Well, that was grim.
And the last Canadian novel I read was grim too.
I thought it would be funny. The blurbs on the front said it would be funny. Maybe it is for those who don’t view their bodies as an insidious enemy, whose goal, as far as they can tell, is type 2 diabetes and heart disease, who didn’t have relatives growing up taking them to task for how big they were, who didn’t, when they lost a bunch of weight in their last year of high school through a combination of not eating and an untreated lung infection, feel that their mothers loved them more now that there was less to love, maybe for people like that, this book was funny.
I am fat. I have a daughter, and with her I use the word fat not as an insult but just as a word, and tell her again and again that size means nothing because good people come in all shapes and sizes, but she is not fat, and secretly (and now now so secretly because here I am typing it aloud) I think her life will be easier because she is thin. I think specific slices of my life would be easier if I lost weight too.
I write grim too. But after the last list of grim novels I’ve been reading, I don’t know whether I can handle any more grim at all.