A Fat Girl in France
The media loves to depict French women as effortlessly thin. Ahead of my trip, I wondered: How will I fit in?
French women, they say, do not get fat. Their secret, according to the bestsellers, is an innate ability to consume the world’s most wonderful foods in torturously minuscule portions. I, however, do get fat. Scratch that: am fat. My stomach protrudes and my arms jiggle and too often in photographs, my neck is inscribed with the shadows of a double chin. I am 5 feet, 4 inches and weigh about 200 pounds, a ratio that qualifies me, medically speaking, as obese.
I like the word “fat,” though, better than “obese.” Perhaps it’s because I want to get to the punch line before someone less kindly disposed toward me gets there, or perhaps it’s because I sometimes enjoy being shocking. In college, my favorite outfit consisted of black pleather pants, a black T-shirt, heavy leather boots, and a dog collar I bought at the local feed and farm supply store. A punk-inclined, poetry-writing classmate, on whom I had a painfully obvious crush, once noted the ensemble and asked what kind of music I liked. My tastes were more mainstream than my outfit suggested, however, and I fessed up because I have always been very bad at faking it.
There’s an implicit social rule in the United…
