Fat Girl by Judith Moore

() Whether or not you have ever struggled with the role that food and weight play in your life, there is no one that hasn't experienced loneliness. Judith Moore does a fabulous job of examining her childhood and her string of unhealthy behaviors - not just eating.

A lot of her actions seem relative to a need for specific forms of love she never received. For example, she always seemed to fall for guys that were unavailable or not good for her, which she blamed partially on having an absent father. But it is also more complicated than that, and Moore captures this too. "Would love have done me any good? Love, I think, would not have made me thin." (pg. 195) "I was hungry for love. I know that. But so are many sad hungry children and they don't rummage people's living quarters and eat their food." (pg. 174)

This book shatters the simple "lazy" and "gluttonous" stigma that fat people are often labeled with. Furthermore, each chapter begins with an insightful, outside quote that brings light to the following section. It was another deeply honest read that I couldn't stop once I started.

"I worried that because of my father's blood I might have been born bad. Underneath the yellow fat made from so many gravies and cherry pies and apple crisps under thick cream, so much toast buttered and jellied, so many deep sunset-yellow egg yolks, I imagined that the bad Tootsie Roll Pop filling of me seethed and simmered." (pg. 84)
"I still liked the three little pigs. [...] Brick was what I built my house with, I thought, and now I see the building materials were the yellow fat bricks. [...] The clean pink picture-book pigs were nothing like real pigs that grunted in their pen on my grandmother's farm. I dwelt on the difference [...] Rather than the squinting eyes from which real pigs looked out at you meanly, book pigs had wide blue Shirley Temple eyes. Real pigs, if you fell down in their pen and no one was around, would eat you alive." (pg. 87)
"I built walls of fat, and I lived inside. When those boys said fatso, fatso at me what they said almost, but not quite, bounced off my fat walls. When my mother [...] took out the belt [...] The belt didn't cut as hard as it might if I were skinny. But if I were skinny would she have hated me so much?" (pg 98)
"The story of being a fat child, the story about wanting more than my mother had to give and wanting my father to rescue me might as well have been hammered together with a million nails." (pg. 111)
"I began to chew my fingernails. I turned into a voracious eater whose meal was herself. I ripped and I tore at the flesh around my child nails; I licked, delicately and hungrily, at the blood that popped up in bright droplets at my chubby fingers' ends. I ate myself raw. [...] I was not delicious. [...]I was eating myself, I see now, alive." (pg. 123 - 124)
"I did not want to be a woman. I did not want to be a man. I considered myself more animal than human, more rock than animal. I was a heavy piece of dull rock that bled onto itself every month. The rock feels nothing. No matter what you do to it [...] the rock does not care. The rock does not hear you. The rock does not feel you. The rock sees you dimly and not well. You cannot murder the rock." (pg. 181)
"Other girls were fatter than I was; they were slow and bovine and looked half asleep. I didn't care that they were fatter than me; what broke my heart was that I was fat, fat, fat." (pg. 184)