Scoot Over, Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology
Edited by Donna Jarrell and Ira Sukrungruang
Despite a couple murderously cruel essays ("Big Game Hunters" and "Fat Like Him") this collection is exceptionally smart and touching.
From "Fat Lady Nuding": "...I remove every extraneous article of clothing and all accessories and submit myself to the doctor's scale, to the mechanical contraption that has been given the power to determine the quality of the relationship I have with my body." Brilliant.
Meanwhile, Pam Houston's writing ("Out of Habit, I Start Apologizing") is just downright beautiful, along with Stephen Kuusisto's "Fatland" as he writes about "a time in [his] life when for complicated reasons [he] became quite fat," compounded by his blindness and how that influences his body image.
We also see things from a thoughtful doctor's perspective (Atul Gawande's "The Man Who Couldn't Stop Eating") and a harsh psychiatrist's view (Irvin Yalom's "Fat Lady"), both enriching, both complicating matters as practitioners looking from the outside, in.
One of the back jacket's descriptions does this text a disservice: "...these writers make a compelling case for why we should make room for a bigger behind." That's not the message.
Instead, the focus is more about what it's like to have a bigger frame in this thin obsessed society. And what's shared is mostly heavy, not lighthearted.
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1 comment:
THANK YOU FOR THIS! Julie
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