Judith Moore's unpalatable book about her lifelong battle with obesity is filled with self-loathing and shame, writes Kate Holmquist
In her 196-page howl of self-hatred, Fat Girl: A True Story, Judith Moore spares the reader not an ounce of seething, raw and dripping masochism masquerading as candour. It's a performance that might make readers wonder if Moore isn't actually suffering from psychological troubles that she has buried under the label of "fat".
Moore, an American who lives in Berkeley, California and edits the books pages at the San Diego Reader, weighed 112 pounds at age nine and craved love so much that food became her lover.
"My mouth is dangerous. My lips and my teeth and my tongue and the damp walls of my cheeks are always ready," she writes. In her teens, she sneaked into the houses of people she had crushes on and ate their fridges clean, leaving behind crumbs in the carpet and her own sour, sweaty smell like the odour from a newly opened tin of chicken soup.
In adulthood, she makes love to ice cream on her sofa, leaving behind wet stains. "Caramel macadamia crunch might as well be the A-bomb, I am so scared of salty nuts and unctuously sweet caramel." Shame and secret eating are deeply embedded in her early on. As a gifted scholarship student at a progressive school in Manhattan, she was called "pigface" and "fatso".
At home, her petite, doll-like mother whipped her with the metal end of a belt until she bled, her mother weeping with fury and shouting, "Aren't you ashamed of yourself? You with a face not even a mother could love". Her mother put her on strict diets, which never worked. Both her own and her mother's unhappiness seemed to have begun when Moore was four years old and her wealthy father, who also tended towards obesity, left home.
"I thought I was a monster. My family had already dug my grave, yes. An emptiness more still than that in which you hear pins drop grew inside me. I was fattening on a dry wind. My badness grew. I knew I was worse than anyone. Every time Mama slapped me so hard my ears rang or that Grammy knocked me one with the straw broom I knew I deserved every blow. When my mother castigated me for wearing her out by causing her to beat me, deep in my heart I agreed."
In her teens and adulthood, Moore found men to perpetuate the emotional abuse. One she fancied told her over dinner that he could never go to bed with her because she was fat.
"By the time I thought of 'love' as an answer, I was too fat for love," she writes.
She went into therapy, but none of her therapists ever asked her about her weight or discussed food with her. There seemed plenty more to discuss.
Moore's self-image swings between extreme self-criticism and deluded vanity. "It may come as a surprise to you - or maybe it won't - but I often do not realise that I am fat, or how fat I am . . . I have believed I looked acceptably attractive, or even pretty, and then saw photographs that showed my wide butt and bulging stomach and those arms as big as big bolognas that hang from deli ceilings."
Lists of food riddle the book like the anxiety-relieving blade-cuts of self-harm. She constantly craves her abusive Grammy's cooking: bacon and eggs, sausage patties, strawberry jam, butter-soaked hot biscuits, molasses-sopped flapjacks, fried chicken, baked hams, thick pork chops, puffy dumplings, potato pancakes, home-made egg noodles, mashed potatoes, apple and cherry pies, huckleberry and peach and boysenberry cobblers, crisp gingerbread cookies and Kadota figs afloat in clotted cream.
What to make of it all? Novels and memoirs about being fat are hot in the US at the moment. Moore, who has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and whose previous book, Never Eat Your Heart Out, was a New York Times "notable book of the year", writes so well that it seems churlish to lump her in with the rest. Yet beneath the beautifully unsettling elegance of her writing, there is no insight or even a glimmer of self-acceptance.
In her nihilism, she dismisses, with a smirk, therapy and antidepressants and 12-step programmes. She rejects the term "eating disorder" and refuses to endear herself to the reader through "moist hugs and complaisant kisses".
It's a show-stopping performance, masquerading as intimacy, by a woman who seems so damaged that she doesn't seem capable of true honesty. Her two marriages, both ended, and her reunion with her father decades after he abandoned her, are dealt with in short and sharp accounts that make you wonder who she is protecting - probably herself.
Replace the word "food" with prescription drugs, street drugs, shopping, sex, gambling or alcohol and the memoir takes on a different, even less appealing, light. Like the fat woman in a travelling freak show, Moore entices us to stare at her with the same wide-eyed disgust with which she regards herself, and it still feels wrong.
Fat Girl: A True Story by Judith Moore is published by Profile Books, £12.99
