moving, unflinching "Fat Girl" inspires respect for courageous author
Summary: 5 Stars
Judith Moore never tells us exactly how much she weighs. She doesn't need to. Throughout her sobering, scathing and terrifying memoir, we know. She is fat. "Fat Girl" ought be read by every American teen-ager; its unusual conversational voice, absolute candor and terrifying storytelling give the memoir a transcendent authenticity. Moore's courage is astounding; her willingness to divulge the most intimate aspects of her hellish life makes the memoir almost too-painful to read.
Self-loathing permeates Moore's description of herself. Her arms "are as big as those maroon-skinned bolognas that hang from butchers' ceilings." The skin on her thighs is "pocked, not unlike worn foam rubber." Her repugnant odors humiliate her. She doesn't perspire; she cascades sweat. Judith Moore is a "short, squat toad of a woman."
It is no surprise to hear her confide: "I hate myself. I have almost always hated myself...because I am fat." Moore unflinchingly instructs us that food provides comfort; it becomes "the mother, the father, the warm-hearted lover." But it is also the curse. As a "fatso," More knows that she elicits disgust, pity, disapproval, condescension and embarrassment. As one drunken date confesses, she's "too fat to [fornicate]."
The author is unrelenting in her staggering self-description and equally uncompromising when she details her horrifying childhood. Abandoned by her father and brutalized by both her mother and maternal grandmother, Moore spiritually "had been starved." She never experienced love. In an exquisite metaphor, she likens herself to the three little pigs; she was the one "who built a house of fat to keep from the door the ravening wolf from whose long teeth dark blood dribbled."
After the dissolution of her parents' marriage, Moore's mother left Judith to suffer her maternal grandmother's emotional assaults. Ironically, this "Nazi of the barnyard" could cook, and the author "got her elbows up on the kitchen table...and fed her face." Yet no amount of food could assuage the gnawing fear of a young girl growing up without a father. "I do not think I so much missed the man who was my father as I wanted a father." Sporadic visits by her mother only exacerbate Moore's isolation and dwindling sense of self-worth.
Eventual relocation to New York with her mother brings new terror into the author's life. Not content with unleashing a daily barrage of verbal abuse, Judith's mother savagely beats her with a belt. Schooldays carry their own unique torture. Moore cannot raise her hand to answer a question for fear of her sweat-stained underarms. She's too fat to do a somersault. Regular visits to the school nurse for weigh-ins reinforce her sense of grotesqueness. Inexorably, Moor's odyssey through her childhood leads her from shyness to silliness to self-abnegation. Every day, she hears reminders from her mother that she is worthless, ugly, vile.
Shame becomes her constant companion. Regular beatings, designed to break her will, "compounded with the shame of my fatness, left me cowering." Shunned by the world, Moore began to bite her nails. "I turned into a voracious eater whose meal was herself...I ate myself raw." Blood "popped up in bright droplets at my chubby fingers' ends." Nothing works to alleviate her anguish, and the author's exposure to the seedier side of urban life further dwarfs her ability to perceive any goodness in the world. Not even a kind upstairs neighbor can staunch her emotional wounds.
There can be no happy ending to "Fat Girl." No miraculous cures, no warm and fuzzy bromides. No tidy conclusion. All that is left is the unadulterated courage of a weary, honorable woman who has never shied away from the elemental truth of her life's story.
Summary of Fat Girl: A True Story
For any woman who has ever had a love/hate relationship with food and with how she looks; for anyone who has knowingly or unconsciously used food to try to fill the hole in his heart or soothe the craggy edges of his psyche, Fat Girl is a brilliantly rendered, angst-filled coming-of-age story of gain and loss. From the lush descriptions of food that call to mind the writings of M.F.K. Fisher at her finest, to the heartbreaking accounts of Moore?s deep longing for family and a sense of belonging and love, Fat Girl stuns and shocks, saddens and tickles.
Judith Moore's breathtakingly frank memoir, Fat Girl, is not for the faint of heart. It packs more emotional punch in its slight 196 pages than any doorstopper confessional. But the author warns us in her introduction of what's to come, and she consistently delivers. "Narrators of first-person claptrap like this often greet the reader at the door with moist hugs and complaisant kisses," Moore advises us bluntly. "I won't. I will not endear myself. I won't put on airs. I am not that pleasant. The older I get the less pleasant I am. I mistrust real-life stories that conclude on a triumphant note.... This is a story about an unhappy fat girl who became a fat woman who was happy and unhappy." With that, Moore unflinchingly leads us backward into a heartbreaking childhood marked by obesity, parental abuse, sexual assault, and the expected schoolyard bullying. What makes Fat Girl especially harrowing, though, is Moore's obvious self-loathing and her eagerness to share it with us. "I have been taking a hard look at myself in the dressing room's three-way mirror. Who am I kidding? My curly hair forms a corona around my round scarlet face, from the chin of which fat has begun to droop. My swollen feet in their black Mary Janes show from beneath the bottom hem of the ridiculous swaying skirt. The dressing room smells of my beefy stench. I should cry but I don't. I am used to this. I am inured." Moore's audaciousness in describing her apparently awful self ensures that her reader is never hardened to the horrors of food obsession and obesity. And while it is at times excruciatingly difficult bearing witness to Moore's merciless self-portraits, the reader cannot help but be floored by her candor. With Fat Girl, Moore has raised the stakes for autobiography while reminding us that our often thoughtless appraisals of others based on appearances can inflict genuine harm. It's a painful lesson well worth remembering. --Kim Hughes
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