The issue of obesity in America has always been an issue with many people, including me. That is why I made time to read Fat Girl by Judith Moore. This is a very interesting nonfiction book with a deeper sense of importance, than what meets the eye. As you read the inside flaps of the book, you will see that this book is more than a girl trying to defeat her weight problem, it’s about her dealing with the fact that she is fat and how she handles the judgment inflicted upon her.

In this book, Moore survived a difficult childhood. Her father (who she inherited her fatness) left when she was little. Her mother was abusive to her and she had only a few friends. She was ridiculed from the time she was in grade school throughout the entirety of her life. She became fat because she starved for love, so she ate and ate and ate some more. One can see the love for food by the way she describes it throughout the book:

“My mouth is dangerous… My mouth wants to bite down on rough bread and hot rare peppered steak and steamed broccoli sprayed with lemon juice. My mouth wants potatoes sluiced with gravy and Cobb salad and club sandwiches and ridged potato chips and loathsome onion dip… Caramel macadamia crunch [ice cream] might as well be the A-bomb, I am so scared of salty nuts and unctuously sweet caramel… of the frozen cream that melts along my tongue and walls of my cheeks.”
She ate until she became fully depended upon food to replace the relationships she longed for. Moore was a fat child and was still a fat woman but she learned so much about others and herself growing up in America as the fat girl no one loved.
The book raises the issue of obesity that most deal with this day in time. Reading this gave me sympathy in the way I view overweight people. I was disappointed to find that she remained fat throughout her life but respect her for telling her story to a criticizing audience. I guess it just goes to show how much of a growing problem obesity is.