The Fat Lady Sings is a great work, one of those rare books that I wish everyone would read. Not only is it filled with many unknown facts, ignored studies, and important psychological insights, but it is also the very moving story of the life of one woman who has had to live as a fat person (her term) in our fat-despising society. When I bought the book, I knew I would learn something, but I had no idea that it would be such a page-turner that I would stay up most of the night reading it and finish it within a couple of days.
Our society as a whole shares a pervasive, insidious set of judgments about fat people that for the most part goes unquestioned. Fat people are seen as obsessive, compulsive binge eaters, food addicts who are making themselves sick and killing themselves with their self-indulgence. If you are not fat, can you possibly imagine dealing with the continual trauma of knowing that strangers on the street are judging you in this way, that people who know absolutely nothing about you think that they know everything about you? The blaming and shaming have been made to appear justifiable, and the prejudices indisputable, by polishing them up as medical issues under a set of assumptions that are mainly false. How many of us could hold up under such chilling indictment? Those who have to do so are deeply wounded in ways that can never be fully healed.
There are statues from many cultures in the ancient world of fat women with voluminous arms and thighs, ample protruding bellies, and big pendulous breasts. Clearly this was an existing body type, probably one that was revered, even in the time before there was fast food, sugary drinks, or french fries. Everything that was eaten in that time was natural and unprocessed. If fat has always been in the range of existing body types, how dare anyone think that we know what a fat person is eating, or how much of it, or what frame of mind they are eating it in, just from the person's size?
I am ashamed to say that before reading this book, I thought I was more enlightened than most on this issue. Fuller, the author of The Fat Lady Sings, is correct; people do sometimes make remarks about a fat person who walks into a room, and more often if she is a woman. At the times when I have happened to be in earshot of such a remark, I would defend the fat person somewhat like this: "Everyone in this room is probably addicted to something, whether it be alcohol, cigarettes, anger, pornography, Facebook, prescription drugs, sex, shopping, whatever. But only the heavy person has to wear their addiction for all the world to see." Now I realize how horrifically unjust I was being in my assumption that the fat person actually had a food addiction. There was no possible way that I could know that, or anything, about her.
Cheryl Fuller is a Jungian psychotherapist, about seventy years old, who has been "fat" to some degree since she was five years old. At some point in her adult life she crossed the line into being a person who is physically large enough that people stare at her, judge, and at times make unkind remarks or give unsolicited advice to her when she goes out in public. Fuller is in good health, and she comes from a line of women on her father's side who were all fat and lived healthy lives into their eighties. But because of the disapproval that surrounded her on all sides, in the first half of her life Fuller spent years trying every diet plan that was available. She lost weight and then gained the lost weight back plus additional weight, because that is what study after study has shown happens to the great majority of people when they diet. Diets have been repeatedly proven not to work. Fuller gained the majority of her weight during the years when she was dieting. At some point, she silently decided to get off the merry-go-round, stop dieting, and do her best to try to accept her body exactly as it is.
Fuller ate compulsively at times during the years that she was dieting, as almost everyone has done-- I certainly have---when the deprivation of dieting got the best of her. But when she let go of dieting, she realized that she is not a compulsive eater. She also found out that she really does love salads, and she does not crave sweets. She eats like many average-sized people do, but her fat body type has remained.
I had terrible survivor guilt while reading this entire book. I probably ate more than Fuller did as a child. I know that I ate enough during my childhood and teen years that if I had had a different biology, I would have been very fat. When I got home from school each day I consumed whole boxes of cookies and crackers, and I often snacked all day long on the weekend. Yet I remained on the thin side until I stopped growing. I've been lucky as an adult in this society to have been able to maintain a medium weight, in spite of being a large eater. I also found out early that diets don't work, and that I have to eat a high fat diet. I feel ill and deprived if I don't. I know there are many people who eat less than I do and yet weigh more, but it was not until I read this book that I really thought about the full implications of the fact that others are shamed horrifically for a body that is larger than mine when they are doing nothing differently from me, and about how I benefit from thin privilege while they are at times scorned and shunned.
While studying Jungian psychotherapy, Fuller had to go through analysis herself, and she was dismayed to find that her analysts would not take the focus off her weight, no matter how many times she asked them to do so. Fuller had a mother who was cruel to her, and therapists often make the snap judgment that a fat woman is carrying extra weight because of her "mother issues," an assumption that cannot be proven. I was sitting in a coffee shop once with a woman who happened to be a therapist, someone I did not know well. A large woman walked in the door, and this therapist gave an instant analysis to me of the woman's psychological issue from a one-second glance at her, and then went on talking about whatever we were talking about before, without missing a beat. I can't remember what the "diagnosis" was, but I do remember feeling chilled to the bone, wondering how much harm this woman had done in her supposed helping profession.
Many fat people come from loving homes, and many thin and medium weight people come from homes with controlling, abusive parents . . . and vice versa. A person's issues do not cause them to be fat, nor do those issues disappear when the person loses weight. My mother was also cruel, and I've turned to food thousands of times when I needed some emotional comfort, as most people across the world do. But as far as I know my therapist did not look at me when I first sat on the couch and assume that I was filling my emotional emptiness with food. Unlike Fuller, I had the luxury of actually being able to work on my issues without the additional pain and shame of my therapist judging my body and pushing me to go on a diet.
Fuller loves to cook and feed people, and she enjoys food very much in a sensual way, as she does with her other love, knitting. But she can only talk about cooking and food with her close family and friends, because if she brings up her love of food with others, she sees that "knowing" look on the face of her listeners as they judge her as a food addict. When I read this, I thought of all the thin and medium weight people I know who love to brag about how much they love to cook and what "foodies" they are. They wear their love of food with great pride. Yet Fuller and other fat people who love food and love to cook are shamed into silence for saying the exact same thing.
There is so much that I learned and such a multitude of "food for thought" that I gained from reading The Fat Lady Sings, much more than I could possibly put into this review. It is such an important book, in so many, many ways. I hope people from all walks of life will read it. It is scholarly but down-to-earth and readable at the same time. I was touched over and over again, I learned so very much, and I am so very sad that any human being would have to suffer what fat people have to suffer in the U.S. and other so-called "civilized" societies. It is time for everyone to start listening to fat people rather than talking about them. Fuller approaches her topic from so many different directions, expertly interweaving her own journey with this "Psychological Exploration of the Cultural Fat Complex and its Effects," as the subtitle says. Do not miss this book.
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