I feel pretty conflicted about and honestly disappointed by this book. I really wanted to like it! Some of the stories were really compelling, and I did enjoy how bizarre and unsettling most of them were. What took me out of it though was this author’s commitment to describing fatness as a character flaw. Again and again, characters that were meant to be morally ambiguous were described as fat. I didn’t notice it at first, but after a few stories the pattern became obvious and honestly distracting. The fatphobia degraded the quality of what could have been a great book and made so much of it utterly banal in my opinion. Oh you’re a man who resents his partner of many years because she is a fully realized person in an of herself? Oh she’s actually not 1 lb of lithe, lean muscle and you feel the need to mention that every two minutes to convey that resentment? Should we throw a party? Should we invite Oprah and Jenny Craig? He did diversify his unoriginal body politics and have a few stories that included weird and unlikeable men who were fat! Diversity win! 

Ultimately this book was a disappointment. It could have been great but all I could see was the author looking at the world with judgmental eyes and seeing fat people as having failed in some moralistic way. The author is actually a writer in residence/visiting professor at UM this semester - maybe I’ll go ask him what the fuck his problem is LOL