‘13 Ways of Looking At A Fat Girl’ by Mona Awad

Reviewed by Phoebe Wang

The creation of an unlikeable female narrator takes a special kind of recklessness, but Mona Awad goes further by writing a central protagonist who is unlikeable even to herself. In her debut collection of short fiction, a finalist for the 2016 Giller Prize and winner of the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, Awad brings into being a true female antihero–multifaceted, furious and vulnerable. Awad may take her inspiration from Wallace Stevens’ poem “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” but there are many more than just 13 ways to look at a self split by conflicting desires.

Critiques of our society’s unhealthy relationship to food and the unrealistic expectations placed on femininity and beauty abound. Unfortunately, body image issues are so prevalent among women that there’s a danger of becoming inured to the discussion. It’s becoming harder to frame these issues with urgency, freshness and nuance. 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl explores the psychic toll of those expectations via sharp and memorable portraits, even those that Lizzie, the collection’s protagonist, rips from her walls in frustration:

First a tiaraed Audrey Hepburn eating breakfast in dark glasses (now with zombies, thanks to me), then Jayne Mansfield sweatered and laughing, then windblown Marilyn in her infamous halter, then Marilyn when she was Norma Jean, pedal pushers and plaid tied over her sucked-in stomach.

Awad excels at textured prose that at once contains action, visceral description and the characters’ latent rage towards falsified ideals. Her style could trace its lineage from Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman, but it has embraced its own mutation. Awad’s acerbic yet chatty language also shares a likeness with contemporary urban writers such as Stacey May Fowles, Claudia Dey, Heather O’Neill and Lisa Moore, whose stories move like brisk clouds, hiding dark linings.

Lizzie goes through many incarnations, from a high school student to a thirty-year-old, from a suburban girl stuck in her own Misery Saga to a city-smug condo-owner, and of course, from an overweight woman to someone with a closet of bodycon dresses. But in every permutation of herself, as Elizabeth, Beth or Lizzie, there is a stricken woman, one who cannot find relief from the glare of self-scrutiny, brutal as change room lighting. Toggling between first and third person points of view, the stories allow the reader to access both Lizzie’s merciless monologue and other characters’ baffled and loving gazes. Awad is adept at depicting Lizzie’s guilty pleasures in a way that’s poignantly hysterical:

At home, I eat the other half of my salad with the other half of the honey Dijon dressing it came with. I make sure to draw the curtains first. I didn’t used to, but then I caught the owner of the Turkish restaurant next door staring at me from his upstairs window, smoking, just as I had finished my post-salad ritual of dragging my finger pads over and over again across the empty plate and sucking the oil off them one by one.

Lizzie’s fixation with her weight and dieting is the thread of oil that ties together the meaty substance of these stories. Beth at work, going to lunch with a thin coworker who can eat anything, Liz at the nail salon with the manicurist with “warm, swollen” hands she specifically requests, Elizabeth out on the town with her mother, who takes a voracious pleasure in the cropped tops her daughter can now flaunt. A series of short vignettes, all of them set in change rooms, also add punches of “we’ve all been there” wit. What woman hasn’t been subjected to the indignities of the patronizing saleslady or the friend who looks good in anything? Awad’s humour is like a paring knife, glinting, shaving off bits that we can’t even feel at first because we’re in shock. Then the pain sets in. Awad has set out to evince discomfort and revulsion in her reader so that we might hold these feelings in front of ourselves like dresses we used to fit into, and recognize them as tender parts of ourselves.

Awad also explores the complexity of female relationships, which I find more vibrant than Lizzie’s male relationships. In particular, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl explores the trope of the other female as both a double and rival. Other women’s bodies provide Lizzie with a standard to measure herself against, a mirror, even as she craves their otherness and separateness. Every other woman is one we might become, or one we might have been, and Awad reminds us of that with her many-sided fat girls.

Penguin Canada | 224 pages | $20.00 | paper | ISBN# 978-0143194798