![]() ![]() ![]() Mel declares they should offer the men sexual favors. She says they are also admiring Elizabeth, but Elizabeth is less enthused. Mel becomes convinced they are staring at her body, at her breasts, and she is proud of the attention. The two girls try to use grade-school methods of telling their futures, but they both come up short every time: the answers to their questions are always “no.” They notice a group of adult men staring at them. The novel begins when the adolescent Elizabeth, or Lizzie, goes to McDonald’s with her friend Mel. ![]() The passage of time is marked by her changing name: first she goes by Lizzie, then Beth, then Elizabeth, then Liz. Each of the novel’s 13 chapters reads like a short story in its own right, a story that captures a slice of Elizabeth’s life at that point in time. Awad, who admits to struggling with her own body image in the past, used those experiences to inform her depiction of the fictional Elizabeth. Awad tells the story of overweight protagonist Elizabeth’s struggle with weight and body image through 13 telling vignettes of her life from adolescence to adulthood. The title, a reference to the Wallace Stevens poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” is an apt description of the book’s contents. 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl is Mona Awad’s 2016 debut novel. ![]()
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