Dating while fat: notes from a harmed life

Dating While Fat: Notes From a Harmed Life is a memoir, collected in four linked stories, exploring the intersection of absurdity and horror at various times throughout the author’s life. “Dating While Fat” is a reflective look back at my life as a formerly obese woman, navigating the dangerous shores of dating, sex, and love and the ridiculous and appalling experiences that I both encouraged and enabled, and those that I did not. In “Mary” I revisit my childhood when I suffered a beating at the hands of an overworked, exhausted, and cruel babysitter, informing my relationships with adults throughout my childhood. In adulthood, I discovered just what having a mentally ill mother meant and working through our relationship and then her suicide attempt in “The Real, Genuine Kind”; and lastly, exploring just what it means to be a cancer patient, and the terrible things we sign up for and let the medical community do to us—that we’ll fight for, please, do the unspeakable to me . . . in the hopes of a restoration to health in “A Bowl of Soup.” All of the stories contribute to a narrative mélange for a revisitation, with fresh understanding through the backward lens of maturity, of a painful, confusing and strange life, experienced and navigated with humor, because at the end, everything is absurd.