Sometimes, you should just have that slice of chocolate cake. With ice cream on the side.

 

I raced through this at a brisk clip after the rather serious nature of previous reads. Not that this wasn't serious. It's just that it's a different type of serious. 

I ordered this from Lit Books, the independent bookstore started by a former colleague and her husband when I saw it listed on a catalogue for Women's Day. Poslaju screwed up the delivery (God knows where that first book ended up) and one of the owners of the bookshop ended up replacing it and delivering it himself.

So the book was procured with some drama. Fitting really, considering the subject matter. Because being fat is a very dramatic thing.

And in this book, we skate from one point of view to another (not 13, despite the title, not quite 13, because it is mostly told from the point of view of the fat girl, who becomes a thin girl once she meets a fairly normal guy who likes her, and whom she feels compelled to "lose" for.

There follows a regimen of calorie counting and weighing of food and industrial strength deprivation that turns her into a depressed, unhappy, neurotic, touchy, inhuman robot. 

Perhaps the most telling chapter is by the husband who misses his former fat girl, who is nervy and jumpy around his thin, brittle wife (other men envy him; he in turn envies a colleague with a fat girlfriend who will do ANYTHING in bed) and feels so deprived in real life with a wife who makes up these nasty little meals for herself (one resembles a dish of turds) and expects him to share it, to be supportive, as if the only consideration in life is her weight and her attempts to lower it, that he starts watching fat porn, and she finds out.

Reading his chapter sort of brings it all together. Her furious futile efforts that have resulted in an unattractive, unspontaneous, industrial woman who no longer enjoys anything sensual and has become a pain to be around. 

 

From the outside looking in, it's easy to spot a mental illness. But if the whole society conspires to make crazy look normal, what then?

When life shrinks to a matter of counting your brittle bones through your skin and you're too tired for sex?

It's funny when the protagonist starts stalking another fat girl, a rather bad manicurist who has married a normal, even handsome guy, who loves her, and who doesn't seem to be a freak.

In the universe of Elizabeth, Lizzie, Beth, Liz, only freaks like fat girls. 

It's all a matter of fetishism.

I don't get it, she blurts out to Cassie, the fat manicurist. What don't you get? Cassie asks coldly.

They both know that what Elizabeth doesn't get is how Cassie (whose name she frequently misremembers as Cammie) could marry a cute guy who loves her and is not a freak and does not expect her to "lose".

She never sees Cassie again. And leaves her own husband, soon after.