Mona Awad's debut story collection, "13 approaches of a fat lady," may still come with a trigger warning for all the fats ladies, skinny ladies, grotesque ladies, slutty girls and each different current or former woman who could pick it up: One minute you are going to be laughing along with Awad, the next you will be crying into chilly bathwater.
As a portrait of the body-photo issues and low-level eating problems that afflict just about all American girls, "13 ways of a fat woman" is devastatingly thorough, its 13 brief experiences as addictive as potato chips and as painful because the prospect of ingesting nothing however four-ounce portions of steamed fish for the relaxation of your life.
For me, the moment got here someplace around the third story, "Full body," a portrait of protagonist Lizzie's relationship with skinny, gothy and annoyingly assured China. Lizzie sits on a closed bathroom in the high school bathroom whereas China applies her eyeliner: "No color is black sufficient for China except for this one type she says she gets at goal that i can never locate. I think it now as a chilly stabby circulate throughout my waterline. Sharp feathery strokes like little knife swipes that make me recoil anytime." The fierce hopefulness of having discovered that magical pal who could make your existence ensue, mixed with the physical intimacy of the moment and the implicit cruelty of comparison, introduced tears to my eyes. Or maybe i used to be simply remembering how sharp these little eyeliner pencils can believe in a global the place essentially the most vital component about your eyes isn't how they see, however how they appear.
The early stories within the assortment are rife with these moments, but additionally with beauty and humor, as wry, introspective Lizzie shares her taste in indie tune and velvet corsets with her ally Mel: "The universe is against us, which makes experience. So we get yet another McFlurry and talk about how fats we are for ages." younger Lizzie in reality is fats, but, because the first-person narrator informs us, "in a while i go to be basically f------ desirable. … i could be hungry and irritated all my life however i'll also have a hell of a time." with the aid of the last story, Lizzie has, indeed, faded to a pointy shadow of her former self, a metamorphosis whose rewards are complicated at gold standard and don't consist of pleasure.
together, these stories do greater than follow one girl's "weight loss journey," to use the ghoulish euphemism. They goal for something like a phenomenology of the fats woman, a portrait of the contexts, both inner and exterior, that make her believe fat or skinny — regularly when it comes to different ladies, but additionally within the conspiracy of garb sizes, the regime of fitness center sign-up sheets and the secrecy of down-low sex with guys ashamed of their personal wants.
The "fats girl" of the title is greater than a flesh-and-blood lady; she's a specter most girls study to fear from an early age. (I cannot be the best infant of the '80s who heard "a second on the lips, a lifetime on the hips!" a dozen times before hitting puberty.) The totem of feminine enjoyment, the fat woman haunts skinny Lizzie even after she loses the weight — not simply in Lizzie's consistent fear of backsliding or in her suspicions that a fats manicurist is enjoying her own existence more (she is), or even within the anxiousness that her husband may also have favourite her former pillowiness to her current angles — however in the dawning recognition that perhaps, simply perhaps, her problems were all the time greater than skin-deep. a couple of experiences exploring Lizzie's relationship with her ailing, obese mom force this aspect domestic with heartbreaking efficiency.
All this ache could be too a whole lot to undergo if the publication wasn't so funny. Awad's prose is voice-y and appealingly certain — one story opens "So i am ingesting scones with the lady I hate" — and she has a superb ear for the condescending language round girls's bodies. (One story, "Additionelle," is named after the plus-size store "Addition Elle.") nevertheless, her finest lines reduce each techniques, as in "Your greatest Fan," a booty name narrated in second-person: "Oh! Oh! how you have made her night no her week no her month no her year!"
This story, paired with a 3rd-person foray from the factor of view of Lizzie's husband, Tom, gives us our best outdoor viewpoint on Lizzie. most likely it's too little version to support the title's winking allusion to Wallace Stevens' noted modernist poem "Thirteen methods of a Blackbird," but then, in lots of the reports, Lizzie describes herself in way more brutal element. If her clinical self-assessments do get a little grueling via the end, it's nothing we girls are not used to.
Amy Gentry is a freelance creator dwelling in Austin, Texas.
"13 approaches of looking at a fats lady"
by way of Mona Awad, Penguin, 214 pages, $16
No comments:
Post a Comment