Fat Chance - Lyndsay Russell

Sharon Plunkett looks the way she sounds - flat, dispirited, and a fat (UK) size 18 - 20. Her job at an advertising agency, surrounded all day by gorgeous, thin young things, only reinforces her unacceptability, as does Debbee, her perfect best friend. Although Sharon's tried every fad, diet, cream and potion known to man, the weight stubbornly clings to her. In desperation, Sharon responds to an ad for Dr Marvel's miracle clinic, " a magical way to change your life" - after an interview Sharon is given one tablet. Swallowed with any beverage it will, she's promised, change her life, as long as she eats nothing for two hours.
Sharon has trouble with her scepticism but is clutching at straws. After taking the pill (with a milkshake), she decides to boost her spirits with some clothes shopping, but nothing fits and, distraught, she collapses. When she exits the shop she notices a significant increase in the number of fat people (especially women) on the street, and advertising that seems to promote size. Sharon's world is now designed for her.
In quick succession she becomes more confident, is noticed at work and promoted to front of office, reverses the power equilibrium between her and Debbee, is spied by a fashion designer and made the centrepiece of his next show, dates a series of hot and famous guys, attracts paparazzi attention, and becomes an international supermodel. Until it all comes tumbling down and Sharon (now Shaz) begins losing weight...
Fat Chance had great potential - I kept hoping that Sharon would realise that she always had the potential to be beautiful, that the guy she liked also liked her all along, that confidence and presentation make a huge difference, that her 'friend' was really an undermining bitch. But no, none of that.
Some of the writing I just plain didn't understand:

"the last thing Sharon saw were two fighting swans, and a soaking gaggle of Academy organisers desperately trying to pull them apart before guests and press realised the anthropological error of mixing the black and white birds together" [emphasis added].

Perhaps part of my dislike of the book is that I didn't warm to the author. In her opening acknowledgements she inserts imaginary responses to accolades for her book, and its message that fat women can be pretty, too, at an awards ceremony: "Wild applause and laughter. I pause - smile sweetly, and look earnestly into camera." Bucket, please.
Fat Chance isn’t helped at all by the heroine - two dimensional, unintelligent, shallow and immature, she seems to have no redeeming features. Her new-found confidence and fame could allow her to campaign for acceptance of women regardless of size, renegotiate her relationship with Debbee, or try acting on her two year crush, Simon. She does none of this.
Additionally, I think it's hard to write fat without the experience. I'm certainly not saying it's not possible to write a whole range of characters one has no experience with personally (otherwise, of course, women could never write men, etc). But to do it well, one has to put in a certain amount of preparation, in the form of research and/or imagination, that doesn't seem reflected in Fat Chance.
From her photo, Russell isn't fat - in an interview where she's asked about this, Russell 'reveals' that she's a UK size 14 and it's not a stretch to imagine being bigger. Uh huh.
She certainly manages to hit a number of stereotypes, including the big one, that people who are fat are lazy and/or stupid. As the book opens, Sharon's ostensibly on a diet. She weighs herself often, and allegedly watches what she eats, but apparently has no concept of either exercise of calorie counting:

'After a day of being good, not even the same weight,' she wailed. Again she counted the calories in her mind... What did she have? The latte... but that was liquid and didn't count. She only had two sugars with it, and the spray of cream on top was so light and fluffy, it surely couldn't be many calories... In the evening, she remembered she'd also polished off a carton of Stilton soup before it went off. But she'd missed pudding with great resolve, and just hit the bottle of wine. Liquid again, just like the soup. No, she just couldn't understand it.

And that brings me to another (on my initial draft of this review I wrote “the biggest”, then realised I’d written that for every area of criticism) issue - the writing. A lot of the time it just isn't realistic at all, it's overblown, under edited and hyperbolic:

She looked so pathetically sad, she put her hand out to the reflection to touch her own reflection in comfort. The ache in her eyes was always there. The look of a kitten that had been abandoned by its mother... Dispassionately, she studied herself [and once again decided her long, naturally platinum hair was her best feature]. As for her eyes... no matter that they were large and almond shaped, they were just too damn tragic. Green. Unusually luminescent in hue, they had a strange tendency to match and reflect whatever shade of green she wore.

She feels better once she's publicly acclaimed, as you do. But the hyperbole doesn't slow down:

Watching her milky breasts plop firmly into her bra, she ran her palms over her mountainous regions of flesh, and found tender miles of delicately dipping hills and vales. Such a variety of shape and contour, texture and colour.

With every new boyfriend she imagines the wedding (though, tellingly, never the marriage itself). It always starts with a riding-into-the-sunset kind of vision that s amended appropriately when the hero du jour's revealed to have feet of clay - he's a helpless drug addict, sleeps around, is using her fame, dumps her when she becomes less popular...
Sharon never seems to have any emotional connection to them. And though one guy she admired from afar before The Change is still around, now he's not good enough for her - though he never gave an indication the reverse was true for him.
Fat Chance is in some ways billed as a parody of the current preoccupation with thinness and size zero. For the most part this is portrayed through taking the opposite case and extending it to the extreme - "there are times I crave a fresh salad or a crisp apple instead of a cake."
There is also controversy in this alternative world - "many experts believed size 24 was dangerously big, but it didn't stop young, impressionable models gorging themselves to attain this dress size," though no indication what it is that this danger may entail. There is, consequently, a ban in some cities on models size 24 and above - a ban violated during a US show when:

"horned satyrs dragged a Titian-sized model standing in a gold cornucopia down the catwalk. There was a hum of anger too - she had to be at least a size 26 - way too big to walk the distance in time to the music."

I liked some of the parody, but a lot of the time it was just taken too far, and the universe had no internal consistency. I’d be interested to know what happened to the models, actresses etc who are famous now – did they suddenly plump up? But what I'm specifically referring to is the men.
In the world we inhabit, there's also pressure on men (though to a lesser degree) to slim down and/or beef up. One might therefore assume that the shift in cultural standards (a shift that's not based on anything except Sharon's magical pill) would similarly apply to men. But no - the men in Russell's imagined world still have to abide by current standards of attractiveness, and all the men Shaz encounters have Brad Pitt-like physiques:

She lifted her hands to his neck, and then ran them down his broad, muscular back to encircle his slim waist. His chest was unbelievable smooth and hard, like a flint stone, leading down to the taut stomach and a finely tuned six pack she'd seen in countless movies, now hers to stroke.

Even for the women, where fat is idealised and aspirational, the aim is still smoothness and lack of jiggle:

... comparing herself to those around her, she knew she was firm for her size, and her breasts were perfectly rounded, even though they were size 36F... the curve of her long, graceful back carve[d] down like an S to massive, rounded buttocks high and taught [sic] as a Venus de Milo.

So not so much a different kind of appreciation as our current cultural ideal, super sized.
And that, I think, is the core of my dislike of this book. Though promoted as fat friendly, size accepting, a triumph for women everywhere, it’s really not.
The cause for Sharon's size is, simplistically, solely due to the childhood trauma of losing her mother as a young age. Similar in appearance to her mother, and consequently disliked by her new stepmother, on an unconscious level the young Sharon decided to gain weight and look different.
As soon as she realises this, Sharon begins to lose weight, and status. As this wouldn't fit into the narrative framwework, though, the reason for Shaz's weight loss is because, while collapsing in the clothing store just after taking Dr Miracle's pill, she couldn't help devouring a cupcake for comfort, and thereby broken the only (Garden of Eden-like) rule of this new universe. Why would she break the rule when she only had to fast for two hours? Perhaps all fat people really are weak-willed gluttons, unable to override short-term wants in order to achieve long-term goals.
When Sharon, having made the psychological breakthrough that magically coincides with the pill wearing off, loses weight despite her best efforts to gain, she truly ends up with it all - a relationship with Simon, a friendship with Debbee (now Debbie), and a position as model/spokeswoman for a fashion range called Minus Miss, for the slim woman. Which just goes to show - fat women can try all they like, true happiness only comes to the thin. Fat Chance is as size-accepting as Weight Watchers. - Alex