Terrible hunger

In plain and poignant language, Judith Moore's new memoir, "Fat Girl," chronicles her youth as an obese child starved of love.

By Judith Moore

Mar 30, 2005 | 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.

There seems to never have been a time when Moore has not been both repulsed by her own body and obsessed with it -- which itself is a heavy weight to bear. But between the pages of "Fat Girl," it is Moore's consuming self-hatred that is exposed and finally, painfully purged. Read an excerpt from Moore's memoir below.

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My mouth is dangerous. My lips and my teeth and my tongue and the damp walls of my cheeks are always ready. My mouth wants to bite down on rough bread and hot rare peppered steak and steamed broccoli sprayed with lemon juice. My mouth wants my maternal grandmother's biscuits and sunny-side-up eggs, whose gold yolks rise high above the white circles. My mouth wants potatoes sluiced with gravy and Cobb salad and club sandwiches and ridged potato chips and loathsome onion dip made with sour cream and dry onion soup mix.

When I walk through the kitchen -- when I walk through the world -- my mouth is on the prowl.

I am frightened of food. I flinch when I consider ice cream, especially flavors beyond strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate. Caramel macadamia crunch might as well be the A-bomb, I am so scared of salty nuts and unctuously sweet caramel. I am scared of the frozen cream that melts along my tongue and walls of my cheeks.

The two couches in my comfortable living room are upholstered with a dark gray fabric. On the skirt of the couch where I most often sit is a stain darker than the upholstery. I never see this stain without thinking of a terrible night.

I could not sleep. I wandered the lightless apartment. Lily the Dachshund, an exceptionally long roan-red dog with an exceptionally long tail, wandered behind me. I opened the freezer and took out a pint of strawberry ice cream and a round-bowled sterling soup spoon and sat on the couch in the moonless dark. Lily the Dachshund, fond of ice cream, nuzzled at my bare feet with her cold black nose.

I sat at the edge of the couch, legs slightly apart. My elbows were on my knees; I was hunched and full of sorrow. I wore a loose cotton nightgown. My breasts hung down inside the gown and swayed. I spooned into my mouth the first chilly strawberry dollop. Cream melted on my tongue, which didn't take long, because the ice cream was soft. I spooned in another bite. I wanted to say to the ice cream, "I love you." I wanted to say, "You are my mother." I wanted to whimper, "Mama, Mama, Mama." I wanted to weep.

I spooned out the last bite for Lily. The ice cream, by then, was runny. As I put the spoon into the empty carton so that Lily could lick it, ice cream dribbled down the couch's skirt. That dribble's what stained the couch.

I am scared of the big, hot hole my mouth is. My mouth always wants something and most of what my mouth wants, I can't give it.

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When I was in first grade no one paid much attention to me. I was occasionally teased. Mostly, I was ignored. No one talked to me at lunch and rarely did anyone allow me to join in a game at recess. Right away, in second grade, a group of older boys took after me. Out on the playground, after lunch, they circled me. They yelled, "Fat girl! Fat girl! Fat girl!" They sang, "I don't want her, you can have her, she's too fat for me." I saw the hairs in their noses, they got that close. I smelled boy BO.

The meanest was Dean, who every day wore brown plaid pants. He was the showoff of the bunch and he put his hands on his hips like a dancer and wriggled back and forth while he sang "I don't want her, you can have her, she's too fat for me." The others sang with him, off-key in pure boy soprano.

I never knew what to do. I stood and stared while their mouths opened and shut, while the hard dentals of "don't" and the soft labial "you" spit and slid from their mouths. They had baby teeth missing. We all did. Wide gaps where our square rabbit teeth would soon drop down.

Rodney, who was one of the most hateful boys, especially liked to poke a finger in my rear end, which in Brooklyn they called your heinie. He was a fourth-grader. He would breathe right down on me and stick a finger right between my buttocks and push and push. He had liver lips and his breath gave off a bubble-gum smell. He would put his liver lips right on my ear. One day he said the worst thing to me. He said, "I bet you'd eat my shit." Rodney also would come up to me on the playground and push me against the chain-link fence. When he got me pushed hard against the fence he would rub his hands over my huge stomach and ask me, "You got a baby in there, Fatso?"

Other times Rodney put his hand over my mouth and crushed my lips against my teeth and with his other hand touched the area between my legs that Grammy had called my "business." Finally one day I got my mouth open and bit his hand. He slapped me hard and said, "Maybe your ma should put a dog muzzle on you."

I told no one. I said not one word about my chafed thighs, about Rodney and his friends.

The fatness was my problem.

Next Page: Inside every fat person is a hole the size of the world

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