The Fat Girl

02/01/2025

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Story titles are often poetic; others suggestive. Some are hyperbolic and some understated. Frequently, they offer a fact. But occasionally a story invokes a prejudice: 'The Adulterous Woman', 'Never Marry a Mexican', and 'The Fat Girl'. In the latter, Andre Dubus doesn’t want us to confirm the prejudice but he wouldn’t want us to pretend this isn’t the way his central character is usually described, even how she would describe herself. “She knew why she was fat; she was fat because she was Louise. Because God had made her that way. Because she wasn’t like her friends Joan and Marjorie, who drank milkshakes after school and were all bones and tight skin.”  

     Her mother doesn’t see her weight as inevitable and for years has been trying to persuade her to eat less: to follow her mother’s example. “Her mother was slim and pretty, carried herself erectly, and ate very little. The two of them would eat bare lunches, while her older brother ate sandwiches and potato chips…” Her mother tells her if she keeps eating she will be the fat girl in school, the ones the boys won’t like. Her father is more indulgent if indulgence is the word. He would tell his wife “oh give her a potato. She’s a growing girl. Her mother’s voice then became tense: if she has a potato she shouldn’t have dessert. She should have both, her father would say, and he would reach over and touch Louise’s cheek or hand or arm.”

          If Dubus’ story is a compassionate account of largeness, then that somehow wouldn’t be enough for a short story. Fiction isn’t there to counter our prejudices just as it shouldn’t be there to confirm them. Dubus seems to want to find in the idea of a fat girl an existential, even spiritual, reality his work often seeks out. Returning to the title, we see an adjective and a noun.  They indicate an external perspective even if it is one we have seen Louise internalise. But what would that internal perspective consist of if it could understand itself better? This would seem to be the journey of the story. Not that it is cruel to undermine people who are overweight, nor that Louise is triumphant at the end as she piles on the pounds again after a period of what amounts to a starvation diet: “she thoughts of the night of trying to sleep while her stomach growled.” She begins to understand the nature of designation, of what it means to be defined by others and how we are made up of an accumulated amalgam of perceptions placed upon us and that we place upon ourselves. As Lionel Kelly says, “...the implicit argument here is that Richard [the man she will marry] is merely a composite of images whose identity is defined by his profession, social status, and material goods, of which slim Louise was one.” (‘American Fat: Obesity and the Short Story’)

          Yet Dubus is in some ways an essentialist writer if all we mean by this is that he entertains a notion of the soul, of some sense of identity that cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts. There has often been a theological underpinning to his work and near the end of his life he understood it quite tangibly. After a car accident that left him in a wheelchair, he noted “...living as a cripple allows you to see more clearly the crippled hearts of some people whose bodies are whole and sound.” (Broken Vessels)  In an essay simply titled 'Grace', he says “...often we receive grace without knowing it, and often we do not know it because when grace comes, we are already joyful or resilient or serene...” These are the words of a writer who might be interested in the parts that make up a person’s identity, but he wouldn’t wish to stop there. “I enjoy getting into characters’ souls.” (Conversations with Andre Dubus)   

          In 'The Fat Girl', this is what Richard doesn’t do: he sees Louise as the sum of her parts, which were slim, and are now no longer so. It’s as if he has bought a product that has a much shorter shelf life than he anticipated. Louise is a faulty product and if she can’t be returned to the store then he can perhaps at least leave it where he found it. However, maybe a more pertinent analogy would be with a plant, or at least a living thing that needs nurturing and love to develop or be happy. When Louise loses the weight she is helped by her friend Carrie, who is willing to shop for her aware that it would be very hard for Louise to go into a supermarket hungry, and it is Carrie who realises that it is best if she holidays with her rather than Louise going home to her parents, where she might give up on her diet. We may see laxness in Carrie’s approach — Louise staves off hunger by smoking Carrie’s cigarettes, and the diet soft drinks Louise consumes will be detrimental to her health in other ways. But Carrie is presented as a generally benign, caring and considerate presence in Louise’s life, and she thinks back on this when Richard proposes that to help her lose weight he will eat the same things Louise will eat. “But his face does not approach the compassion and determination and love she had seen in Carrie’s during what she now recognises as the worst year of her life.” Carrie could see her unhappiness; Richard sees only her weight. Earlier, when Louise says he never touches her anymore, he replies: “I don’t want to touch you. Why should I? Have you looked at yourself?” Asking her to lose the fat and saying he will limit his diet isn’t an act of empathy but closer to emotional blackmail. Richard after all is “a tall, energetic man with the metabolism of a pencil sharpener.” He wants her to lose weight and will suffer as well. But her unhappiness, or her happiness for that matter, doesn’t seem to interest him.  He married a thin woman and this is what he wants her to be. She may have a baby that is making her happy and that leads her to regain weight, but now she should return to her svelte self. 

       If the story only happens to be about a woman who should weigh whatever she likes and whose husband ought to take her as she is, then this would make for a nice sentiment but would be unlikely to make a great story.  Fiction’s purpose shouldn’t be to insist on a value but to explore it, and it shouldn’t assume that appearances don’t matter, only that this isn’t all that matters. What Carrie sees isn’t a fat person but an unhappy person, and proposes that if Louise loses weight she might no longer be miserable. Richard sees an overweight person who is making him unhappy. She should lose the weight to make him happier. In Carrie’s compassion, Louise may or not be happy but she will at least have an idea whether the weight is why she isn’t. In Richard’s desire for her to lose weight, it isn’t really about her happiness but his. She may be miserable or content but she will be slim. 

       When she puts on weight, it is as if it confirms to Louise what she would have suspected anyway: that Richard was never interested in her. When they would lie in bed together she would talk of being fat. “When I was alone I didn’t mind being fat but then I’d have to leave the house again and then I didn’t want to look like me. But at home I didn’t mind except when I was getting dressed to go out of the house and when mother looked at me. But I stopped looking at her when she looked at me.” This indicates that Louise was ashamed of her looks but she wasn’t dispirited. Carrie can see that spirit; Richard can’t. When she speaks to him in bed it is as though she wishes to convey to him this divide in her personality: that she can be socially happy as a thin person but personally dispirited or vice versa. Richard simply “could not see her as she was when she was fat.” 

       In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre makes much of shame. When one says “I am ashamed of myself”, shame supposes a me-as-object for the Other but also a selfness which is ashamed and which is imperfectly expressed by the I of the formula. Thus shame is a unitary apprehension with three dimensions: “I am ashamed of myself before the Other.” Louise isn’t ashamed of herself, Dubus proposes. She is ashamed by the looks of those upon her and thus understands well the importance less of her weight than the gaze of others. Carrie wanted her to lose weight because she could see Louise hiding food from her and wanted an honest friendship.  Louise wants to please her friend and loses the fat. If she wasn’t quite herself in the weight loss, she was at least generating an honest complicity with Carrie. What would there be with Richard, this man who is her husband? 

        The story asks what are we to others and what are we to ourselves, a more complicated problem than asking people to be un-prejudicial. Ideally, everyone would be tolerant of everybody else but things often don’t work out that way, and rather than saying the father is a lovely man who wants his daughter to be as she is, and the mother a monster who constantly chides her about her size, we may wonder what Louise means to her mother as opposed to what she means for her mother, and what her parents mean to her. The mother cannot get Louise to lose the fat though she would have been cajoling her to do so, and the father, who may have had more chance of getting her to slim down if he were inclined to care about her weight, doesn’t wonder if she should do so. When the parents see her for the first time since she has become a thin person, her mother says “you’re so beautiful” while her father “blushed and offered her a martini.” Then there are the friends and relatives, the “applause in their eyes lasted the entire summer, and she loved their eyes.” This is the opposite of shame but finally may be no better if these eyes are turning you into an object of the gaze rather than acknowledging the subject who is present to that look. 

      Carrie can see both the subject and the object and this seems to be what Louise seeks from Richard when she tries to explain that she was a fat person before becoming a thin one. There really is more to her than meets the eye as we can see Dubus uses the notion of fat as an opportunity to indicate the inner self without falling into easy, essentialist cliches (there are complicated ones too), nor saying that we have to love people no matter their size or shape. To offer these would lead to truisms like people are what they are, or we should take people as they are. Perhaps we should, but Dubus’ story surely offers instead a subtler notion: not accepting people as who they are but how they are, an anagrammatic shift that sees people are changing all the time but we need to comprehend the self that is behind these changes. At the end of the story, Louise will have put on much of the weight she earlier lost,  but this doesn’t mean she is back to her true self. It is more whatever that happens to be it won’t be shaped by a husband who rejects who she is and doesn’t care to understand how she is, in what has led her to being overweight and slender, and now heavier again. If he could manage that the marriage might survive and Louise may be slender or large but this would be a secondary question.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The Fat Girl

Story titles are often poetic; others suggestive. Some are hyperbolic and some understated. Frequently, they offer a fact. But occasionally a story invokes a prejudice: 'The Adulterous Woman', 'Never Marry a Mexican', and 'The Fat Girl'. In the latter, Andre Dubus doesn’t want us to confirm the prejudice but he wouldn’t want us to pretend this isn’t the way his central character is usually described, even how she would describe herself. “She knew why she was fat; she was fat because she was Louise. Because God had made her that way. Because she wasn’t like her friends Joan and Marjorie, who drank milkshakes after school and were all bones and tight skin.”  

     Her mother doesn’t see her weight as inevitable and for years has been trying to persuade her to eat less: to follow her mother’s example. “Her mother was slim and pretty, carried herself erectly, and ate very little. The two of them would eat bare lunches, while her older brother ate sandwiches and potato chips…” Her mother tells her if she keeps eating she will be the fat girl in school, the ones the boys won’t like. Her father is more indulgent if indulgence is the word. He would tell his wife “oh give her a potato. She’s a growing girl. Her mother’s voice then became tense: if she has a potato she shouldn’t have dessert. She should have both, her father would say, and he would reach over and touch Louise’s cheek or hand or arm.”

          If Dubus’ story is a compassionate account of largeness, then that somehow wouldn’t be enough for a short story. Fiction isn’t there to counter our prejudices just as it shouldn’t be there to confirm them. Dubus seems to want to find in the idea of a fat girl an existential, even spiritual, reality his work often seeks out. Returning to the title, we see an adjective and a noun.  They indicate an external perspective even if it is one we have seen Louise internalise. But what would that internal perspective consist of if it could understand itself better? This would seem to be the journey of the story. Not that it is cruel to undermine people who are overweight, nor that Louise is triumphant at the end as she piles on the pounds again after a period of what amounts to a starvation diet: “she thoughts of the night of trying to sleep while her stomach growled.” She begins to understand the nature of designation, of what it means to be defined by others and how we are made up of an accumulated amalgam of perceptions placed upon us and that we place upon ourselves. As Lionel Kelly says, “...the implicit argument here is that Richard [the man she will marry] is merely a composite of images whose identity is defined by his profession, social status, and material goods, of which slim Louise was one.” (‘American Fat: Obesity and the Short Story’)

          Yet Dubus is in some ways an essentialist writer if all we mean by this is that he entertains a notion of the soul, of some sense of identity that cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts. There has often been a theological underpinning to his work and near the end of his life he understood it quite tangibly. After a car accident that left him in a wheelchair, he noted “...living as a cripple allows you to see more clearly the crippled hearts of some people whose bodies are whole and sound.” (Broken Vessels)  In an essay simply titled 'Grace', he says “...often we receive grace without knowing it, and often we do not know it because when grace comes, we are already joyful or resilient or serene...” These are the words of a writer who might be interested in the parts that make up a person’s identity, but he wouldn’t wish to stop there. “I enjoy getting into characters’ souls.” (Conversations with Andre Dubus)   

          In 'The Fat Girl', this is what Richard doesn’t do: he sees Louise as the sum of her parts, which were slim, and are now no longer so. It’s as if he has bought a product that has a much shorter shelf life than he anticipated. Louise is a faulty product and if she can’t be returned to the store then he can perhaps at least leave it where he found it. However, maybe a more pertinent analogy would be with a plant, or at least a living thing that needs nurturing and love to develop or be happy. When Louise loses the weight she is helped by her friend Carrie, who is willing to shop for her aware that it would be very hard for Louise to go into a supermarket hungry, and it is Carrie who realises that it is best if she holidays with her rather than Louise going home to her parents, where she might give up on her diet. We may see laxness in Carrie’s approach — Louise staves off hunger by smoking Carrie’s cigarettes, and the diet soft drinks Louise consumes will be detrimental to her health in other ways. But Carrie is presented as a generally benign, caring and considerate presence in Louise’s life, and she thinks back on this when Richard proposes that to help her lose weight he will eat the same things Louise will eat. “But his face does not approach the compassion and determination and love she had seen in Carrie’s during what she now recognises as the worst year of her life.” Carrie could see her unhappiness; Richard sees only her weight. Earlier, when Louise says he never touches her anymore, he replies: “I don’t want to touch you. Why should I? Have you looked at yourself?” Asking her to lose the fat and saying he will limit his diet isn’t an act of empathy but closer to emotional blackmail. Richard after all is “a tall, energetic man with the metabolism of a pencil sharpener.” He wants her to lose weight and will suffer as well. But her unhappiness, or her happiness for that matter, doesn’t seem to interest him.  He married a thin woman and this is what he wants her to be. She may have a baby that is making her happy and that leads her to regain weight, but now she should return to her svelte self. 

       If the story only happens to be about a woman who should weigh whatever she likes and whose husband ought to take her as she is, then this would make for a nice sentiment but would be unlikely to make a great story.  Fiction’s purpose shouldn’t be to insist on a value but to explore it, and it shouldn’t assume that appearances don’t matter, only that this isn’t all that matters. What Carrie sees isn’t a fat person but an unhappy person, and proposes that if Louise loses weight she might no longer be miserable. Richard sees an overweight person who is making him unhappy. She should lose the weight to make him happier. In Carrie’s compassion, Louise may or not be happy but she will at least have an idea whether the weight is why she isn’t. In Richard’s desire for her to lose weight, it isn’t really about her happiness but his. She may be miserable or content but she will be slim. 

       When she puts on weight, it is as if it confirms to Louise what she would have suspected anyway: that Richard was never interested in her. When they would lie in bed together she would talk of being fat. “When I was alone I didn’t mind being fat but then I’d have to leave the house again and then I didn’t want to look like me. But at home I didn’t mind except when I was getting dressed to go out of the house and when mother looked at me. But I stopped looking at her when she looked at me.” This indicates that Louise was ashamed of her looks but she wasn’t dispirited. Carrie can see that spirit; Richard can’t. When she speaks to him in bed it is as though she wishes to convey to him this divide in her personality: that she can be socially happy as a thin person but personally dispirited or vice versa. Richard simply “could not see her as she was when she was fat.” 

       In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre makes much of shame. When one says “I am ashamed of myself”, shame supposes a me-as-object for the Other but also a selfness which is ashamed and which is imperfectly expressed by the I of the formula. Thus shame is a unitary apprehension with three dimensions: “I am ashamed of myself before the Other.” Louise isn’t ashamed of herself, Dubus proposes. She is ashamed by the looks of those upon her and thus understands well the importance less of her weight than the gaze of others. Carrie wanted her to lose weight because she could see Louise hiding food from her and wanted an honest friendship.  Louise wants to please her friend and loses the fat. If she wasn’t quite herself in the weight loss, she was at least generating an honest complicity with Carrie. What would there be with Richard, this man who is her husband? 

        The story asks what are we to others and what are we to ourselves, a more complicated problem than asking people to be un-prejudicial. Ideally, everyone would be tolerant of everybody else but things often don’t work out that way, and rather than saying the father is a lovely man who wants his daughter to be as she is, and the mother a monster who constantly chides her about her size, we may wonder what Louise means to her mother as opposed to what she means for her mother, and what her parents mean to her. The mother cannot get Louise to lose the fat though she would have been cajoling her to do so, and the father, who may have had more chance of getting her to slim down if he were inclined to care about her weight, doesn’t wonder if she should do so. When the parents see her for the first time since she has become a thin person, her mother says “you’re so beautiful” while her father “blushed and offered her a martini.” Then there are the friends and relatives, the “applause in their eyes lasted the entire summer, and she loved their eyes.” This is the opposite of shame but finally may be no better if these eyes are turning you into an object of the gaze rather than acknowledging the subject who is present to that look. 

      Carrie can see both the subject and the object and this seems to be what Louise seeks from Richard when she tries to explain that she was a fat person before becoming a thin one. There really is more to her than meets the eye as we can see Dubus uses the notion of fat as an opportunity to indicate the inner self without falling into easy, essentialist cliches (there are complicated ones too), nor saying that we have to love people no matter their size or shape. To offer these would lead to truisms like people are what they are, or we should take people as they are. Perhaps we should, but Dubus’ story surely offers instead a subtler notion: not accepting people as who they are but how they are, an anagrammatic shift that sees people are changing all the time but we need to comprehend the self that is behind these changes. At the end of the story, Louise will have put on much of the weight she earlier lost,  but this doesn’t mean she is back to her true self. It is more whatever that happens to be it won’t be shaped by a husband who rejects who she is and doesn’t care to understand how she is, in what has led her to being overweight and slender, and now heavier again. If he could manage that the marriage might survive and Louise may be slender or large but this would be a secondary question.


© Tony McKibbin