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A review by emmareadstoomuch
The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things by Carolyn Mackler
2.0
This book is a TIME CAPSULE.
I read this exclusively because I got an ARC of the sequel, which is inexplicably coming out this year. Yes. A sequel. To this 2003 contemporary. Which couldn’t do a better job of capturing a bygone, offensive, outdated way of looking at weight if that were its goddamn purpose.
For the most part, this is just a strange reading experience. When I was in elementary school, I was obsessed with reading contemporaries well above the age I was supposed to be reading. (“Mom, what’s a blowjob?” -Me at age nine because of a contemporary I can’t remember but which I do know had a girl swimming on the cover and “10th grade and up” written in pencil in the margin of the title page.)
It was really easy to access these books because I lived in a neighborhood with a library in it, and the library then had a very small, very limited young adult section. It was pretty much all early-to-mid 2000s contemporaries like this one. And since the whole thing was limited to a handful of shelves, I read almost all of them. I didn’t even like them, necessarily. I read them disinterestedly, with detachment, as if I were a researcher studying slugs who (correctly) views slugs as being mildly disgusting.
Also like slugs, these books were largely interchangeable. (Slugs all look the same, I think, and I will not confirm this because I refuse to look it up and therefore voluntarily regard a slug.)
Reading this book was like being forced to reread a book nine- or ten-year-old me read with the clear, clear eyes that a decade of character development has brought me.
It was not a fun experience.
Outside of that, even, there was a wildly outdated depiction of being overweight. It is not impossible to be fat and healthy. Any generalized stigmatization of fatness is an unfair one. But in this book, fat is equated to bad.
Virginia’s being fat (and the only fat person in her family) is such a demonstrably negative thing in this book that she hates herself, and believes that everyone in her family hates her, and thinks she’s ugly and that everyone thinks she’s ugly. She thinks her best friend is embarrassed of her and tired of her. She thinks her parents are ashamed of her.
She turns to crash diets and over-exercise and even self-harm. By the end of the book, she appears to suddenly love herself on the basis of an eyebrow piercing and a bathroom dye job, but none of the really damaging things in this book are confronted. Including vitriolic, self-hating lists of what fat girls are allowed to do in relationships and otherwise.
It was 2003. A lot has changed since then. But that doesn’t mean I enjoyed reading it.
Bottom line: The sequel has a hell of a lot of damage repair to do in order to justify its existence.
I read this exclusively because I got an ARC of the sequel, which is inexplicably coming out this year. Yes. A sequel. To this 2003 contemporary. Which couldn’t do a better job of capturing a bygone, offensive, outdated way of looking at weight if that were its goddamn purpose.
For the most part, this is just a strange reading experience. When I was in elementary school, I was obsessed with reading contemporaries well above the age I was supposed to be reading. (“Mom, what’s a blowjob?” -Me at age nine because of a contemporary I can’t remember but which I do know had a girl swimming on the cover and “10th grade and up” written in pencil in the margin of the title page.)
It was really easy to access these books because I lived in a neighborhood with a library in it, and the library then had a very small, very limited young adult section. It was pretty much all early-to-mid 2000s contemporaries like this one. And since the whole thing was limited to a handful of shelves, I read almost all of them. I didn’t even like them, necessarily. I read them disinterestedly, with detachment, as if I were a researcher studying slugs who (correctly) views slugs as being mildly disgusting.
Also like slugs, these books were largely interchangeable. (Slugs all look the same, I think, and I will not confirm this because I refuse to look it up and therefore voluntarily regard a slug.)
Reading this book was like being forced to reread a book nine- or ten-year-old me read with the clear, clear eyes that a decade of character development has brought me.
It was not a fun experience.
Outside of that, even, there was a wildly outdated depiction of being overweight. It is not impossible to be fat and healthy. Any generalized stigmatization of fatness is an unfair one. But in this book, fat is equated to bad.
Virginia’s being fat (and the only fat person in her family) is such a demonstrably negative thing in this book that she hates herself, and believes that everyone in her family hates her, and thinks she’s ugly and that everyone thinks she’s ugly. She thinks her best friend is embarrassed of her and tired of her. She thinks her parents are ashamed of her.
She turns to crash diets and over-exercise and even self-harm. By the end of the book, she appears to suddenly love herself on the basis of an eyebrow piercing and a bathroom dye job, but none of the really damaging things in this book are confronted. Including vitriolic, self-hating lists of what fat girls are allowed to do in relationships and otherwise.
It was 2003. A lot has changed since then. But that doesn’t mean I enjoyed reading it.
Bottom line: The sequel has a hell of a lot of damage repair to do in order to justify its existence.