Mona Awad has made waves with 13 Ways Of Looking At A Fat Girl (NNNN), her new collection of short stories. Centred on Lizzie, whose life and relationships are defined by her large size, the book is perceptive and very dark. We talked to Awad about what inspired her to make fat her focus.
Are you yourself weight-obsessed?
Weight is something that Ive struggled with and a lot of people I care about have struggled with. But frankly, any woman with a body who has to look in the mirror and has to exist in our culture can connect to the concept of a fat girl.
Thats who I wrote it for, for every single woman who looks in the mirror and thinks theres something wrong with her. I did want to give voice to what we deal with every day. A lot of life gets used up in that struggle. Its a big cost.
Using fat girl in the title is almost a trigger.
The reason fat girl is in the title is because its a charged term. It brings with it images and presumptions, and I wanted to complicate, subvert and challenge those assumptions.
Lizzie loses almost half her body weight, but that doesnt make her happy.
Transformation is tricky. The narrative around it is that it yields a happy ending, a fairy tale result. I was getting frustrated with narratives that tells the story of Cue the music, this persons happy. I was more interested in the complication, what cant we leave behind. When we change our bodies we dont change our whole selves. We cant escape.
Can women escape the pressures that cultural messages put on their body image?
Being in culture, its constantly in your face.
As long as someone is looking at you, which is all the time.
Exactly. You can try to step outside of it, but youll get pushed back into it. The gaze forces you back into that struggle.
In one story, The Girl I Hate, a thinner Lizzie keeps going out with a slim woman whos always eating everything Lizzie has to avoid.
The Girl I Hate is ultimately Lizzie herself. The thing that goes on between women when they eat together theres a subtext about their bodies, the way they order and the way they order off each other. But is that woman tormenting Lizzie? Thats up for grabs.
A few of the stories take place in a clothing store, especially the change room. Its almost as if its a terror site.
The impetus for the book came from an image of a girl struggling in a dressing room with a dress and her mother and the store clerk outside at the door.
But the job of the store clerk is to sell the damn dress, isnt it?
Lizzie isnt able to see past her shame about her own body to see beyond it. Youre vulnerable in that change room. Youre naked and youre under the lights and youre in a public space, but its private, and things can become skewed.
How would you respond to someone who says, I revel in my fat, I love it, Im creative with it?
I would love that.
See my review of the book here.
susanc@nowtoronto.com | @susangcole
