Fat Girl

By Judith Moore

Judith Moore was an unhappy child who compensated for her misery with the comfort of food. She didn't just eat too much, she loved food deeply as you can tell from her detailed descriptions of the foods she has eaten and the foods she would like to eat. She was a foodist.
Her father vanished from her life when she was little and she ended up living with her maternal grandmother while her mother took off too. Her grandmother was a busy, no-nonsense farmer who had no time or love for her grandchild. The grandmother cooked three big meals a day for her farmhands and Judith began her fat life at her grandmother's table enjoying a delicious array of homemade goodies as, from the descriptions, the grandmother was a really good cook. Judith was starving for affection and she filled that emptiness with food.
Her mother came back into her life and took her off to New York to live while the mother tried to pursue a career as a singer. One of the few nice things Judith has to say about the mother is that she had a lovely, sweet singing voice. But the mother blamed Judith for blighting her life and she never let her forget it. She was an abusive mother, withholding affection from a little girl starved for it. Plus she rode Judith about her fatness, putting her on numerous diets that sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. But she made such a big deal about Judith's weight and her eating that it became the little girl's obsession too. She had no armour against the cruelness of classmates and no refuge in parental love and saw herself through fat-colored glasses that convinced her she was repulsive and unlovable.
The bright spot in this story is Judith's intelligence. For she grew up to have children of her own, and according to her obituary, she was the loving and involved mother to her own children that her mother never was. Plus she had a successful career with accomplishments and awards and although she struggled with her weight and sadness all her life, all in all, it sounds like she did pretty good.

This was a hard book to read. Not because of the abuse she received at the hands of her nasty mother or the cruel remarks from friend or classmates. No, it is the self-disgust of the author that I found shocking and repulsive. It is not the descriptions of her fat little thighs rubbing and getting sores that upsets. No, it is the repeated denigrations of herself and of that little, sad fat kid she used to be. Still, it is a gripping, if uncomfortable read, and, if not an undistorted picture of growing up fat, it is certainly how she saw herself.