Judith Moore's Fat Girl


She's created a new genre: fat p0rn, with a dash of food p0rn for good measure.

Judith Moore's Fat Girl is a horrid little book, taken in its entirety. Yes, yes, we're supposed to admire Moore's "breathtaking frankness" and "refreshing candor." But what we're doing is reveling in someone's self-loathing, all while ignoring the essential fact that most of this story does not ring true.

It's a slim book, under 200 pages, and I was stuck on a five-hour cross-country flight, so I finished it, but the whole time I was wondering when the author would stop describing her fat and her food in ecstatic detail long enough to tell me a story.

This is why I call this book fat p0rn. We are treated to page after page of details on exactly how fat she is. Where the rolls of fat are. How they rub against one another. How they look, how they smell, how they feel, how they look naked, how they look in clothes. Fat ankles, fat legs, fat bellies, fat arms, fat, pig-like face. And lots and lots of sweat. Now, doesn't that sound edifying?

And yet, I confess, I don't believe her self-description...not when she never cops to being any more than 40 or so pounds overweight. The fat she describes belongs to a woman who has 100 lbs to lose, not 40. The same kind of disconnect happens throughout. In this scene she huffs and puffs going up one flight of stairs. In that scene she walks blocks and blocks briskly without a problem. Look are you on death's door, or are you a basically fit person who can't seem to lose weight?

Because in half of the book she bemoans how strictly she can follow diets without losing a pound, and then in half the book we get the food p0rn. Long passages describing her binges. This is the new "in" thing in memoirs. This was a similar complaint I had with James Lie's (I'm sorry Frey's) book My Friend Leonard. Really, guys, long passages describing tons of food in detail really can't replace plot or character, m'kay?

About 20 pages from the end of the book Moore is only 12 years old, and I'm wondering, wow, how's she going to wrap this up? Well, she's going to wrap it up in the blink of an eye with no more insight than she shared in the first 180 pages. Meanwhile you've sat through this character's incredibly unpleasant and degrading childhood and incredibly unpleasant and degrading descriptions of herself and everyone around her.

There are flashes in this book where Moore does capture how we think and feel about our bodies. Passages where she describes the shock of seeing a picture and how that picture on film doesn't jibe with the picture in her head. But these passages are a small percentage of the book. This book commits the worst literary crime, really: it's boring, repetitive and tells me nothing new. I'm not going to praise an author because she is willing to publicly flay herself. I'm not going to praise a book because it wallows in ugliness and emotional squalor. I'm not going to say "oooh, how brave." I'll leave that to critics who want to fall all over themselves to praise the brave fat woman for admitting she's fat.

Whatev.

Buy Fat Girl at Amazon.com (if you're a glutton...for punishment!)

Posted: Sat - April 1, 2006 at 09:01 AM       EmailFeedback

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