Book review: Big Girls Don't Cry by Cathie Linz

I came across this book by browsing "similar titles" on Amazon. I'd started out with some chick-lit book, and basically just started adding titles to my Booksfree queue. I thought this might be a nice light read.

When I got it in the mail and read the back cover, I got a bad feeling: "Cole is still the golden boy, a sexy charmer with commitment issues and a short attention span--until Leena and her curves strut into his life."

Nevertheless, I gave it a try. I made it about 80 pages in before I put it away in disgust. This is not a "chick lit" book. It's not an empowering story for fat girls (which is the type of book I was looking at when this popped up). It's a romance novel that was too long for Harlequin so it got published on its own.

It's full of cheesy set-ups--for instance, the main character, Leena (who just took total control of a vet's office and basically hired herself) starts hyperventilating (because her life sucks so much), and the male romantic lead who she's known for an hour solves this by .... kissing her. I gave up at the point where Leena is feeling insecure so dares said romantic lead to "prove" he's attracted to her with a make-out session. Leena's always doing things like putting her hands "on her curvaceous hips", blah blah blah.

I skipped to the end; it ends exactly as you'd expect. The "fat" girl with big city dreams realizes her home town isn't so bad, and throws away a second career chance for a guy (because, you know, you can't have both!) and a life in said town. It's a fairly standard story, but not one that impresses. I won't be checking out any more of Linz's books.

Book Review: Jemima J by Jane Green

(This is a pretty ranty review, I really didn't like this book.)

I'd actually read this book before a couple of years ago; I decided to re-read it because I remembered hating it but not why. What I remembered of it seemed fairly harmless. Well, I re-read it, and I still don't like it. There are several different issues with this book, so I'll try to address them separately.

First, the way this book is written is .... unique. Some of it is written from Jemima's point of view. Some of it is written in third person observing Jemima. And some of it is written in omniscient third person, watching other characters. Sometimes this narrator criticizes, sometimes hints at the future, sometimes empathizes. The entire thing is also in present tense. Having not read anything else by Jane Green, I don't know if this is typical of her writing or not. But it got old and annoying. Especially annoying was the way, when in third person, the characters' full names were used over and over--as if there were another Jemima in the book we might get confused about, or something.

Secondly, Jemima herself has little in the way of personality. She's every fat girl cliche you can list: She hates herself and her body. She's consumed with thoughts of food. She overeats; she eats mindlessly; she eats in secret. She's an emotional eater. She deludes herself into thinking what she eats in healthy when it's not. She's unhealthy--can't even walk up a flight of stairs without taking a rest. She has a "pretty face". She's not a virgin, but has never had good sex or a real relationship. She has no friends and blames it on her weight. She lets people walk all over her. She's always going to start a diet "tomorrow". She's so smart, and so talented, and so funny, and so special ... but nobody knows it because she's fat! Boo hoo! And, naturally, she's in love with the office hunk who's "out of her league"--because she fat. Although there's nothing terribly awful about the character, there's nothing special either--she's sort of your generic fat girl as pictured by someone skinny.

*****SPOILERS*****
Thirdly, the story itself is ... well ... sort of weirdly contrived. Essentially, Jemima becomes friends with her crush, Ben, but he then goes to work somewhere else. She meets someone from California on the Internet and drops a bunch of weight, then goes to meet him. At first it's all fun, until she discovers--gasp!--he likes fat girls! In fact, he has a fat girlfriend, but cooked up this scheme to get a "trophy girlfriend" to show off around LA. And somehow the fat girlfriend is okay with this. Because she "loves" him and he "needs" this. Jemima gets out of the situation, and in LA runs into Ben, who has seen her around, but didn't recognize her and thought she was the most beautiful women ever. She and Ben end up together.

Um, what? I assume this is supposed to be some sort of irony--oh, look at Jemima, she lost a bunch of weight for a chubby chaser! Ha ha! Oh but look, fate conspired to bring her and Ben together in LA, how lovely. And Ben's not a total douchebag for not loving her when she was fat, because she was his friend! So obviously he's not a shallow scum-sucker!

I'll grant this: the idea was cute, and original. It was just too thin a premise. And all the smug third-person narration about fate and how amazing Ben is, yadda yadda, got on my nerves.
*****END SPOILERS****

However, I think my biggest problem with this book is the fact that the author has very, very obviously never been fat. I could try to write a cohesive paragraph about this, but there's too much, so I'm resorting to lists.

1) Jane Green obviously has no idea what 200 pounds looks like:
Jemima supposedly weighs 217 pounds, yet the book is ripe with descriptions like "she rolls over onto her side, and tries to forget her stomach weighing down, sinking into the mattress". Chairs squash her thighs painfully. She can't cross her legs. The most offensive of all comes when describing a "chubby chasers" porn: Jemima says she used to look like these women, who are "not so much a woman, more a mountain of flesh" and who have "acres of flesh that would completely obliterate her genitalia". So 200 pounds is a disgusting pile of asexual flesh, with body parts that are capable all on their own of impacting furniture. Oh really? That'll be a surprise to my friends who weigh 255 or more like me, who still have husbands and boyfriends and one night stands. And can still sit on regular furniture and sleep in regular beds.

2) At one point, the third person narrator asserts that "yes, it is possible for Jemima to put on two or three pounds overnight". This just rubs me the wrong way. Anyone can do that. It's called water retention. But of course, it's weight, and she's a mindless fatty, therefore it must be fat. Ignorance.

3) Along with not knowing what 200 pounds looks like, the author seems to have a general disconnect with weight and clothing sizes. Jemima is 5'7", and yet at 120 pounds supposedly wears a size 8--which, if it's a British sizing, would be an American size 10. To juxtapose, my mother, at 140 and 5'3", wears a size four. At another point, Jemima puts on "26 inch" waist jeans. That would actually be an American size 2!
You could say that's just lack of research on Green's part, and maybe it is. But with 2 being the new 4, and 0 being the new 2, and popular culture vilifying fat, it just plays right in to the "you can never be skinny enough" BS. After all, if a 5'7" women at 120 pounds is a size 8 (horror of horrors!), then what would she have to weigh to be the "perfect" size 0?

4) The rates of weight loss given are completely unhealthy, and are basically a result of anorexia. Jemima is described as eating lettuce for lunch, and lettuce and chicken for dinner, while exercising prodigiously. She skips meals to exercise. She loses 22 pounds in a month, and the author's tone is congratulating. It's even more congratulating when she states that Jemima has lost "almost a whole person" later on. Ninety pounds is a whole person? Are you kidding me?

5) Jane Green apparently thinks that a pound of fat takes up a LOT more room than it does. Jemima at 217 pounds has a "quadruple" chin. She has no visible knees or waist. At 182 pounds, she merely has a "double chin", and miraculously has knees and a waist. And that 22 pound loss makes her "infinitely less huge" than she was before, and makes her face "unrecognizable". And yet, the crush, Ben, doesn't notice her weight loss. Even though he's sooooo wonderful and she's sooooo different.

6) Jemima loses 80 pounds in five months. She's been fat her whole life. And yet, miraculously, she has no stretch marks, no loose skin, nothing to clue in her Internet boyfriend that she used to be overweight. In fact, when she loses weight, she becomes perfect. Beyond perfect, actually. Strangers stare at her and hit on her. Men driving by in cars call their friends and say they just fell in love. The message is clear, and obviously part of the cultural fantasy of being thin: if you lose weight, you will become a traffic stopper. So stop eating, fatty!

7) Jane Green obviously buys into the fact that 1) all fat people overeat and 2) all fat people overeat out of boredom or depression. Because as soon as Jemima becomes interested in the Internet, she magically quits wanting chocolate! And as soon as she stops eating chocolate, or bacon sandwiches, she starts losing weight! And even when she starts eating normally again after acting anorexic for five months, the weight doesn't come back on like it does in the real world of starvation dieting.

8) If a guy likes fat girls, he's obviously a twisted pervert. Oh, and his mommy must have been fat.


Oh, at the end of the book Green makes a token effort at self-acceptance. After an emotional binge-eating episode (WHAT? THIN PEOPLE OVEREAT?!!!!@11! Oh wait, deep down she's a disgusting fatty. I forgot.), Jemima likes how her stomach is rounded (from food? WTF?). She realizes her low weight looks more like a boy than a woman (because she has small breasts. Again, WTF?), and decides--all at once--that "I'm not going to binge anymore, but I'm not going to stay obsessed with being as skinny as I can be." At the very end, she goes up A WHOLE SIZE (oh god) and is suddenly "curvy and feminine" but still eats "whatever, whenever" as long as its "reasonably healthy". Oh, and she gets the guy and the dream job and her life is perfect.

If the book didn't piss me off so much, I could've summed up the entire thing with one word: FAIL.

Book review: Locker Room Diaries

The Locker Room Diaries: The Naked Truth About Women, Body Image, and Re-Imagining The "Perfect" Body by Leslie Goldman

(This isn't the most cohesive review; the book itself is fragmented into very delineated chapters.)

Leslie Goldman spent a long time eavesdropping in her locker gym, interviewing women, and making pithy observations about women and their attitudes toward their bodies. Goldman is recovering from an eating disorder, which she mentions quite often in the book, and I think it's great that she's so open about it.

Throughout the book, at various points and in line with various subjects, Goldman calls for women to accept themselves as they are. She describes a multitude of bodies, in various conditions--fat, thin, tall, short, white, black, Hispanic, young, old, pregnant, post-pregnancy, etc. Through out she describes women traipsing around the locker room in various states of being, not to mention nudity. Unfortunately, her emphasis on appearances undermines the message. At one point, while discussing flaws, she actually encourages readers to look for flaws in others, stating that "schadenfreude can be your best friend" in the locker room. In short, if I were new to the gym, this book would make me more concerned about being scrutinized in the locker room.

In addition to the locker room, Goldman has a clear obsession with exercise in general. She clearly looks down on people who don't exercise. I believe at one point she expresses admiration for an anorexic at her gym who exercises three hours a day, seven days a week. The overall impression is that if you don't exercise, or don't exercise enough, you're not as good as Goldman.

There are also places where she just flat-out goes on tangents--for example, about people talking in the steam room. She also complains about womens' beauty rituals in the locker room. Now I admit I'd probably laugh if I saw a women take a break from blowdrying her hair to blowdry her nether regions--but Goldman apparently thinks that's just disgusting. She also criticizes women who blowdry or do their makeup while topless--while also stating that she does the same. She at one point says she'll stop walking around topless because some of the women she talked to were made uncomfortable by it; but she also talks about encouraging other women to go topless.

Gym-specific locales aside, the author's language also clearly belies her spoken message. I've already returned the book, but the example that jumped out at me the most is that assertion that someone's 36C breasts were "respectable". It really bothered me all the way through, and I think if I were less secure in myself this book would have made me even more critical of my "flaws".

The most depressing part to me was probably at the very end, when Goldman interviewed older women. Although some of them did express a certain comfort with their bodies, their comments seemed overwhelmingly negative. The same could be said about Goldman's interviews with women who had had children--such as the women who said she didn't want another baby because of how it made her body look, and another one who described her post-pregnancy breasts as "a nipple on a board". There were a couple of women who said they looked at their bodies in different ways now--able to create and sustain life, etc.--but most of them seemed devastated by how giving birth had changed their bodies.

There were some good things about the book. I admire the intent behind it, even though I don't think Goldman really believes in accepting people as they are. Goldman is also quite witty and amusing. I appreciated her efforts to include everyone--not only the various gym patrons, but the people who work at the gym, including the largely Hispanic cleaning crew and how their culture influenced their views regarding body image and nudity.

All in all, I think Goldman's intentions were great, but I think the concept would have been better served with a larger sample size (rather than just her $140/month gym's clients) and by less of an author bias. I believe Goldman was trying to give women confidence in their bodies by describing the flaws and conditions of many other women; unfortunately, she mostly manages to re-enforce the idea of women critiquing one another to feel superior.

(Goldman also re-tells a hilarious story from Kristy at She Just Walks Around With It, which Kristy calls "Why Yes, Cute Firemen, That IS My Ass")