Fat Girl: A True Story

Fat Girl by Judith Moore is a coming of age story suited for any woman that has struggled with a love and hate relationship with food. After her descriptive introduction on her body, eating habits, and just how much she hates how the two coincide, it follows her journey throughout her childhood ensuring not to omit any of the vivid memories that are laid out for the reader. This story is self deprecating more often than not creating a honest and relatable take on body dysmorphia. 

I’m on a diet. I am always on a diet. I am trying to get rid of pounds of my waddling self. I am always trying to get rid of pounds of myself. I am a short, squat toad of a woman. My curly auburn hair is fading. Curls form a clown’s ruff about my round face. My shoulders are wide. My upper arms are as big as those maroon-skinned bolognas that hang from butchers’ ceilings. My belly juts out. The skin on my thighs is pocked, not unlike worn foam rubber. When I walk my buttocks grind like the turbines I once saw move water over the top of the Grand Coulee Dam. I hate myself. I have almost always hated myself. I have good reasons for hating myself, but it’s not for bad things I’ve done. I do not hate myself for betrayals, for going behind the back of someone who trusted me. I hate myself because I am not beautiful. I hate myself because I am fat.

Moore often talks about herself like this throughout the entire story, without an ounce of self pity. She wants to tell her story the way that she sees it, without fluffing it up. She describes her favorite foods that her great aunt Mary used to make growing up with such explicit detail that it may even cause the reader’s desire to run to the kitchen to come about without even noticing until it has already erupted. 

She knows how most people feel about someone who is overweight– disgust or pity. It is often either “I can’t imagine how hard it is” or at the movie theater “Jesus don’t let that girl sit next to me.. I don’t want our legs touching the entire movie”. It is even worse in the dating world; boys don’t want to date a girl that isn’t thin and fit. If she has a stomach and back rolls, most don’t even bat an eye at her. Judith had a boy tell her in school that “she was too fat to fuck”. 

Her parents’ marriage disintegrated due to her father’s struggles with weight as well. His name was Ham, short for Hamilton, and at one point in his life he was 300 pounds. He was made fun of in school for being fat, so when he got older, he changed his eating habits, most of which were unhealthy. The weight started shedding off quickly and before he knew it, he was thin. That is when he met Judith’s mother, who never struggled with her own weight. Once they had been married for a couple of years, he started to gain back the weight that he had lost previously. 

I will tell the story of my family and the food we ate. We were an unhappy family. Everybody was pretty much in it for themselves. We were hard American isolatos. We were solitaries. Unhappy families, though, still have to eat. For my father and for me, who are this story's primary fatsos, food was the source of some of our greatest pleasure and most terrible pain.

Judith’s mother was frustrated because this was not who she married. She was disgusted when he would kiss her with a mouth full of Muenster cheese, sauerkraut, and garlic. She would never forget the taste, and would never forgive Ham for eating the way he did. Once Judith turned 4, her mother filed for a divorce from her father. After their divorce, Judith didn’t see her father often. She bounced around between her maternal grandmother’s house, and her mother’s apartment. At her grandmother’s house, she was frowned upon because she was her father’s spitting image. At her mother’s apartment, her weight gain was always a point in the conversation. She was always emotionally abused by the women in her life that were supposed to be her biggest supporters.