I found a fun book last week: Such a Pretty Fat, by Jen Lancaster. It was the subtitle that got my attention: One Narcissist’s Quest to Discover if Her Life Makes Her Ass Look Big, or Why Pie is Not the Answer. I initially picked it up (okay, downloaded it) because it looked like an amusing read, but I was pleasantly surprised to find some thought-provoking substance under the wit and snark.
It’s a memoir by an obese writer. The premise is simple: Jen Lancaster (who also wrote Bitter is the New Black; Bright Lights, Big Ass; and Pretty in Plaid) doesn’t mind being overweight, until her doctor scares the crap out of her. She also doesn’t mind that she’s mostly lounging around with no ideas for a new book, until her husband loses his job. At the intersection of health-scare and money-scare she finds a new project: lose weight, get healthy, and write about the process.
The result is funny, insightful, snarky, and sometimes a little dark–exactly what I look for in a memoir. Lancaster is a sartorial snob, a bit of a princess, and most of all, an avowed hedonist. Her struggles with her weight give us a tiny window onto the larger landscape of Jen-as-a-person and what makes her tick.
According to her doctor, Jen’s weight has put her on a path headed toward some pretty miserable outcomes: heart disease, stroke, diabetes–the works. She’s freaked, but for a big chunk of the book, freaking out is pretty much all the effort she’s able to muster. It takes her a lot of pages to really hit the bottom and realize that only she can take charge of her health, and her life. She tries a bunch of different approaches (her attempt at the Atkins diet–in which she starts staring at her husband’s food in a way that makes him kind of nervous–is a spectacular failure, and her forays into group-supported weight loss are hysterical), loses a few pounds here and there, and gains them back plus more.
Ultimately, it’s only when she makes an effort to figure out why she’s overweight that she’s able to really get some control–and balance–back in her life. She has to figure out how to handle all the stuff we all deal with–travel, restaurants, parties, bad hair days. By the end of the book, she seems to have figured out how to live relatively normally, without destroying her body.
My only complaint about the book is this: I think she glosses over some of her deeper psychological issues that may (or may not, I don’t know) be relevant. For instance–she’s a prude. She won’t use any word that has anything to do with S-E-X, even going so far as to spell N-I-P-P-L-E (as someone who breastfed two children, I can’t really comprehend that sort of inhibition–there was a time when I’d whip out a breast pretty much anywhere. But I digress). It seems to me that the link between sex and body image and weight is kind of hard to miss, but she never makes that connection that I kept expecting.
All in all, though, it was a fun twist on the chick-lit theme that made me laugh AND think (and it inspired me to work harder in the weight room, which is always a good thing). If your New Year’s resolution to get-fit-lose-weight-exercise-more-eat-healthy is starting to fade, this might be just the thing to get you back on track.
PS–if you go to Amazon to look at the book, be sure to check out her trailer.