Fat Girl: A True Story [Paperback]

Judith Moore (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 28, 2006

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

In her memoir of growing up fat, Moore, who previously wrote about food in Never Eat Your Heart Out, employs her edgy, refreshingly candid voice to tell the story of a little girl who weighed 112 pounds in second grade; whose father abandoned her to a raging, wicked mother straight out of the Brothers Grimm; whose lifelong dieting endeavors failed as miserably as her childhood attempts to find love at home. As relentless as this catalogue of beatings, humiliation and self-loathing can be, it's tolerable—even inspiring in places—because Moore pulls it off without a glimmer of self-pity. The book does have some high points, especially while Moore is stashed at the home of a kind uncle who harbors his own secrets, but the happiest moments are tinged with dread. Who can help wondering what will become of this tortured and miserable child? Alas, Moore cuts her story short after briefly touching on an unsatisfying reunion with her father and her two failed marriages. The ending feels hurried, but perhaps the publication of this book will give Moore's story the happy ending she deserves.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Plume (February 28, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452285852
• ISBN-13: 978-0452285859
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (126 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #168,052 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars horrifying and moving, unflinching "Fat Girl" inspires respect for courageous author, May 25, 2006

By 

Bruce J. Wasser (Lake Bluff, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Fat Girl: A True Story (Paperback)

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.

73 of 85 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Could not put this book down, March 14, 2005

By 

Dart "bookworm" (Northern New Jersey) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fat Girl: A True Story (Hardcover)

This is one of the most intense books that I have read in the past few years. Having been slim and heavy during by life, I have experienced the perks and attention given to attractive people, and the invisibility given to someone when they are fat. I could feel her pain and longing, that I too felt as a child. A void that could never be filled. Her honesty is amazing and courageous, and on top of that the book is just beautifully written. Amazing.

86 of 105 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Fat Stereotypes, Hatred and Shame, March 7, 2005

By 

K. Barron "Katsreview" (Detroit, MI) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Fat Girl: A True Story (Hardcover)

Judith Moore is a gifted writer. This is a horrifying book.

I could have seen it coming from the quotation on the inside cover from Frances Kuffel, author of Passing For Thin : "Judith Moore is lost in the seascape of the overweight, and food is the Circe whose enchantment turns humans into swine. Oh, but the words of that spell!" This is not the only time in this book that fat people are compared to swine, elephants, and a variety of other animals -- it happens frequently.

In spite of the fact that she mentions that not every fat woman is like herself ... and in spite of the fact that in her story it is clear that genetics has a LOT to do with being fat (in fact, in the end, she talks of her two daughters, the thin one who eats nonstop and is lazy and inactive, and the fat one who is so painfully careful about what she eats and is extremely active) ... this book is like taking all of the fat hatred that ever existed and giving it legitimacy and power. You can see where it comes from. You can see where this woman learned to hate herself and her fat. But it's not like other books such as Shadow on a Tightrope where there is dismay at the horrible treatment of fat people. There is no battlecry --which she states clearly in the beginning -- she is NO fat activist.

That was an understatement. If you want to read how fat people are ugly and disgusting ... and even if it isn't their fault, they smell and are out of control and deserve to be hated and ridiculed -- thisis the book to read. If you want to read about how much everyone is repulsed by fat people -- because she's been skinny and she hasskinny friends and she knows how they talk behind fat people's backs -- and she even knows how fat people think and talk about other fat people -- if you want this poison in your mind or if you want an eagle's view of the poison that exists in some people's minds, then this is a book to read. This is a book that dehumanizes fat people at the same time it puts a face on a fat child and her pain at being fat.

Her self-hatred isn't just about being fat -- it is also clearly about being female. She talks of how people smell throughout the book. The smell from between the legs of women is always disgusting, even if the woman (like her mother) is thin. She talks of her own disgusting, "meat-like" smell (just regular body smell) -- and she talks of the delicious spicy meat smell of the boys in grade school. Why do women smell awful and men smell clean and delicious?

This is her story and her truth and I can't be critical of that -- but I CAN be critical of the constant fat-bashing, the constant over-generalizations of what "everyone" thinks of fat people even now, and of the fact that even now, she speaks of fatness with a quiet disgust and acknowledgement that fatness is gross, smelly, unattractive, awful and every other negative word you can think of -- and that fat people are NOT loved, lovable, or in any way worthy of feeling happy and at home in their own bodies. Yuck! This book couldn't be more negative about fat than a KKK instruction manual (if they exist)could be about dark skin color. In every possible way, she pounds the message of fat people being inferior -- that has been the message she has gotten all of her life from a variety of sources. She mentions, but doesn't seem to realize the people who did show her love and kindness. It's like the positive aspects of her childhood, the people who hugged her and accepted her, she writes about, but

doesn't let them sink into her consciousness. Her childhood was

horribly sad and scarring. But, you know what? At some pointyou

become an adult and you get to choose to heal and you get to choose what you value and believe. She could look back and see that the things her mother said to her and how she beat her were evil and wrong! She could change her self-concept through grown-up eyes. Not to give away the ending, but she is still wanting to diet. She is still hating her fat body. She pretty much made that clear in the introduction anyway.

Some of the things she says just make no sense. She talks abouther father (I think, some of the characters have gotten mixed up in my head -- the tone of the whole book is so dark that I feel like I've been in another world) -- being too fat at over two hundred pounds and 5'11" -- being unable to bend over and tie his shoes. Excuse me? I'm well over 200 pounds at 5'7" and can easily touch my toes. This kind of thing happens a lot in the book -- shock at howfat a person is, how much they weigh, and all of the things they can't do because of their incredible girth -- which is never really that big. The characterizations of fat people are through the eyes of a child that has been taught to absolutely hate and despise fat. But she's writing as an adult, so I struggle with that. Even as a child's voice, I struggle with the level of self-hatred and fat-hatred.

In the end, it is not a book worth reading. I am frustrated and angry that it is THIS sort of book that gets published written by fatauthors about fat experience -- and that gets heavily promoted. Sure, if it's fat-negative, let's push it. But where are the fat-positive books? Sitting unpublished in our drawers because publishers aren't generally interested in publishing anything that would make fat people feel good about ourselves or feel powerful. The handful of books like Fat!So? are not nationally promoted or put on the "New Releases" tables at our bookstores -- they are to be special ordered by people who have the awareness and connections to be able to know about them. Most libraries won't have a copy of Fat!So? but will have a copy of Fat Girl -- and that is just wrong. Simply wrong. Separate drinking fountains wrong.