Thoughts about fat... and other things.

Recently finished "Big Fat Manifesto," by Susan Vaught, for a review. It's about a teenage girl who writes a column, Fat Girl, about the way society treats you when you're overweight.

I don't know what to think of the book. The author has a point, and it's well-written, but it's supposed to be a YA book for and about kids. These kids don't talk like kids. They don't think like kids. They think like grownups - wish - they had thought when they were kids. Plus, Vaught, whom the book publicist assures me has had weight issues herself, makes the lead character come off like some brassy, opinionated, loud stereotype of a fat person.

I don't have an either way on the issue. I'm fairly thin. Breathing has always been more of an issue for me. I know about discrimination (translation: people acting like asses because something about you disrupts the way they think the world should be) from having learning disabilities and having to advocate for myself in grad school.

It got kinda funny when I was teaching and had a pregnant student who wouldn't fit behind the chair desks. The professor I answered to said something like 'pregnant women shouldn't be in school,' and when I finally got a chair that fit her, some other prof stole it from me for an AV presentation to prop up something.

Meanwhile, I was going to the same people asking for special recs for myself and, except for a few eye rolls, had no problem. Then I went Ivy League. Ivy League means you're supposed to be perfect. The moment I said 'learning disability accomodations,' they looked at me as if I'd escaped from a mental asylum.

I hear it's better now. I mean for LD people in grad school. I hope careers of administrators were damaged in the process. (If they haven't, and someone needs an aggressive ax behind the passive voice, I'll volunteer.) I received some first class hell over the issue.

But the book. It had a nice pace, but is a bit formulaic. Plus, the author is obviously from an era before iPod, and probably before personal computers. If the subject means so much to her, I wonder why she didn't do the research/soul-searching/google-searches necessary to make the book credible. I'm not sure God is in the details, but when novelists sweat the small stuff, they've usually sweated the large stuff, too.

So the book feels more like a personal rant, perhaps a necessary venting session, than a work of art, or even of activism. The personal has to take a step or two to be effective politically. She may have an agent, and Vaught can write a decent sentence, but it feels as though she's never left the therapy session.

I've a close friend whose girlfriend is overweight. R suffers horribly because of it, and she's a nice person. Excellent writer. Sweet lady. But then, I have the feeling fat women rarely dare to be other than sweet, the world already hates them so. R is a nuanced person. One problem with politics in books is that it often strips people of nuance. Some people lack nuance—perhaps the author is one—but stripping people of nuance is one of the things discrimination does.

I remember struggling to get into the disability office at Columbia (on an upper floor, with a non-motorized door that even I had trouble opening) and having a mean woman in owl glasses with a scowl that would sour not only milk, but an entire cow, look at my paperwork, and attempt to turn all my hopes dreams, struggles, and reasonable writing samples into a heap of unnecessary bother that she could write away. "We have standards here, you know." So why haven't they fired you yet?

But of course, I'll give the book a good review because it's for a certain sort of magazine, and that's what is required.

Love and that fuck-you attitude,

The Red Pooka!