The main character struggles with her repressed sexuality, her issues with food and her body, and her mother issues, and those all get tangled up in each other–which is my way of trying to tactfully give a content warning for her fantasizing sexually about a (fictional) mother/daughter relationship. Soon, she is falling for Miriam, and every time they are together, she finds herself veering from her controlled food plan. Instead of throwing the extra yogurt out, though, she finds herself devouring it, and coming back every day. Rachel is panicked: this does not fit into her calorie plan. The next day, she goes to get her daily low-fat yogurt (no toppings, filled just to the line) and meets a new employee: a beautiful fat woman who fills her cup past the line and comps her some sprinkles. Don’t you think so?” Rachel storms out of the session and doesn’t return. And I think she’s worthy of love–more than worthy of love, actually. Her therapist says, “I think she’s quite lovely. Rachel agrees, and she uses all of the clay available to her to sculpt a fat woman.
She will never stop gaining weight.ĭuring a session, her therapist asks her to do two things: 1) To go on a 90 day communication detox from her toxic mother, and 2) To sculpt her fear of gaining weight. In her mind, she has to exert this control because if it slips for a moment, she will spin out of control. She desperately wants her mother’s approval, and she feels like her hunger is bottomless. She is either bisexual or a lesbian, but she’s pushed that down most of her life. She was raised to prize and police her body, and despite this tight control she keeps over her weight, it’s never enough for her mother. Every moment she is awake, she is thinking about food. She carefully counts calories and dutifully exercises to keep thin. This follows Rachel, a twenty-something woman who is obsessed with food. It turned out to be an immersive, raw, sometimes overwhelming reading experience.Ĭontent warning: Discussion of disordered eating, self-loathing, internalized homophobia. I picked it up based on the fact that it was queer and had a blurb from Carmen Maria Machado that was about all I knew about it. There are some books–very rarely–that I read and form such a personal attachment to that I don’t want to share them with the world.
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