13 Ways Of Looking At A Fat Girl

-Honest, searing, and necessary.- --Elle -Simultaneously tart and tender, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl is stunning...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, like Dolores in Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone or Lena Dunham in Girls.- --Washington Post -Heartbreaking . . . [rife] with beauty and humor . . . As addictive as potato chips and as painful as the prospect of eating nothing but 4-ounce portions of steamed fish for the rest of your life.- --Chicago Tribune -Gutting . . . Awad gets everything right and, throughout these interconnected stories, reveals how absurd our culture is about women and their bodies. Several sections had me in tears. . . . I highly recommend this one.- --Roxane Gay (via GoodReads) -Awad tells Lizzie's story from a variety of different perspectives and in different scenes, some deeply funny, some dreamlike, many tragic. Throughout, her prose is lively, while her insight into the often-baffling complexities of being a woman is touching and sharp.- --The Atlantic, -The Best Books We Missed This Year- -Awad is a fine writer with a keen sense of black humor, which makes this often sad story more entertaining than you might expect.- --Lynn Neary, NPR's -Guide To 2016's Great Reads- -A ferocious look at body image and how it permeates every aspect of our lives. At times funny, at others heart-breaking, this is an important one to read this year.- --BookRiot, -The Best Books of 2016, So Far- -Dark and caustically funny...[This] book somehow manages to strike a balance between depressing and hilarious. --Time Out New York, -The 15 Best Books of 2016--Awad's sensitive, unflinching depiction of [Lizzie's struggle] is a valuable addition to the canon of American womanhood.- --Time-Moving.- --The New York Times Book Review -A novel in thirteen vignettes about the experience of being a woman dealing with body image issues or simply put: The experience of being a woman. . . . Even someone who has never struggled with her weight should be able to see her teenage self in Awad's pages.- --The Rumpus-With dark humor and heartbreaking honesty, Awad cuts away at diet culture and the pressure on women to make thinness and beauty their priority.- --San Francisco Chronicle-Awad explores the sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking ways that a person's struggle with body image can seep into every part of her existence. . . . 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl is not really about how Lizzie March looks. . . . [it's] about how she sees herself.- --Wall Street Journal-Awad portrays Lizzie's humiliations with unflinching honesty and a dose of dark humor.- --NPR -It's as if the writer has eavesdropped on your most pathetic, smallest thoughts. . . . Awad's writing is heartbreaking and witty, while her prose is insightful and sharp-elbowed in its caustic edge. . . . [Lizzie is] a vulnerable, funny and fierce narrator.- --The Salt Lake Tribune-Awad's satiric edge is on display in her debut novel.- --Los Angeles Times -[A] mordant coming-of-age novel.- --O, The Oprah Magazine-In this dark, honest debut, Awad sharply observes . . . the struggles of growing up, growing out, and trying to slim down, at any cost.- --Marie Claire-The nuance Awad adds to conceptions of weight and body image is applied also to her realizations of female friendships. Lizzie's relationships with other women are at once petty and kind, jealous and admiring.- --The Huffington Post -Blunt and funny, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl is a refreshingly honest look at how society views physical appearance, how we internalize those critiques and how that affects the way we navigate the world.- --Mashable -Awad's writing is white hot, and deserves to be invoked alongside Gaitskill in its observation and cutting humor, its literary pleasures. It's impossible not to care for Lizzie: not a talking point, but a sweet, calculating, hurt person--that is

Mona Awad received her MFA in fiction from Brown University. Her work has appeared in McSweeney's, The Walrus, Joyland, Post Road, St. Petersburg Review, and many other journals. She is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing and English literature at the University of Denver.