13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

Written by Mona Awad

Narrated by Jorjeana Marie

Growing up in the suburban hell of Misery Saga (a.k.a. Mississauga), Lizzie has never liked the way she looks-even though her best friend Mel says she's the pretty one. She starts dating guys online, but she's afraid to send pictures, even when her skinny friend China does her makeup: she knows no one would want her if they could really see her. So she starts to lose. With punishing drive, she counts almonds consumed, miles logged, pounds dropped. She fights her way into coveted dresses. She grows up and gets thin, navigating double-edged validation from her mother, her friends, her husband, her reflection in the mirror. But no matter how much she loses, will she ever see herself as anything other than a fat girl?

In her brilliant, hilarious, and at times shocking debut, Mona Awad simultaneously skewers the body image-obsessed culture that tells women they have no value outside their physical appearance, and delivers a tender and moving depiction of a lovably difficult young woman whose life is hijacked by her struggle to conform. As caustically funny as it is heartbreaking, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl introduces a vital new voice in fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio
• Release date: Sep 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9780735235373

Mona Awad

Mona Awad is the author of the novels All’s Well, Bunny, and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl. Bunny was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award and the New England Book Award. It was named a Best Book of 2019 by Time, Vogue, and the New York Public Library. It is currently being developed for film with Bad Robot Productions. All’s Well was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award. 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. Awad’s forthcoming novel Rouge, is being adapted for film by Fremantle and Sinestra. This spring, Margaret Atwood named Awad her “literary heir” in The New York Times’s T Magazine. She teaches fiction in the creative writing program at Syracuse University and is based in Boston.

Reviews for 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

[loranne_test_01 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I ALMOST gave up on this one about halfway through. I just felt like it wasn't for me. I totally appreciate the parallelism between this book and 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, but for me, the disjointedness works much better in poetry than in prose.

BUT! I stuck it out and the second half of the book was much more enjoyable! I might actually read another book about adult Liz if it existed. Probably not, but maybe.

[kristi_test_02 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I ALMOST gave up on this one about halfway through. I just felt like it wasn't for me. I totally appreciate the parallelism between this book and 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, but for me, the disjointedness works much better in poetry than in prose.

BUT! I stuck it out and the second half of the book was much more enjoyable! I might actually read another book about adult Liz if it existed. Probably not, but maybe.

[brainannex · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Some really great writing on a sentence by sentence basis but there doesn't seem to be anything new that she's saying. I wanted to give the main character some feminist writings to chew on. That said, there is a certain resonant pain with how the main character deals with men, with family, and with the world.

[iambookish-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm divided in my opinion of this book, on the one hand it was very readable, and on the other hand I didn't much like the narrative. It's 13 short stories with one main character. We meet her when she is an overweight adolescent and throughout the stories her life, weight and even her name fluctuate over time.
I didn't find it funny or filled with dark humor, it was just a bit depressing.

[aine.fin · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very relevant read to most women today. Library book.

[narshkite · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Connected stories about a nasty, self-obsessed, vacuous girl who becomes a nasty, self-obsessed, vacuous woman. Oh, and she is fat. As a fat girl I know how difficult and sometimes painful it can be to be overweight. That said, it is not the only thing we chubsters think about, it does not entirely define us. And we don't walk around judging others, even when we are going through skinny times. This woman is shallow and cruel and intellectually lazy. Being fat is the least of her problems.

[lynnb_64 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a very powerful book. Elizabeth has been overweight most of her life, and this has done a lot of damage to her self-esteem. Even when she, through extreme dieting and exercise, become thin, she continues to obsess about her weight and isn't happy. This book looks at how so many women feel unattractive in a world where far too much importance is placed on appearance. It is honest, sometimes brutally so, about how we look at ourselves, and how others relate to overweight women.The book is a series of thirteen inter-connected stories that give us glimpses of Elizabeth at various times of her life, mostly told from her point of view although two chapters are narrated by men in her life. This style made the various moments in Elizabeth's life very vivid and poignant and, by the end, I felt I knew her.

[gypsysmom_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I think in small doses this collection of short stories would have been thought-provoking and illuminating. There are some gems of observation here but reading story after story was enervating. The stories tell of an overweight girl, then an overweight young woman, then a young woman who starves herself into losing weight and then a woman who counts every calorie and carbohydrate and fixates on food and then a woman who fixates on food and exercise. Only at the very end do we get a hope that Elizabeth (also known as Lizzie, Beth, and other iterations) has seen that her obsession is unhealthy. I think the author wants us to realize that problems with body image are rampant in today's society and that they can be debilitating. I just think that some more positive messages might have made the collection better.

[bucketofrhymes · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Well-written, uncomfortable. I love books with flawed lead characters, books that deal with the expectations placed on young women by society, books that let girls be unlikeable. And there's a self-consciousness that this book captures in a compelling way. However, I found this book a little much in its constant portrayal of the longing to be desired by someone else. It was frustrating, and I kept on waiting for Elizabeth to break out of that mindset and stop focusing so much on the people around her.

[karen.helfrick · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Wonderful writing that makes me feel like I know this girl and her struggle. This feels like a memoir, like real. In places almost too real, which is depressing. Because in the end, this character has a miserable life of hating herself and the situations she places herself in.

[xaverie_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It's best to ignore the blurbs on a book because they're usually meaningless, but I want to fight the authors who gave blurbs for this book. "Full of sharp insight and sly humor"? "Hilarious and cutting"? "sparkles with wit...Awad knows how to talk about the raw struggles of female friendships, sex, contact, humanness, and her voice is a wry celebration of all this at once."

I could not disagree more.

There's nothing wry, clever, or funny about this book at all. Acerbic and bitter. Perhaps deeply tragic, even.

There are 13 vignettes, 11 of which are told from the perspective of Elizabeth/Liz/Lizzie/Beth, the name she insists people use is usually connected to what sort of identity she's invented for herself. She's a fat girl who has internalized all the fatphobic propaganda of society - not only does she hate herself, as she is supposed to, she hates anyone and everyone around her.

That's perhaps the most difficult aspect of the book: the protagonist is empty. She has no real friends, no interests beyond fatness, and not once in the book does she have a nice thing to say about anyone. Her self-loathing is a poison that has coated everything, preventing Elizabeth from having a single meaningful relationship.

Truly, the closest the book come to wry or clever is in the second vignette, told from the unnamed perspective of some douchebag musician who only refers to Elizabeth as the 'Fat Girl' in his head, who should be grateful to have even his drunken, sloppy attention. That he was the one replaced at the end with another gormless musician was a funny twist. But then we were back to Elizabeth's perspective.

I suppose any cleverness lies in the way that Elizabeth's desire to be thin, and the time when she achieves her goal weight, and that it changes nothing. She is still self-conscious, still self-loathing, still deeply hateful of all women. But ultimately, this novel is just sad. A portrait of a woman who internalized all the hateful messages of society, as she was supposed to, and all it did was leave her with nothing.

[thewestwing-864351 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed aspects of this book a lot, especially the first few chapters. But parts were hard going. I know that’s the point of the book but I felt it could have been so much more.

[bbbbecky13 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I ALMOST gave up on this one about halfway through. I just felt like it wasn't for me. I totally appreciate the parallelism between this book and 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, but for me, the disjointedness works much better in poetry than in prose.

BUT! I stuck it out and the second half of the book was much more enjoyable! I might actually read another book about adult Liz if it existed. Probably not, but maybe.

[marquis784-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

One of several short stories contained in this book.
It was mildly amusing but overall had me feeling depressed about he characters. I kept wanting to interject suggestions on her flawed thinking of self acceptance. She develops a "relationship" with a much older physically disabled man online. This just demonstrates her inability to accept herself as a "fat" girl just like her mother. She feels bad about her mother who seems to be a "fat middle aged lonely woman". A fear I'm sure is one she lives with daily.

[deltaqueen50 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Oh dear, from what I had heard about it, I was expecting to really like 13 Ways of Looking At A Fat Girl by Mona Awad so it came as a big disappointment when I not only didn’t like it, I pretty much hated it. I obviously missed something here as this book was up for numerous awards but I really struggled to get through it. This is a collection of short stories that are connected in that they all depict scenes from one person’s life. Lizzie lives in what she calls “Misery Saga” a nickname for Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto, she is overweight, insecure and has little or no self-esteem.Through the course of the book she goes through many weight changes, from an obese teenager to a thin young woman, but no matter what weight she seemed to be, she remained, to me, a very damaged character. Her craving for affection in her younger days allowed many to take advantage of her and use her in different ways, including sexually, which was difficult to read about. As a thin woman she came across extremely unhappy and angry.So many things put me off this book. It is full of nasty, small minded people who appear to be only out for themselves. The humor is sly and always directed at other people’s shortcomings. I can’t knock the writing but overall I didn’t like the characters, didn’t like the stories and didn’t like the book.