Salon.com > Judith Moore http://www.salon.com Sun, 27 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Terrible hunger http://www.salon.com/2005/03/30/fatgirl_excerpt/ http://www.salon.com/2005/03/30/fatgirl_excerpt/#comments Wed, 30 Mar 2005 21:23:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2005/03/30/fatgirl_excerpt Judith Moore does not want your pity. From the very first line of her new memoir, "Fat Girl: A True Story," Moore's purpose is clear, her voice steady and unforgiving. "I am fat," she writes. "I am not so fat that I can't fasten the seat belt on the plane. But, fat I am ... All I will do here is tell my story. I will not supply windbag notions about what's wrong with me. You will figure that out. I will tell you only what I know about myself, which is not all that much."

While Moore's intentions sound simple, the story that emerges in "Fat Girl" is layered and complex. Hers is not a self-help book, nor an inspiring diet guide. Instead, in spare and often piercing prose, Moore bares the ugly truth about her past as an obese child starved of love, a ravenous "wild animal" of a girl who ate to fill the hole left by an absent father and an abusive, vindictive mother. Moore, whose previous memoir, "Never Eat Your Heart Out," also used food as a lens through which to examine pivotal moments in her life, again appraises herself -- and her flawed, fractious family -- with ruthless candor. "Fat Girl" chronicles what it felt like to weigh 120 pounds in the second grade, to be ridiculed by her only grandmother, and to repeatedly break into her neighbor's home to empty the refrigerator.

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