Americans are obsessed with fat. Most people want to lose it: We spend a collective $33 billion a year on weight-loss programs, diet aids, and fitness clubs. Twenty-five percent of American men and 40 percent of women deprive themselves of food on any given day in a quest for thinness.
Fear of fat is so pervasive, it’s no wonder the diet backlash is big, too. There are fat activists and fat support groups; International No-Diet Days and Body Disparagement–Free Zones; and a slew of new books adding to the freighted debate. None of three recent titles was written by a fat activist, per se, but each takes part in our culture’s ongoing argument with itself about fat.
Wendy McClure’s weight-loss memoir, I’m Not the New Me (Riverhead, $14), is the easiest read of the bunch—maybe a little too easy. Written in the first person and sometimes in the present tense, it’s overly familiar (“I am fine. I am not a princess. I mean, fuck that princess shit”). You half expect the book to text-message your cell phone and address you as “girlfriend.”
This rather lightweight book reads like one long blog—not surprising, since the Chicago-based McClure made her name writing for chatty Web sites (e.g., Television Without Pity) and blogging about her weight on www.poundy.com. She talks about going out with her friends, chronicles her diet and exercise routines, and vents about promising relationships gone bad. Throughout, she offers alternately sad and comic insights into what it’s like to go through life big.
One of McClure’s overarching themes is that she’s the same person after losing weight as she was before. But since we don’t learn much about who she was or where she came from, we have to take that point on faith. McClure just doesn’t seem interested in going that deep.
Judith Moore, to the contrary, plunges into the abyss in Fat Girl: A True Story (Hudson Street, $21.95). Her disturbing memoir begins with a sharp self-critique—”I hate myself because I am not beautiful. I hate myself because I am fat”—and drills down from there, excavating childhood trauma and self-loathing at each descending level.
Horrible people and bad smells choke page after page. Moore’s grandmother had the “sour, yeasty odor that sauerkraut brine takes on.” Her elementary-school tormentors gave off a “salty pork smell.” A stranger who molested her in a movie theater smelled like “tobacco, shaving soap, sweet hair oil, and bacon.” Her own odor, to her mind, is “awful.”
Now a senior editor at The San Diego Reader, Moore places some of the blame for her misery with her mother, who beat her bloody, and her father, who left home before she started kindergarten. She was “starved” for love, she writes, and ate to try to fill the void. At times, we wonder how Moore’s mother became such a monster. And we’re mildly curious to know what kind of mother Moore made in turn (she has two grown daughters). But by the end of the book, we already know more than we wanted to, and we’re ready to turn away.
Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession (Tarcher/ Penguin, $25) offers a welcome respite from Fat Girl. It sidesteps the notion of obesity as a personal tragedy and, in more than a dozen essays, views the very notion of body size—that there are standards to be measured against—as a cultural construction. Co-editor (with Anne Meneley) Don Kulick’s “Porn” looks at fat-worshiping forms of pornography. “Leaky,” by Kulick and Thais Machado-Borges, visits Brazil, the plastic-surgery capital of the world. In “Phat,” Joan Gross examines the role of heavy men in hip-hop, from Heavy D to the Notorious B.I.G.
A number of writers introduce places or subcultures in which fat is valued as a sign of wealth or status. Rebecca Popenoe, for instance, lived for four years among a group of desert Arabs in Niger who equate fat with beauty. She describes an alternative world in which women, before weighing themselves, put on as many clothes as possible, to nudge the needle upward.
After suffering through Fat Girl, and to a lesser extent, I’m Not the New Me, such food-friendly corners of the globe seem like little utopias. If only Moore and McClure could visit them, to find relief from our own fat-phobic culture—and, perhaps, from themselves.
Wendy McClure will appear at University Book Store, Bellevue (990 102nd Ave. N.E., 425-462-4500), 6 p.m. Mon., May 2; and at Third Place Books, 7 p.m. Tues., May 3.
