When Being a “Fat Girl” is About More than Just Appearances Isabel Armiento College

A lifetime of self-hatred that refuses to heal. Friendships based around jealousy or pity, hating or needing each friend because of how wide or narrow you look when standing next to her. All culminating in a life lived in willing captivity, sacrificing any guise of fun in the name of an unattainable goal, a gerbil running around its wheel. It all feels like a recipe for dystopia, the vibe waxing hopeless, an underlying melancholy saturating each sentence. Yet, Mona Awad’s novel 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl is not the tale of one girl’s gaping unhappiness but of her lifelong quest to construct an alternative happiness, valid despite its unconventionality. The novel forms a clear dichotomy between skinny and fat, Lizzie’s search for happiness skittering around the divide; her various interactions all focus on the other person’s body, her comfort in each relationship contingent upon their weight. It seems that an intense inferiority manifests when she is around the thin, while a begrudging sense of familiarity and home arises around the fat, yet it is not so simple. Happiness for Lizzie is about finding fellow “fat girls” – girls of various sizes who are steeped in insecurity, a by-product of a lifetime of struggling with...