13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad

Then when I came up with this idea of, 'My Mother's Idea of Sexy' . I probably wrote it 40 times and finally I abandoned it. It just wasn't working for me at all, but I was writing that scene over and over and over again.

Initially, when I wrote them it was just a mother and daughter having dinner and it was tense. The mother is struggling with her weight and my main character has lost weight, so there are a lot of different emotions going on in those scenes. In this one, the mother-daughter dynamic is really informed by weight. I think mother-daughter dynamics are hard to capture in fiction. 'The stories about the mother-daughter relationship were really hard. There's something about that time that makes me more inclined to trust that little voice that you need to tap into to write a story.' The scene she wrote over 40 times In the morning you're tired you're still in that state of sleeping and waking. 'The more conscious I become in the day, the more I do tend to censor myself as a writer. Writing early in the morning quiets any inner critic that you might have. I have a lot of problems, as a writer, trusting myself. There's also something brave-making about the morning. 'I like to write in silence and without distractions. Does she change? I wanted to take her back to the dressing room and see if she was encountering the same demons.' Silencing the critic I wanted that girl to have sex, to go to lunch with a friend that she idolizes, to lose weight and see what happens to her when she undergoes that physical transformation. Then I thought of the title, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, because I didn't want to write just about that scene. 'I had this vision of a girl in a dressing room struggling with a dress and just outside the change room door, her mother and a sales clerk were waiting for her to come out. Fatness and skinniness seem to factor into all of Lizzie's relationships, feeding the tension in this compelling, compact debut.Īwad sat down with CBC Books to talk about the process of writing 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl. The book follows a sharp-voiced young woman named Lizzie, who struggles with her weight as a teenager and then with her weight loss as an adult. Mona Awad's debut novel, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, has struck a chord with readers - it won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad