Fat Girl Walking by Brittany Gibbons
Written by Ashley Kelmore, Posted in Feminism, Reviews
Four Stars
**Apparently this isn’t released until Tuesday, but my local Barnes and Noble had it out yesterday, so I guess I’m reviewing this from the future? Awesome!**
You might be familiar with Ms. Gibbons. She’s the woman who went on TV in her bathing suit (in Times Square, no less), wearing a size 18ish. She had sex with her husband every night of the year in hopes of improving her own body confidence. She runs the website ‘Brittany, Herself’ and is the leader of the ‘curvy girls army.’
I found this book while trying to kick-start by Cannonball Read yesterday. I bought four books that I could see myself forgoing TV for (although not the new Game of Thrones tonight, because I’m not an animal). This one really jumped out at me, and I pretty much inhaled it. I read it before bed last night, only stopping because my eyes refused to cooperate. I read it on a 30 minute walk to get lunch, and on the walk home. I was even a little sad that today was a run day, not an elliptical day, so I couldn’t read it while working out.
I related to a lot of what Ms. Gibbons shares in this collection of essays, even though I’ve never had children (her discussion of being a mother permeates much of the second half of the book, but is certainly not the overall focus). No one would describe me as thin. Fat? Eh, probably not usually. But I’ll freely admit to having more than one totally fine morning destroyed because I stepped on the scale.
And that’s bullshit. Ms. Gibbons articulates the ways in which it is bullshit much better than I can, so I’ll just leave it at that. There are some really laugh-out-loud moments, and some really thoughtful ones that gave me pause. I was reading this too quickly to even bother to underline passages I especially liked (the book would have been mostly underlined anyway), but this one stuck out:
“The reality was that my life wasn’t miserable because I was curvy; I was miserable because I thought I’d be happier if I were thinner, and when I sat to think about it, it didn’t really make sense.”
Word.
