Lessons from Fat Girl

Writing—especially writing for children—exists to teach and to delight. That crucial lesson in balance, which not every age has comprehended equally, stands as my one remembered relic of the children’s literature course I took in college five years ago. Well, that and the blackberry pie.

In that class, we spent a good deal of time reviewing the fictive children’s compositions of our peers. Ours were unsteady tales, rickety in plot and sparse in telling detail, which we had cranked out the previous midnights. I remember that most of these 12-point stories bored me. But one, written—I think—by a girl named Hannah, featured a blackberry pie steaming in a made-up kitchen. “You can throw any story at me; I don’t care,” I announced to the group. “If there is a blackberry pie, I’ll read it!”

On one of my last days at Patrick Henry, I listened as visiting author and former WORLD Magazine features editor Lynn Vincent described the way she edited her work at the cellular level to produce a reader response she called “ICPID”: “I couldn’t put it down.” The formula for ICPID, in my opinion, differs for every person. But to hold a wide range of human attention, why not lunge for one of the most universal and yet specific tantalizers known to man? Why not write about food?

I always struggle to find a book I really like, much less an ICPID one. But a couple weeks ago I found Fat Girl by Judith Moore peeking out of a library shelf. The book tells the author’s tragic tale of food and figure. Moore’s pages charge through mountains of memories, circuiting through scenes of childhood abuse and the potatoes, pound cakes, and pizzas she used to protect herself, she says, behind walls of fat. She arrives at a startling conclusion: Inside many a fat person, a very hungry person hides. Not an undisciplined person. Not a person with a certifiable medical difficulty. But a person who is very, very hungry for love. At least, this was the case with Moore.

Fat Girl was published in 2005, a year before the author’s death. This fact presents me with a difficulty every reader must grow accustomed to: Because of death, you will never access the person who has handed you her broken heart on so many pages through so many fine, fine words. You will never get to do anything to help heal her wounds, or thank her for the gift of understanding she spent her life to share with you.

I said earlier that writing exists to teach and delight. Fat Girl,of course, does not make suitable reading for a child. But it made perfect reading for the child inside me, the child who remembers what it feels like to suffer injustice in a fallen world. Moore ropes the reader with her luscious descriptions of food. That’s the delight. The teaching comes in when Moore tells us the hard truth about her past. Memory by memory, she peels scales from our eyes. Fat Girl taught me a compassion I never have thought of having. I couldn’t put it down.