To be clear, I have been involved in the fat acceptance movement for well over a decade, and I love the non fiction writing that has cropped up over the last however many years so I was keen to read this too. But for me, it was just a bit old news. I have been here so long that I've heard all these critiques before. I mentioned this to two friends who are also fat and who are also in the movement, and they agreed that for us it's just not new, but that it may be for some people. And I agree, so if some people do need to read this book and would get a lot out of it, I can't really diss it too much.
Basically, it looks at the 'fat girl best friend' in TV shows and films and explores the tropes that the fat side character endures. She's never the main character, she never gets to have her own wishes and wants, she is often either over sexualised or isn't allowed to be sexual at all, she is just the friend of the Thin Main Character. There are lots of examples given but the ones people are often more familiar with are Fat Monica in Friends and Fat Amy in Pitch Perfect. (And it's actually really problematic that both these women are nicknamed 'Fat', for god's sake). But as I say, there was a lot of new information for me.
Things I did like were: the fact that some of the women who are depicted as 'fat' in Hollywood are actually just 'entertainment thin', and what that means, and I also really liked the look at Paula in Crazy Ex Girlfriend because generally that show does so well at representation and I liked Paula when I watched the show.
I did find there were parts of it that weren't proofread properly which I found annoying, and there were some parts of it that were just plain wrong. For instance, it said that the film Frozen was released in 2019. No, it was not. I don't even like the film and I know that. This made me feel like not enough care was taken over the book, and that disappointed me.
In all I'm giving this three out of five. I will donate it somewhere I think, and will hope that someone else will get more out of it that I did.
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