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by Judith Moore
February 2005
I wrote Fat Girl because I'd read books that other fat women wrote about
how they were fat. Most fat women didn't write the truth about fat. They
didn't write about fat fat fat fat thighs and how tender flesh on the
inside of fat thighs rubs and rubs. The skin on one thigh rubs the skin on
the other thigh down to raw blister. Every step you take, this raw
blistered skin hurts. You can't tell anybody "I have blisters" and "I
hurt" because first off, you don't want to talk even in whispers about
anything that goes on in the gloom between your thighs. No way. You are
disgusting and what goes on between your thighs is disgusting, so you
don't tell. Besides, anybody you told would know you got the blisters
because you're fat. They'd cluck-cluck-cluck that you were fat because in
one sitting you poked in your snout and gobbled, with warm garlic French
bread: an entire four-serving bowl of the perfect Cobb salad (Romaine and
Bibb lettuces, Haas avocado whose soft ripe flesh turns an immeasurably
buttery green, watercress, tomato loosed tenderly from its tight skin,
cold chicken breast and ham cut into batons, hard-boiled egg, chives,
crumbled Maytag Blue cheese, bacon fried and broken up, and for dressing,
a heavy sluice of whatever you like). Anyone you told about that Cobb
salad and French bread would feel either revolted by you or sorry for you.
You don't want anyone to feel either way, not about you. You don't wish
friend or stranger to feel sorry for you because you don't feel sorry for
yourself, you feel fat.
From the beginning, if you were a child of many chins, you learned right
off to set a goofy smile on your face when boys yelled "Fat-so." You
learned not to cry one tear when they sang, straight to your heart, "I
don't want her, you can have her, she's too fat for me." Those boys
screamed "Pig Face, Pig Face, Oink oink oink." When you trundled past them
on the asphalt playground, these same boys reached out and pinched doughy
flab on your arm. While they pinched, they squealed "Fatty, Fatty." If a
grownup asked, "How did you get that red place on your arm?" I said,
"Bump'd into sump'in.'" How can you confide, how can you tell, about
pinches and oinks and "I don't want her"? Somebody should, I told myself.
Which is also why I wrote Fat Girl.
Another reason I wrote Fat Girl is that few writers about fatties write
that even thin girls (and women and men) can, behind their bony walls,
remain fat. They weigh 110; they think they weigh 200. How this happens is
that if a person's been fat and gotten thin and maybe even stayed thin,
she doesn't forget she was fat. Thin people who've lost weight tend not to
lose the fat-joweled self. Gramma's Sunday dinner (or Denney's special) is
always setting a table in their mind. Thin people who once were fat don't
forget fat jokes. When you lose fifty pounds and you're with someone who
didn't know you when you were a tub 'o lard, you well may make fat jokes
too. The worst (and dirtiest) I ever heard was "You'd have to roll her in
flour to find the wet spot." Some fat girls become anorexic women. Some
anorexic women die of starvation. That's truly sad, much sadder than
fatness.
Fat women who wrote about how they were fat ignored the aesthetics of
food. They did write about how, for many fat people, food is more than
peach pie, more than consolation, more than love. But nobody fat, writing
about fat, quite got down to the nub of how much she admired the greasy
sheen on hamburger buns, admired that grease as if it were Art, as if that
oily patina (acquired on an ancient, filthy grill) were the "unravish'd
bride of quietness" Keats admires in his "Ode on a Grecian Urn."
Narrators of first-person claptrap like what you read in Fat Girl often
greet the reader at the door with hugs and kisses. I don't. I do not
endear myself to you. I don't put on airs. I am not that pleasant. The
older I get the less pleasant I am. If you have never been fat, you may
find me and my story repugnant. There's not much I can do about this. Part
of the Fat Girl story I gave to someone to read and he told me, flat out,
that it was repellent. I thought, but did not say, "Then, how can you say
you like me?" I realized that he did not like me. He tolerated me. Fuck
him.
You can't hide your fat. But the truth about fat gets hidden in many books
fat women write about being fat. Now that Fat Girl's written, printed and
distributed, now that Fat Girl's ready to be read, I ask myself why so
much gets left out when fat women write about being fat.
According to the thin or the formerly or even presently fat, the fat
person lacks willpower, pride, this wretched attitude called "self
esteem," and does not care about his friends or family because if she did
care about friends or family, she would not wander the earth looking like
a repulsive sow, rhinoceros, hippo, elephant, or, general nine-headed
monster. The fat person doesn't even love herself because if she did, she
would be slender and lithe and getting exercise by being busy with her
bicycle rides and weight-lighting with her three-pound pink weights. The
most shameful fat facts, and those facts most avoided when the fat or
formerly fat write about fatness, are facts about the fat body. Nobody
wants to write details of how nobody wants to do sex things with you and
the humiliating acts, sexual and other, that you commit to get a man (or
woman) to love you. Nobody wants to write how somebody looked at you,
across a perfectly tasty cheeseburger and French fries dinner and said,
"You're too fat to fuck." Huffing and puffing, no fat person wants to
admit to, or weeping when you look in the mirror and a creature who
inspires horror and dismay looks back at you, or shopping in fat stores
for fat clothes, or how repulsed thin people are when they watch you slurp
succulent pink shrimp dipped in red cocktail sauce (your puffy fingers
dangle the shrimp's prickly tail), or how much trouble fat women have
pulling on pantyhose over meaty thighs and rolls of stomach and buttocks
that grind like the turbines that move water over the top of Grand Coulee
Dam. Even the Size 3000 pantyhose made especially for fat women rip and
tear when you try getting your tiny hog feet through the hosiery's filmy
fabric. Plus, right away after a bath, in your fat folds and under your
breasts and in your secular and your sacred secret places, you smell bad.
Nobody, especially nobody fat or once-fat, wants to write this.
What people do want to write about is weight loss and how to lose it. They
want to write about self-esteem and how to gain it. Fat Girl makes no
claims to do either. What Fat Girl does is tell my story. I have never
lugged home sacks of food and binged. I have never taken diet pills or
made an appointment with a quack diet doctor. Nor have I gone the vomit or
laxative route. I am a simple over-eater who has spent decades eating too
much and dieting and exercising. I am what nutritionists call a "yo-yo
dieter." I gain twenty pounds and lose fifteen. I gain forty and lose
fifty. I do not supply windbag notions about what's wrong with me. I tell
you only what I know about myself, which is not all that much. You, if you
read Fat Girl, will know more about me than I know. Fat Girl is a
confessional box and inside those four walls I make a clean breast of it.
Fat Girl tells the story of my family and the food we ate. We were an
unhappy family. With the exception of my father's maternal grandparents
and a woman who worked for them and my mother's half-brother, nobody much
loved anybody. There was not a lot of family feeling. There was not a lot
of blood is thicker than water and home is where the heart is. Everybody
was pretty much in it for themselves. We were hard American isolatos. We
were solitaries, some of us, even outcasts. Unhappy families, though,
still have to eat. For my father and for me, who are Fat Girl's primary
fatso's, food was source of some of our greatest pleasure and most awful
pain.
One aspect of Fat Girl that some critics don't like is that Fat Girl (and
the person who wrote it) doesn't "end" happily and happy. Fat Girl does
not haul ass its reader somewhere over the rainbow. Fat Girl's authoress
does not prevail over adversity. I mistrust stories that finish on a note
so triumphant that silver flutes pipe and wedding bells ring and Uncle
Ben's long-grain white rice ricochets across the hot concrete outside the
First Presbyterian Church on a June afternoon.
Adrienne Rich long ago wrote that "the dutiful daughter of the fathers is
only a hack." I'd rather be fat than be a hack. The truth is: I may be
both. Our buddy Keats wrote in his "Ode on a Grecian Urn" that
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter;
Perhaps I should have kept my fat trap shut about fat fat fat fat thighs
and the rubbing raw. I don't think so. Fat Girl wants to make room for
herself. She wants to tuck in her big belly and sit with her strong spine
straight; she wants to sit right there on the bookstore shelf with the
other ladies whose true life stories are getting told. She wants you to
take her off the shelf and hold her in both of your hands and open her up.
She wants to tell you her story and she wants you to tell her your story.
Especially if your thighs are fat. She also wants to say "Thank you for
hanging around and reading this."
Why I Wrote Fat Girl 
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