I read this book partly with an eye to how it would deal with these things, and I was interested to find that Truly’s isolation from others in her small town is more tied up with her height and perceived lack of femininity. Her domineering and creepy brother-in-law, a doctor, comments unkindly on her weight, but she sees it as just one way in which she’s different, not the main way.

Truly has a sister who is beautiful and desired, and she’s described as “plump”, although from the context this is clearly just “not skinny”.

Does Truly lose all the weight? No, although she does lose some – no spoiler, it’s mentioned in Chapter 1. But she doesn’t become skinny and “normal” (“Don’t get me wrong: I was still me”) and the process of her empowerment and independence from her brother-in-law begins before she “begins to shrink”, and is not directly tied up with it.

On the whole, I thought Baker dealt with the issues pretty well. I would have found it unconvincing if Truly hadn’t experienced any adverse comments, but the characters who make them are well-established as unpleasant people, and Truly’s own attitudes to her body are complex and quite convincing.

hey, we do need a bookclub… or maybe a list somewhere on this site, of recommended fat-friendly novels?

in addition, i have a problem with the scene in which the protagonist is sexually assaulted by a queer woman, whose unwanted sexual advances are very oddly combined with a session of binge eating. fat is an interesting issue in the queer community, especially due to the homophobic stereotypes of queer women being queer simply because we’re too ugly to get a man. so, while i think it was an interesting plot device to show that women too can be sexual predators, i really didn’t like the way that this was framed: it seemed to further equate food and eating with negativity, guilt, abuse, and mindfuckery.

In The River Midnight, there is a merchant character named Misha, who is “as big as any man and just as strong.” She’s depicted as a fat, robust character who enjoys a hotly sexual dalliance with a respected man in the village.

It was not considered extraordinary that her character was married to a very handsome man or that there was one other man in love with her (as he fathered her child) or that her husband thought that a 3rd man was as well. Nobody was shocked or surprised that she would have garnered the adoration of multiple men. It was accepted as an ordinary fact along with all of the other ordinary facts in the movie.

In the little wrap-up at the end of the movie, the basic implication is that she ends up with both the husband and the lover or at least that both of them love her so much that they will put up with each other.

So, not really sticking with the request but if you get a chance to watch it, I would recommend it. It made me all squee-y happy to see Dawn French play a character that is presented as beautiful and aware of her beauty and her sex appeal.