A review by marplellous
13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad

challenging dark reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

i needed to bump the rating up from 4 to 5 stars because i couldn’t stop thinking about it. 

while it is presented as a collection of short stories, it is actually snippets from the live of one character, the titular “fat girl”, her descent into diet culture and disordered eating, and the shallow praise she receives for being “rehabilitated”. most of the short stories are from her perspective, but two outstanding ones i remember a fews months later are from the perspective of men who either sleep with the fat girl as an “easy lay” or have to deal with the orthorexic woman she became. 

the characterisation in this book is outstanding, and i still have to think about it because it makes me constantly angry. it illuminates how femininity and the search for womanhood is so often connected to shrinking oneself, to petty competition (imagined or real) with other women, to only defining oneself by calories, clothes, beauty. it is a challenging read and surely not suitable for everyone, but it resonated heavily with me. 

what you can’t expect from this book is a cathartic ending, which makes it only more memorable in my opinion. the last story deals with the petty arguments the titular “fat girl”, now thin and addicted to working out, has with her neighbor over the usage of gym equipment. in one scene, a fire breaks out in their apartment complex and they both find each other evacuating, when their gaze falls out of the windows, onto the gym, where another woman is working out tirelessly, despite the blaring sirens around her. here, awad phrases something akin to “and we were on the cusp of a realization”, but then the moment passes. 

this book is frustrating, tauting, disgusting, vile, and yet, in its glaring ugliness one of the most efficient takedowns of diet culture i have ever seen. 
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