13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl Quotes

“Later on I'm going to be really fucking beautiful. I'm going to grow into that nose and develop an eating disorder. I'll be hungry and angry all my life but I'll also have a hell of a time.”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“My father has always felt that being fat was a choice. When I was in college I would sometimes meet him for lunch or coffee, and he would stare at my extra flesh like it was some weird piece of clothing I was wearing just to annoy him. Like my fat was an elaborate turban or Mel’s zombie tiara or some anarchy flag that, in my impetuous youth, I was choosing to hold up and wave in his face. Not really part of me, just something I was doing to rebel, prove him wrong. I started seeing him even less. Now, I wouldn’t say he’s proud of me. As far as he is concerned, things have just become as they should be. I’ve finally put down the flag. Taken off the turban. Case closed. Good for me.”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“The universe is against us, which makes sense. So we get another McFlurry and talk about how fat we are for a while.”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“I’d spend hours hunting for something—anything—that would render me moderately fuckable. And if not fuckable, something in which I could grieve over the fact of not being fuckable with unbaubled dignity. I”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“But even though Ruth's only a hair thinner than I am, she's way on the other side of the fat girl spectrum, looking at me from the safe, slightly smug distance of her own control and conviction.”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“There was always that shadowy twin, thin when I was fat, fat when I was thin, myself in silvery negative, with dark teeth and shining white pupils glowing in the black sunlight of that other world. —Margaret Atwood”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“What does she even eat, do you think?"
"Tea fungus,"Ruth says. "Unsweetened. From an eye dropper. Is what I picture. either that or some sort of sea vegetable."
"Sad," I say.
"It is," Ruth muses.
We decide to order two skim milk cappuccinos and split a gluten-free carrot cake cupcake.”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“Even with my skin and tits, though, it's still Mel who looks better. She's got psoriasis and a mustache she has to bleach and still. It's definitely Mel who has any hope in hell with any of the boys we like.”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“I want to grab her and confess that I'm an unbeliever. That being on that machine makes me feel like I'm running in some sucking substance worse than mud. I can find no foothold, no traction. That I feel out of control, inches from the lip of the abyss. That while we've been sitting here, there's this angry, hungry maw in me that is fathoms deep. But even though Ruth's only a hair thinner than I am, she's way on the other side of the fat girl spectrum, looking at me from the safe, slightly smug distance of her own control and conviction.”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“She is a sleek, beautiful young woman, younger looking even than her twenty-eight years, except maybe around the eyes. Even though he himself has borne witness to her transformation over the past three years, he is still getting used to the severely pared-down point of her chin, the now visible web of bones in her throat, how all the once-soft edges of her have suddenly grown knife sharp. How they seem pointed at him in perpetual, quiet accusation.”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“I wonder where it all goes, Mel asked me once.

What?

Our fat. After we lose it. I know we sweat but that can't be all it is. It can't just turn into water and salt. It can't just disappear. We don't just melt, do we?”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“Looking back, it still doesn't add up how we went from lying in the grass and listening to the same set of headphones to where we are now. Nowhere. I really need to email her.”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“So I’ll be honest with you. In this story, I don’t look that good, except for maybe my skin, which Mel claims she would kill for. Also my tits. Mel says they’re huge and she assures me it’s a good thing.”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“I wonder where it all goes, Mel asked me once. What? Our fat. After we lose it. I know we sweat but that can’t be all it is. It can’t just turn into water and salt. It can’t just disappear. We don’t just melt, do we?”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“The muzak has abruptly ceased, cutting off Michael Bolton in mid-croon. They’re getting serious.”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“Dickie has a unique ability to forage deep into the peripheries of the perverse and come back, polo shirt collar popped and grinning like a guy in a beer commercial, like life is just one big, hilarious frat boy stunt.”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“Deep blue like the hour between the dog and the wolf. An attractively scooped neckline. Sleeves and hemline a length and cut you would call kind. Buttons in back like discreetly sealed lips. Good give in the fabric. Double lined. The sort of dress that looks like nothing but a sad dark sack on the hanger, but on the body it’s a different story. Takes extremely well to accessories. My mother loved this sort of dress. At whatever weight she was—thin, fat, middling—she owned an iteration. I saw her wear it to work, lunch with friends, on dates, to movies, parties, funerals. I saw her wear it alone in her apartment for days on end. Scratch at a stain on the boob. Shit. The hemline begin to unravel. Fuck fuck fuck. Do you have a safety pin? Holes begin to appear in the armpits. Jesus. The sleeves fray. Well. That’s that, isn’t it? She wore it so much she’d wear it out and then she’d have to hunt for another, whip through the plus-size racks for something that fit just as impossibly well, that was just as dignified, just as forgiving in its plain dark elegance.”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“I do what I’m trying not to do, which is dream myself into her clothes buckle by buckle, zip by zip, and then into her skin. Until I am her limbs and her long curving back, Steppenwolf branded on my knobby spine. Until I am her lips and her sharply cut cheeks and her eyes clouded in their glittering gray smoke. Until I am her eyebrow arching itself at me from the opposite shore of the room.”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“And I hate that when I say this, she nods, nods in this way like she knows exactly what I’m going to do later. Can actually see me listening to Little Earthquakes on continuous loop while I tear my way through the takeout she left behind.”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“Tall and rail thin and pale as death. The kind of girl who looks like she should be walking down a dirt road in a music video, one where the sky is gray and the earth is gray and there’s nothing for miles but this girl walking in a torn dress toward you, dark lips curving into a smile, her hands splayed open at her sides like Christ’s.”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“Epic. Primordial. Gritty. Incandescent. These are just a few of the adjectives the fat girl feeds you along with her Banana-Rama bread, her peanut butter and raspberry triangles, her rocky road. She says it’s like you have Leonard Cohen’s touch with lyrics coupled with Daniel Johnston’s sincerity coupled with a Rimbaudian aura of tragedy yet with Nick Cave teeth. She doesn’t tell you not to quit your day job, like Some People. Instead, she counsels never to give up, her gaze wet, dark, and adoring as a dog’s.”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“She says eating one of them is like getting fucked. Not vanilla-style either, the kind with whips.”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“I wonder where it all goes. Mel asked me once.

What?

Our fat. After we lose it. I know we sweat but that can't be all it is. It can't just turn into water and salt. It can't just disappear. We don't just melt, do we?

She looked at me, smiling, bouncing a little in her chair. She was in a good mood because she'd been on a diet for a while, was losing. Feeling philosophical in her slinky velvet dress, stirring a peppermint tea she'd doctored with a million Twins. I think we do melt, actually, I told her. I read an article about it once in a science magazine. I can't remember exactly what it said, though. I think it even comes out in our breath.

Mel wasn't listening. She was looking at her reflection in the window, pleased.

Maybe it's all around us, she said at last, waving a hand at the dusty café air, making her voice spooky, her eyes big and wide like we were teenagers and she was trying to scare me. Maybe we're all around us. Maybe the universe is made up of it. Our old fat. She smiled. Wouldn't that be so funny?”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“Looking back, it still doesn't add up how we went from lying in the grass and listening to the same set of headphones to where we are now. Nowhere. I really needed to e-mail her.”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“Or sometimes my mother would come in with me and sit there, watch me change into and out of things. It looks fine, she'd say. She said that every time except once, when she turned away, attempting to mask her disgust at the sight of the fresh mess of red stretch marks across my stomach. Even though she had the same marks on her own stomach, she couldn't bear seeing them on me. Hadn't she tried, in her way, to spare me from inheriting her fate? I can still see them now in the mirror, faded.”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“And I sit there, watching him chomp breadsticks and regard the waterfall sullenly, thinking how there was a time, not too long ago, when with my formerly swollen hands, I could have snapped him in two. A time when I was afraid to lean against him if we were watching TV on the couch because I worried the weight of me was too much. That if I rolled over at night, I'd accidentally crush him to death. It was a ridiculous fear--I was never that big--but it kept me up nights. That and my own hunger.”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“When he gets back, she's curled on the couch, flipping through a cookbook called Roast Chicken and Other Stories, watching America's Next Top Model. The only thing more disturbing than when she does this is when she watches the Food Network with a legal pad on her lap, taking notes for decadent meals he knows she'll never make.”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“She takes [the dress] off the rack and into her arms, gently now, like it's a maiden, Snow White fresh from her glass coffin. There is such great care in the gesture that it brings another mother back to me briefly. One I didn't see very much. Happy. At ease in her flesh. "I'll tell her," I say.”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“Trixie is now fastening the scarf around my neck like a flaccid noose and I feel my chest getting red and patchy and hot underneath her hands.”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“And you don't know what it is, if it's the dirty mothers or the vodka or the rose or some sort of black magic, but you can't take your eyes off the fat girl; she has transformed, as she always seems to do around this time of night, into something you could almost love for an hour.”
― Mona Awad, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl