13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
A Novel
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3.1 • 94 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From the author of Bunny, a “hilarious, heartbreaking book” (People) about a woman whose life is hijacked by her struggle to conform
“Stunning . . . As you watch Lizzie navigate fraught relationships—with food, men, girlfriends, her parents and even with herself—you’ll want to grab a friend and say: ‘Whoa. This. Exactly.’” —Washington Post
Growing up in the suburban hell of Misery Saga (a.k.a. Mississauga), Lizzie has never liked the way she looks—even though her best friend Mel says she’s the pretty one. She starts dating guys online, but she’s afraid to send pictures, even when her skinny friend China does her makeup: she knows no one would want her if they could really see her. So she starts to lose. With punishing drive, she counts almonds consumed, miles logged, pounds dropped. She fights her way into coveted dresses. She grows up and gets thin, navigating double-edged validation from her mother, her friends, her husband, her reflection in the mirror. But no matter how much she loses, will she ever see herself as anything other than a fat girl?
In her brilliant, hilarious, and at times shocking debut, Mona Awad skewers the body image-obsessed culture that tells women they have no value outside their physical appearance. Brilliant, hilarious, and heartbreaking, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl introduces a vital new voice in fiction.
WINNER OF THE AMAZON CANADA FIRST NOVEL AWARD
FINALIST FOR THE SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE COLORADO BOOK AWARD FOR LITERARY FICTION
LONGLISTED FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
ARAB AMERICAN BOOK AWARD HONORABLE MENTION FOR FICTION
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Awad opens her assured and terrific debut collection of linked stories with a quotation from Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle:"There was always that shadowy twin, thin when I was fat, fat when I was thin..." Roughly following that 1976 novel's coming-of-age trajectory from miserable overweight youth to precarious (but fashion-model size) adulthood, Awad artfully revisits themes related to body mass, femininity, cultural values, and resistance, finding virtually no reasons to be optimistic. Though Atwood's Joan ultimately carves out a niche for herself on her own terms, Awad's furious and damaged Lizzie is deformed by external pressures. She finds nominal success in too-tight bandage dresses, and she obsessively measures food intake while worrying about maximizing her sessions on an elliptical machine. From a half-correct bitter prediction Lizzie makes as a teen Goth in suburban Ontario ("I'll be hungry and angry all my life but I'll also have a hell of a time") to glimpses of her days as an angry, dissatisfied temp, Awad portrays Lizzie careening between raging at the world and scrutinizing her failings in the mirror. After she's "started losing," upsetting stories trace her discomfiting relationship with her overweight mother in "Fit4U" and "My Mother's Idea of Sexy" and romantic partners in "She'll Do Anything." Marketing the book as "hilarious" is misdirection: Lizzie's witticisms, while abundant, are attacks, and her grotesque development is a profoundly somber indictment of the gendered cultural norms that, in effect, created her.
Customer Reviews
Mildly interesting
This story reads like the rambling journal of a mildly depressed, neurotic and fairly unlikable woman.
Boring.
The title was intriguing, but I wouldn’t recommend this book.
Underwhelming
I normally do not review books immediately after reading them. However, it is my experience in reading that tells me that fighting to finish a paragraph, page, or sentence isn’t a good thing. The story - if that is what this really was, felt like the unexplored diary of an overweight teenager. It also read more like a book written by a skinny person trying to write from the mentality of a heavy person. Still the “fat” character Lizzie, Beth, Elizabeth, Liz and whatever other names she may come up with by the end of your reading of this review fell flat. Terribly and mind numbingly flat.
This flatness may be due to the fact that her only true defining feature is that is or once was “fat”. Still many women and men (ect) can feel fat and overweight when they are not, and that is more how this read. A person with body image issues constantly second guessing themselves and writing about her musings in a diary.