Fat Girl Judith Moore Profile, 196pp, £12.99 ISBN 1861979800

There are memoirs - lyrical, heartfelt, knowing - and then there are writers who dare to rip the top layer of their skin, skull, bone right off, so you can see right inside them where the blood and other matter glisten and throb. For a writer to be prepared to do this - and for you to be prepared to see them do it - feels risky, scary, exciting, sometimes even voyeuristic. Yet the sheer quality of a stranger's prose (and believe me, this is the closest you will ever get to a total stranger, in the heart, the self, on the page) can make for an encounter that is uplifting; life-altering, even.

Judith Moore's new memoir is such a book. Clearly acclaimed in the US, she seems less well known over here. Well, whatever shape she is physically, she is a ferocious talent. So deliciously balanced and sparing - and lean - is the way she flings together her words, that for all the tragedy and loneliness they describe, for all the visceral disgust and loathing that snarl and snap from its pages, this is a beautiful, almost dizzyingly attractive read.

But why? What is it that makes this book so different from the next (or last) monologue about an unloved childhood? For a start, it's the intense quality of scrutiny that Moore inflicts on her grown-up self, the writer. Every memoirist attempts this - it has become de rigueur for memoirists to look as if they are being extremely tough on themselves - but few manage it. Here, though, the scrutiny feels real. You flinch for her. There is not an ounce of self-pity in these pages. There is no ego, no self-absorption, nor even self-consciousness. In its place there is a great deal of humility and gentleness and warmth and humour.

This is not going to be a book about eating disorders, the author wryly emphasises in the first few pages. "This will be the last time in this book you will see the words eating disorder." She is true to her word. It becomes increasingly obvious, as Moore lets us into the sweaty, shameful, smelly facts of her childhood and adolescence as well as the lives of her parents (fat father, thin mother) and deeply unpleasant grandmother (fat to start with, thin as she shrivelled to a cancerous death), that this is most of all a book about how the quality and amount of love we are given (or not) may or may not make us fat - but certainly shapes the way we see ourselves for ever.

None of the material explored here is especially new. It tells a familiar tale of an unloved and unwanted little girl who becomes her "own wolf", the story of someone so "starved" of love that her own mouth becomes a "dangerous" thing that she cannot control. Despite all of this, Moore's memoir is also beguiling for its uncomplicated love of food. Her descriptions of "crabs' legs dipped in hot butter or crab cakes dribbled with garlic aioli . . . toasted cheese sandwiches or home- made lemonade pinkened with macerated strawberries" verge on the poetic. So it is not surprising that the book is full of people, put on rigid and sad diets (Moore, her father), making attempts to obtain food. Fridges are raided, mouths are stuffed. The funniest and perhaps saddest episode in the book is when her father, deprived of food by his disgusted wife, wakes his old nanny in the night and, baffled by his own urges, forces her at gunpoint to make him a lemon meringue pie. If this were a novel, it would be supremely funny; it is a tribute to Moore's prose that, even as you recoil at just how it is not, you also crave the pie.

From the start, Moore is honest enough to admit that she does not expect catharsis. She even goes so far as to say that, had things been different, had this poisoned, cruel and neglectful childhood been a happier one, she might well still have been someone who wanted to overeat: "Love, I think, would not have made me thin." But she is glad to be having the chance to explore these possibilities in print. So much so, that the last words of Fat Girl - her last to her reader - are, touchingly, a thank you for staying with her to the end. I found myself hoping, as I closed the pages and studied the author's extremely personable photo, that she realises she has created a graceful, taut and delicious book.

Julie Myerson's most recent book is Not a Games Person (Yellow Jersey Press)

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website