1) "Does This Book Make Me Look Fat?" by Marissa Walsh
A theme anthology is sometimes forgiven artistic paleness if it’s strong or striking in subject matter, but this underwhelming collection carries only a weak narrative thrust. Each chapter addresses, in some way, insecurity or oppression due to body type. Fiction and memoir alternate uneasily with each other, never quite meshing. Most chapters are fine individually, competently portraying body anxiety and dissatisfaction, but there’s no particular power to the sum total. While many chapters acknowledge the harsh cultural pressures that render positive body image a challenge for almost everyone, there’s no underlying or overarching condemnation of such pressures. Two stories shine as literature—Jaclyn Moriarty’s “The Day Before Waterlily Arrived” and Ellen Hopkins’s “Pretty, Hungry”—and Coe Booth’s “How to Tame a Wild Booty” is empowering. Overall, however, this volume is more likely simply to keep readers company in their insecurity than to help them conquer it. (Anthology. 11 & up)
2) "Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media" by Susan J. Douglas
3) "Thinner Than Thou" by Kit Reed
A nightmarish, tragicomic near-future where body image is the new religion, from the author of@Expectations (2000), etc.
When anorexic Annie Abercrombie vanishes from her home, twins Betz and Danny suspect the dreaded Dedicated Sisters (“Your body is a temple. If you can't keep it sacred, we will”). In Dave Berman's beat-up old Saturn, they set off to find her (Dave is Annie's girlfriend, but Betz wishes he were hers). Their journey’s a strange one, not least because Danny aspires to be a world-record-breaking eating champion: in one memorably ghastly scene, he chomps his way through three 50-ounce steaks. Back home, Marg comes to several realizations: husband Ralph’s interest in his family extends only to their usefulness as perfect accessories, she doesn’t want the facelift Ralph has insistently scheduled for her, and her decision to call the Deds for Annie was utterly wrong; so she joins the search for Annie and the missing twins. Annie, meanwhile, teams up with the obese but resourceful Kelly to try and escape the Deds’ relentless regime. In an era that has spawned Jumbo Jiggler clubs, where the obscenely obese perform lap-dances to audiences whose illicit thrills derive not from sex but from fat, the Reverend Earl (slogan: “Thinner than thou”) promises a slim, beautiful heaven, the Afterfat. But Jeremy Devlin finds the Reverend’s much-touted luxury spa, Sylvania, a prison camp wherein monstrous secrets are concealed. What, for instance, is the Reverend’s mysterious new program for the elderly, Solutions? What lies concealed beneath the Arizona desert? And what’s the connection between the Reverend and the Dedicated Sisters?
Unsettling, sometimes appalling: satire edging remorselessly toward reality.
4) "Models Don't Eat Chocolate Cookies" by Erin Dionne
Fat girl, entered into a plus-size beauty contest by her interfering aunt, decides to lose weight so that she’ll be too thin to compete in an event she considers to be more than mortifying. It’s a clever premise, and the most winning part of the book is the beauty pageant itself, which gives readers the opportunity to see the inside workings of the process. These scenes are far more engaging than the more familiar fat-girl-at-school material, which pits 13-year-old protagonist Celeste against a thin meany who is trying to steal her best friend. The beauty competition is presented as a multilevel affair that happens over a period of time, which gives Celeste the opportunity not only to shrink in size but to grow from passive and dull to resourceful and sympathetic. Although it’s slow to gain traction and a bit too explicit in terms of life lessons learned, readers will warm to Celeste as she becomes a competitor in the Miss HuskyPeach contest, to say nothing of life itself.(Fiction. 8-12)
5) "She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders" by Jennifer Finney Boylan
The limpid, soul-rich story of novelist James Boylan (Getting In, 1998, etc.) becoming Jennifer Boylan.
From early on, Boylan says, the idea “that I was in the wrong body, living the wrong life, was never out of my conscious mind—never.” In the beautifully guileless way he has of describing his feelings, he recounts wearing women’s clothes—“I’d stand around thinking, this is stupid, why am I doing this, and then I’d think, because I can’t not.” Because he has mercifully inherited the buoyant optimism of his mother, an optimism that will serve him well over the years to come, he is able to recount, with comic aplomb, such tidbits as, “Earlier in the evening I’d sat on a chair in that room wearing a bra and reading Lord of the Rings.” He was 16. He figured if he had sex, then his sense of himself might change, or if he fell in love, maybe then. Well, he does fall in love, with the remarkable Grace, and they have children, and he gets tenure and high marks from his students at Colby, and develops a close friendship with novelist Richard Russo, also teaching at Colby. And he still wants to be a woman. In writing as sheer as stockings, artful without artifice, he explains the process of becoming Jennifer: both the physiological, which has a comfortable tactility, and the emotional repercussions among his nearest and dearest. These aren’t so easy—his wife’s saying, “I want what I had”; his children thinking of him, in the midst of hormonal makeover, as “boygirl”; Russo telling him that Jennifer “seems mannered, studied, implausible.” Yet they all manage the sticky web of circumstance—this mysterious condition—in their own fashion, and that makes them lovable. There’s a particularly poignant moment, when they’re attending a wedding and Grace turns to Jennifer, asking if she wants to dance.
Serious, real, funny. Told so disarmingly that it’s strong enough to defang a taboo.
6) "Jemima J" by Jane Green
An overweight woman turns from ugly duckling to swan in British novelist Green’s American debut: a tale that offers plenty of engaging plot twists but not much substance.
Jemima spends many secret hours pouring over fashion magazines, whose cheeky, “how to improve your [fill in the blank]” tone the novel echoes. It’s a depressing activity, since Jemima—a good hundred pounds over the limit for contemporary beauty—looks nothing like the supermodels who cavort through those glossy pages. Her job writing the household hints column for a London newspaper bums her out too, as does the fact that gorgeous Ben, the man of her dreams, adores her as a friend but nothing more. When Jemima gets on the Internet for the first time, she realizes that in cyberspace a little extra fat doesn't matter if it isn't mentioned. So she begins an online flirtation with Brad from L.A., who sends a picture and turns out to be a real hunk. Thanks to a computer-enhanced photo of herself (thinner all over), Brad wants Jemima to fly to California for a rendezvous. So she loses weight, dyes her hair blond, and dons the wardrobe of a sophisticated ‘somebody.’ Now known as J.J., Jemima gets to California and is so shocked that a man like Brad would be interested in her that she wills herself to fall in love. But something is wrong: sweet Ben never leaves her mind. Sure, Brad is good-looking, but what else? Has Jemima met Mr. Perfect? Or should she hold out for Ben—that is, if she ever sees him again? (Readers should not spend a lot of time worrying about this last question.)
Slightly unpredictable story development saves this from exactly duplicating the vast mound of similar feel-good modern fairy tales for women, but it lives in the same neighborhood.
7) "Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies, and Fat" by Hillel Schwartz
An old-fashioned anecdotal compendium about fatness over 150 years of American history. Nothing in this book is slim: even the notes run to over 100 pages. The impressive amount of historical research--the author is a Yale PhD in history--focuses on specific anecdotes about how Americans feel and felt about what they weigh. Schwartz's prose is appropriately orotund, and these pages are as stuffed with adjectives as a cocktail olive with pimiento. Schwartz's keen sense of humor keeps all this stuff about weight from being weighty. Although the subject is dietetics, some lurid tales here seem to stray from the point. P.T. Barnum's hunt for ""fat boys and human skeletons,"" while interesting in itself, does not have much application to everyday American life at the time. Moreover, Schwartz might have explored more thoroughly the role of Europe as the source of Fads and fashions regarding diet, rather than isolating American ideals and paranoias about weight to such an extent. Because it includes much peripheral material, this book can be read as a kind of general-store catalogue of diverting, often weird anecdotes about almost anything having to do with the shape of American bodies from 1830 to the present. As entertainment it succeeds beyond dispute, although as serious history it reveals a want of discrimination between what is truly significant and what is merely colorful copy. The main message of this jovial parade of stories is that ""fat is fine"" and the world errs in despising fat people. The author speaks with passionate eloquence on his subject, like a pudgy John the Baptist crying in the wilderness. His arguments are so convincing, in fact that the reader has the urge to reply, ""In that case, pass the ice cream over here!
8) "Huge" by Sasha Paley
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