Romantic comedy outside the box

January 8 to 11, 1975

Good Samaritans and Other Stories, John O'Hara
A Shroud for A Nightingale, P.D. James
Ellery Queen, A Mystery Anthology (Opus 281)


January 8 to 11, 2006

Conversations with the Fat Girl, Liza Palmer

This is an interesting variant on a new subgenre that I guess we could call "big beautiful chick lit" or to translate that into English—romantic comedies with plus-sized heroines. I totally applaud this development and judging from the online comments, many women have been looking for these books and seek them out and recommend them to others
http://chicklitbooks.com/site/index.php/2005/10/25/p69

The fact is that the "heroine = slim" is the overwhelming equation in romantic (and romantic comic) fiction—oh, hell, fiction of any kind! It reminds me of a sequence in one of my favorite comic novels—which I'm delighted to see back in print--The Boyfriend School by Sarah Bird. http://www.randomhouse.com/BB/read/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780345460097
The heroine, a reporter for an alternative newspaper who is tryng to write a romance, decides to make her heroine a big, strapping gal, "who never met an enchilada she didn't like." When an editor gets hold of the manuscript she changes it--now the heroine feels she is too skinny because "she forgets to eat." Same thing, right? Um, no.

Conversations with the Fat Girl is interesting, as I point out in my "state of the F-word" essay on my web page http://www.maadwomen.com/lynnemurray/essays/fword.html
the word "fat" in the title often is an attention-getter and frequently indicates that the theme will NOT concern fat. Paradoxically, the word "fat" is so negatively loaded, that books with big beautiful heroines often avoid the three-letter F-word to keep from alienating readers.

Conversations with the Fat Girl is an exception in that the title uses the F-word and the heroine and her best friend are both struggling with self-esteem and body issues. Conversations looks at the friendship of two fat girls who supported each other emotionally in youth and adolescence. What happens when one of them gets gastric bypass surgery, moves away and tries to live as if she never was tainted by having been fat?

I could quibble with many things in this book, but the main one that saddens me is a simple error that could have been corrected if anyone had looked at a map. The author sets a pivotal scene with the characters walking on the Golden Gate Bridge and has her characters drive to San Francisco from the University of California at Berkeley all the time to do this. You really can't get directly from Berkeley to the Golden Gate Bridge. From Berkeley to San Francisco you take the Bay Bridge. You also can't walk across the Bay Bridge—gotta drive, or maybe take a bus or BART. Not that you can't get to the GGB from Berkeley, but you've got to drive across some other bridge first (either the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, approaching the GGB from Marin, or crossing the Bay Bridge and approaching the GGB from San Francisco.)

This is not really a little-known fact, and it's easily checked via map, mapquest.com anything like that. Readers who know this geographic fact will say, "What?!!" and be stopped dead in their tracks and thrown out of the story for a moment--it's like putting the Hollywood sign in the Swiss Alps.

When my first novel came out in 1988, a triple-Virgo copy editor looked at every word. She even got out a map and questioned several of my characters' routes from point A to point B. My favorite was when she asked why my characters didn't take the direct route--walking straight through Sutro Park and crossing the Great Highway to get from Sutro Heights to the Cliff House. Um, a little matter of a 5-story drop off the cliff where Sutro Park overlooks the Great Highway. But shoot, she looked at the map. For Liza Palmer's book nobody did.