13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

November 16, 2015
Awad opens her assured and terrific debut collection of linked stories with a quotation from Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle:“There was always that shadowy twin, thin when I was fat, fat when I was thin...”
Roughly following that 1976 novel’s coming-of-age trajectory from miserable overweight youth to precarious (but fashion-model size) adulthood, Awad artfully revisits themes related to body mass, femininity, cultural values, and resistance, finding virtually no reasons to be optimistic. Though Atwood’s Joan ultimately carves out a niche for herself on her own terms, Awad’s furious and damaged Lizzie is deformed by external pressures. She finds nominal success in too-tight bandage dresses, and she obsessively measures food intake while worrying about maximizing her sessions on an elliptical machine. From a half-correct bitter prediction Lizzie makes as a teen Goth in suburban Ontario (“I’ll be hungry and angry all my life but I’ll also have a hell of a time”) to glimpses of her days as an angry, dissatisfied temp, Awad portrays Lizzie careening between raging at the world and scrutinizing her failings in the mirror. After she’s “started losing,” upsetting stories trace her discomfiting relationship with her overweight mother in “Fit4U” and “My Mother’s Idea of Sexy” and romantic partners in “She’ll Do Anything.” Marketing the book as “hilarious” is misdirection: Lizzie’s witticisms, while abundant, are attacks, and her grotesque development is a profoundly somber indictment of the gendered cultural norms that, in effect, created her. Agent: Julia Kenny, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency.

Starred review from December 1, 2015
A young woman navigates uneasy relationships with herself, her weight, and the world in Awad's painfully raw--and bitingly funny--debut. When we meet Lizzie March, she's in high school, fighting the profound boredom of suburbia and adolescence with her best friend, Mel. "The universe is against us, which makes sense," she observes. "So we get another McFlurry and talk about how fat we are for a while." Later--the novel is told in a series of self-contained vignettes, snapshots of Lizzie from fat adolescence into thin adulthood--we watch Lizzie spend a tortured afternoon trying to take an acceptable full-body shot to send to her online boyfriend; we watch her date, or sort of date, a sleazy jazz harmonica player ("Archibald doesn't take me to dinner, but I can be naked in front of him"). Lizzie becomes Beth, graduates from college, eats tiny salads; loses some weight, and then some more, committed to never being hungry for anything. Increasingly thin, she marries a man who fell in love with her when she was fat, and we watch him wish, sometimes, that she were still that girl: now, Elizabeth's life--by this point, she's Elizabeth--is dedicated to the maintenance of her hard-won figure, displayed in tight, joyless cocktail dresses. She's trapped by her body, whatever size she is, and the shame of her own physical existence is isolating, a lens that filters every interaction. But it's too simple to say that this is a novel "about" body image and self-hatred and the systemic oppression of women (though that wouldn't be totally wrong); in Lizzie, Awad has created a character too vivid, too complicated, and too fundamentally human to be reduced to a single moral. Lizzie's particular sadness is unsettlingly sharp: she gets under your skin, and she stays there. Beautifully constructed; a devastating novel but also a deeply empathetic one.

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June 1, 2016

A shockingly accurate portrayal of fat culture and female body shaming, this brief novel comprised of 13 short stories is like a grittier Bridget Jones's Diary mashed with Andrew Smith's Grasshopper Jungle. Lizzie obsesses over her weight. She believes that her thighs are too big and that no one could love her, and so she willingly allows her friends and boyfriends to control her. Lizzie is into online dating until the older man she meets wants a full-body shot, and she always takes what she can get when it comes to romance. When she finds a good man, she loses weight to keep him (even though he doesn't care about her appearance) and changes her name, but her self-esteem doesn't improve. The truths revealed in this work make it a difficult read, but most teens will identify with Lizzie in at least one of these tales. Some were previously published, but Awad has arranged them artfully to create a thought-provoking account of a young woman growing awkwardly into late adulthood. VERDICT A brash, realistic, and much needed look at body culture and self-esteem. Pair this with Isabel Quintero's Gabi, a Girl in Pieces.-Sarah Hill, Lake Land College, Mattoon, IL

Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2016
Behind the title of Awad's sharp first book, a unique novel in 13 vignettes, is brazen-voiced Lizzie, who longs for, tests, and prods the deep center of the cultural promise that thinness, no matter how one achieves it, is the prerequisite for happiness. As a teen, Lizzie defines herself with dark makeup and a musical obsession and discovers sex through Internet chat rooms and the flaky, but thinner friends she aspires to emulate. Later, we watch Lizzie change her dress size, her nickname, her marital status, and the part of the country she calls home. Some of the book's most touching moments are found in Lizzie's accounts of her relationship with her mother, a woman Lizzie defines by her size as much as Lizzie defines herself, yet with tenderness and love. Adult Lizzie is simultaneously driven and exhausted by her effort to stay thin. To read her stories is to mourn for all the interests, friendships, and places this character might have found to enjoy, were her tightrope efforts not all-consuming.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)