Fat Girl A True Story

A nonfiction She's Come Undone, Fat Girl is a powerfully honest and darkly riveting memoir of obsession with food, and with one's body, penned by a Guggenheim and NEA award-winning writer. For any woman who has ever had a love-hate relationship with food and with how she looks, for anyone who has knowingly or unconsciously used food to try to fill the hole in his heart or soothe the craggy edges of his psyche, Fat Girl is a brilliantly rendered, angst-filled coming-of-age story of gain and loss. In this mesmerizing book, Moore describes, in vivid detail, what it was like to be "the fat girl," both in school and in her loveless home; dreading unannounced weigh-ins in front of her class and avoiding the verbal and physical lashings of her petite and icy mother; struggling to become invisible while desperately craving attention. Through the people who shaped Moore's early life-among them a spiteful, self-serving grandmother and a kind, homosexual uncle-we bear witness to the depths of human cruelty and the remarkable power of compassion. From the lush descriptions of food that call to mind the writings of M. F. K. Fisher at her finest, to the heart-breaking accounts of Moore's deep longing for a family and a sense of belonging and love, Fat Girl stuns and shocks, saddens and tickles.

Listed under Social Science · Women's Studies