While many women writers are leaning toward a brand of feminism that links all women by making sweeping (and often suffocating) generalizations, Mona Awad insists on difference. She grants Lizzie, her female main character, intense specificity, making her a crucial addition to the fat girl story ... Awad validates the stumbling messiness of her character — a girl whose relation to her own physicality compromises her coming of age and ability to have any true self-revelation — by elevating her experience to something of clear literary value.
The way food and body image define Elizabeth’s life is depressing and sad. But the book is neither. There is so much humor here — much of it dark, but spot on ... Lizzie’s inner dialogue is scathingly funny, especially around people she can’t stand — which is a lot of people.
The book feels less like a traditional novel than a collection of 13 moving portraits of Lizzie at different cross-sections of her life, fulfilling the promise of its title — and the prophecy the teenage Lizzie makes in McDonald’s: 'I’m going to grow into that nose and develop an eating disorder. I’ll be hungry and angry all my life, but I’ll also have a hell of a time.'
