Why do so few novelists dare to write about being fat?

Mona Awad’s absorbing novel 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl goes where few writers still dare – into the mind of a heavyweight woman

At first, I was taken aback by the lack of incident in Mona Awad’s otherwise absorbing new novel, 13 Ways of Looking At a Fat Girl. The protagonist, a woman named Elizabeth living in southern Ontario, simply grows up, gains weight, loses it, gets married, gets divorced. That’s it.

Few novelists are comfortable with this quiet of a plot. In order to sustain it you either have to have to construct a narrator of unusual reflective capabilities, or one with an undeniably interesting characteristic, something any reader wants to know more about. And Awad opts for the latter. It seems blunt Elizabeth is mostly interesting because she is – as the title says – fat.

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