How To Be A Woman

Chapter 6




I Am Fat!




So now it’s 1991, and I’m 16, and I’m sitting on St Peter’s cathedral lawn with Matthew Vale, smoking.

Matt is – by both his own, and several independent adjudicators’ assessments – the coolest adolescent in Wolverhampton. He’s got the entire Byrds back catalogue and a lot of baggy charity-shop jumpers, and when he dances he has proper moves; some of which he’s copied off the Supremes. One of his earliest lectures to me was how you should ‘always have a plan’ when you walk onto a dance floor.


‘Don’t just go on there and … f*ck around,’ he will say, smoking his fag. ‘Tell a little story.’ It is good advice. Matt has lots of good advice. Another piece he gives me is: ‘Try not to be a total dick.’ Once you’ve been told it, it’s amazing to note how many people appear not to have been told it. It is wise counsel.

When you first meet Matt, he tells you – as he pulls his fringe over his eyes – that he keeps his fringe over his eyes because he had a bad acid trip, and can’t look anyone in the eye. ‘Because sometimes, I worry that when people look me in the eye, they see that I’m a demon.’

After I’ve known him for six months, I one day see him lying on a bed, with his hair swept back. And I realise that it’s actually because he has a little bit of a squint, and doesn’t want anyone to see it.

Yes of course I fancy him. God I fancy him. I didn’t until my friend Jools saw him up town and exclaimed, on the phone afterwards, ‘Who was HE? He. Was. FIT. AS.’

Previously, I’d prided myself on our brotherly/sisterly vibe. After hearing the howling lust in Jools’s voice, however, I stopped kidding myself, and acknowledged that he was six foot two, and f*cking buff under the baggy jumpers, and had eyes as green as a dragon’s. When I thought about kissing him, I would reflect on how prettily pink, like a girl’s, his mouth was. How I would have to eat it so carefully, to make it last. His mouth was so small. It filled up half of my head. I was 16 I was 16 I was 16, and he was 19, and we are on St Peter’s cathedral lawn, smoking fags.

This day we are smoking fags is late October. It is two months after we first met – on an adult education course, for film-making, on which we were both immediately and consistently lacklustre – and this is the first day out we have had together, alone. We are basically now auditioning each other, as friends.

I’ve seen his girlfriend so I know we’re not going to ‘happen’ – unless she suddenly dies, which would be terribly, terribly, TERRIBLY sad – but we’ve had a very exciting day: bought Fleetwood Mac’s Tango in the Night on cassette from the Cancer Research shop for 50p, shoplifted a deodorant from Boots, and generally represented all over the Mander Centre, and across Queen Square.

I am dressed so carefully, as we sit on the cathedral lawn, exhaling. It’s 1991 and I’ve just started earning money – as the least important person at Melody Maker – and so, for the first time in my life, I can buy clothes from shops, instead of jumble sales. I am wearing a turquoise, tie-dyed shirt over a long skirt, Doc Marten boots and a waistcoat. I’m 16 I’m 16 I’m 16 and these are my best clothes, and this is my best day, and a loft of pigeons flash past us, wings like linen, and it’s autumn, and the sky goes on forever, and I can wait for him, I’ll just wait for him, she might die, after all, she could die so easily; people drop dead on buses all the time.

And Matt says:

‘Did you have a nickname at school?’

And I say:

‘Yes.’

And he says:

‘Did they call you Fatty?’


So that’s the first time I ever felt the world stop – although not the last, of course. Everything very cold and still and bright for one second. A flashbulb. Someone has just taken a picture of us, to show again at the end of our lives, in a slideshow: ‘Here’s some of your worst bits!’ Me and Matty Vale, on the cathedral lawn, October 1991.

Because genuinely I thought he might not have noticed, hahaha. I thought I’d hidden those extra four stones really carefully, under my new shirt, and the waistcoat, and I was talking too fast for him to see it. I thought my hair was long and shiny and my eyes were blue, and I’d kept it secret. I thought he might not have noticed that I’m fat.

I’ve said it – there, I’ve said it. Because I am 16, 16, 16 and 16 stone. All I do is sit around eating bread and cheese, and reading. I’m fat. We’re all fat. The entire family is obese.

We don’t have any full-length mirrors in the house, so whenever I want to see myself naked, I have to go up town, to Marks & Spencer, and pretend that I’m going to try on a tartan skirt, and go into the changing room, and look at myself there.

I am a virgin, and I don’t play sport, or move heavy objects, or go anywhere or do anything, and so my body is this vast, sleeping, pale thing. There it is, standing awkwardly in the mirror, looking like it’s waiting to receive bad news. It is the bad news. Teenage girls are supposed to be lithe, and hot. A fat teenage girl’s body is of no use to anyone, let alone the teenage girl. It is an albatross. An outsized white bird. I’m dragging it round like a sea anchor.

But I’m just a brain in a jar, I tell myself. That’s my comforting thought. I’m just a brain in a jar. It doesn’t matter about the other bits. That is what my body is. ‘The other bits.’ The jar. I’m clever, so it doesn’t matter that I’m fat.

I am fat.


Because I am fully aware of what the word ‘fat’ means – what it really means, when you say it, or think it. It’s not just a simple, descriptive word like ‘brunette’ or ‘34’.

It’s a swearword. It’s a weapon. It’s a sociological sub-species. It’s an accusation, dismissal and rejection. When Matt asks if they used to call me ‘Fatty’ at school, he’s already imagining me, pityingly, in the lower orders of the school hierarchy – lumped in with (as it’s Wolverhampton, in 1986) the two Asian kids, the stutterer, the Jehovah’s Witness with one eye, the kid with special needs, the boy who’s obviously gay, and the boy so thin he’s constantly asked if Bob Geldof has been round his house yet.

Matt is going to sympathise with me, which means he’ll never f*ck me, which means I will, sadly, die of terminal unhappiness – possibly within the next hour, conceivably before I’ve finished this cigarette, which, I notice, I’m now crying on.

In my family, my fat family, none of us ever say the word ‘fat’. ‘Fat’ is the word you hear shouted in the playground, or on the street – it’s never allowed over the threshold of the house. My mum won’t have that filth in her house. At home, together, we are safe. It’s like an eruv for the slow and soft. There will be no harm to our feelings here because we never acknowledge fat exists. We never refer to our size. We are the elephants in the room.

But the silence is the most oppressive thing of all. Because there’s a silent, shrugging, stoical acceptance of all the things in the world we can never be part of: shorts, swimming pools, strappy dresses, country walks, roller-skating, ra-ra skirts, vest tops, high heels, rope climbing, sitting on a high stool, walking past building sites, flirting, being kissed, feeling confident.

And ever losing weight, ever.

The idea of suggesting we don’t have to be fat – that things could change – is the most distant and alien prospect of all. We’re fat now and we’ll be fat forever and we must never, ever mention it, and that is the end of it. It’s like Harry Potter’s Sorting Hat. We were pulled from the hat marked ‘Fat’ and that is what we must now remain, until we die. Fat is our race. Our species. Our mode.

As a result, there is very little of the outside world – and very little of the year – we can enjoy. Summer is sweaty under self-conscious layers. On stormy days, wind flattens skirts against thighs, and alarms both us and, we think, onlookers and passers-by.


Winter is the only time we feel truly comfortable: covered head to toe in jumpers, coats, boots and hat. I develop a crush on Father Christmas. If I married him, not only would I be expected to stay fat, but I’d look thin standing next to him, in comparison. Perspective would be my friend. We all dream of moving to Norway, or Alaska, where we could wear massive padded coats all the time, and never reveal an inch of flesh. When it rains, we’re happiest of all. Then we can just stay in, away from everyone, in our pyjamas, and not worry about anything. The brains in jars can stay inside, nice and dry.

When Matty Vale asks me if I used to be called Fatty, I am wearing my swimsuit from when I was 12 under my clothes – by way of a primitive and ultimately ineffective corset – and I have been painfully holding my stomach in since gone midday.

‘No!’ I say. I give an imperious, Ava Gardner-like flash of eyebrow and eye. ‘Jesus!’

I take another drag on the fag, and stop holding in my stomach. He’s busted me. Why bother.

No. They didn’t call me Fatty at school, Matt, you hot, oblivious thing, who I’m going to spend the next two years pining after like crack cocaine, to the point where I will steal your jumper and keep it under my pillow, and then inadvertently cause you to split up with your girlfriend when I tell a terrible secret to the wrong person, and our little social circle explodes in a spectacularly messy fashion.

It was Fatso.


Is the word ‘fat’ making you wince when you read it? Does it feel like I’m being rude, or indelicate, to say it? In the last two generations, it’s become a furiously overloaded word – in a conversation, when the word ‘fat’ appears, it often alarms people, like a siren going off and prompts a supportive, scared flurry of dismissal – ‘You’re not fat! Of course you’re not fat! Babe, you’re NOT FAT!’ – when the person is, clearly and undeniably, fat, and just wants to discuss it.

More often than not, though, it’s used as a weapon to stop the conversation dead: ‘Shut up, you fat bitch.’ Silence.

The accusation of ‘fatness’ has replaced ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ as the playground taunt of choice. It’s generally regarded to be the Hiroshima of accusations – the bomb which, once dropped, calls for immediate surrender from the accused. If you can counter perfectly valid argument with ‘Yeah, well, at least I’m not fat’, then you are the Allies, and you have won.

The accusation is so strong, it is still effective even if it has no basis in the truth whatsoever. I have seen size 10 women being silenced by this line – as if they feel the accuser has somehow sensed that they secretly have a ‘fat aura’ or will become fat later in life, and called them on it.

On being hit with ‘Yeah, well, at least I’m not fat’ on two occasions, I tried to pervert a classic line, and replied, ‘I’m fat because every time I f*ck your dad, he gives me a biscuit.’

But my audience didn’t really get the ahead-of-its-time technique of subverting a cliché and just presumed I’d developed an eating disorder to cope with an unhappy experience of paedophilia instead.


It just added to my generally undesirable air. I am ahead of both the curve, and my age-group weight centile.

But giving the word ‘fat’ such power is, of course, no good at all. Just as I have previously urged you to stand on a chair and shout ‘I AM A STRIDENT FEMINIST’, so I now urge you to stand on a chair and say the word ‘FAT’. ‘FAT FAT FAT FAT FAT.’

Say it until you lose the nervousness around it, say it until it seems normal – like the word ‘tray’ – and eventually becomes meaningless. Point at things and call them ‘fat’. ‘That tile is fat.’ ‘The wall is fat.’ ‘I believe Jesus is fat.’ The heat needs to be drained out of the word ‘fat’, like fever from a child. We need to be able to stare, clearly and calmly, right into the middle of fat, and talk about what it is, and what it means, and why it’s become the big topic for Western women in the 21st century. FAT FAT FAT FAT.

First of all, I think we should agree on what ‘fat’ actually is. Obviously, norms of beauty come and go, and there are extremes of metabolism and build – that big-boned thing is TRUE! I only found out recently! Compared to Kylie, I genuinely have the bones of a mastodon! I would NEVER have fitted into those gold hotpants because I have got TOO MUCH CALCIUM!

So given all this, it doesn’t pay to ever be too proscriptive about the term ‘normal’.

But after a lifetime of consideration, I believe I’ve finally nailed a sensible definition of what a good, advisable, ‘normal’ weight is. What is ‘fat’ and ‘not fat’. And it is:

‘Human shaped.’

If you look recognisably, straightforwardly human – the kind of reasonable figure a ten-year-old would draw, if asked to sketch a person in under a minute – then you are fine. ‘The body reasonably healthy and clean is the body beautiful,’ as the Goddess Greer puts it.

You could spend the rest of your life obsessing about the crenellations on the back of your thighs, the beer-barrel swell of your belly, or the fact that, when you run, you can feel your buttocks banging against each other like a set of Clackers. But to do that would be to be operating on the subconscious assumption that, at some point, you will be forced to appear in front of people naked, and judged out of ten, and – as we have discussed before – THIS ISN’T GOING TO HAPPEN UNLESS YOU ENTER AMERICA’S NEXT TOP MODEL. What happens in your bra and pants STAYS in your bra and pants. If you can find a frock you look nice in and can run up three flights of stairs, you’re not fat.

The idea that you need to be better than merely ‘human shaped’ – this inch-perfect toning, where even an excess tablespoon of fat overhanging the knee is unacceptable, let alone a world where a size 12 is ‘XL’ – is another piece of what strident feminists can technically dismiss as ‘total bullshit’.

My fat years were when I was not human shaped. I was a 16-stone triangle, with inverted triangle legs, and no real neck. And that’s because I wasn’t doing human things. I didn’t walk or run or dance or swim or climb up stairs; the food I ate wasn’t the stuff that humans are supposed to eat. No one is supposed to eat a pound of boiled potatoes covered in Vitalite, or a fist-sized lump of cheese on the end of a fork, wielded like a lollipop. I had no connection to or understanding of my body. I was just a brain in a jar. I wasn’t a woman.


Ironically, having unwittingly smashed my heart to bits with his fists on St Peter’s cathedral lawn, it is Matthew Vale who over the course of four months knocks four stone off me, and thereby introduces me to the other half of myself: the bit with legs on it.

On Thursday and Friday nights, we take to climbing over the railings of the dual carriageway to a pub in the middle of nowhere, and dancing for five hours straight to records from 1986–1991 only, made by white British bands, featured in NME and Melody Maker: Spiritualized, Happy Mondays, The Fall, New Order. He also gets me on ten Silk Cut a day which leaves me no money for lunch – useful.

Speeded up CCTV footage would show me, over the six months on that dance floor, turning from something fairly Flump-like into something that is undeniably a human-shaped teenage girl, who can now go out and buy a dress, from a normal shop. A short flowery one, to be worn with cardi, boots and eyeliner. I can pass for ‘normal’, if I dress carefully, but I still never use the words ‘thin’ or ‘fat’, in case anyone starts paying closer attention; starts trying to work out which one I am.


But more importantly, on that tiny dance floor – ciggie in one hand, cider in the other, ‘How Soon Is Now’ sounding like The Smiths are speeding past us, light-decked and vast, like the Millennium Falcon – I feel a new-found euphoria: I’ve found out where my body is. Turns out, it was RIGHT UNDER MY HEAD, ALL ALONG! WHO KNEW? It’s always the last place you look.

And now I can make it spin over here, badly, and leap over there, ridiculously, and pretend to play invisible maracas in a dance move that surely keeps me a virgin for another year, minimum, but it’s fun, having these arms, and these legs, and this little belly.

And it’s the start of a slow process – that takes in pregnancies and births and long, stoned afternoon f*cks, and 26-mile walks, and learning to run, run really fast, so it just feels like dancing, but in a straight line – of getting to the point where, at 35, I can say I like my body as much as my head. My brain doesn’t look as good in a frock, and my body is still fairly poor at making jokes out of the ridiculous occurrences in the life of Victoria Beckham, but we’re all friends now. We get on, and we agree on things, such as what a ‘reasonable’ amount of crisps adds up to, and whether I should run up the escalator (yes).

I don’t wish now – as I often used to when I was 15, and particularly hysterical – that I could be involved in a serious car crash, in which my entire body would have to be rebuilt from scratch, but using around half the amount of raw materials currently in employ.

And when I look at myself in the mirrors of the changing rooms at Marks & Spencer now, my body looks, finally, awake.


But why did I get fat? Why was I eating until I hurt, and regarding my own body as something as distant and unsympathetic as, say, the state of the housing market in Buenos Aires? And why – while it’s obviously not wholly advisable to swell up so large that, on one very bad day, you get stuck in a bucket seat at a local fair, and have to be helped out by your ex-headmaster, Mr Thompson – is being fat treated as a cross between terrible shame and utter tragedy? Something that – for a woman – is treated as something in between sustaining a sizeable facial scar, and sleeping with the Nazis? Why will women happily boast-moan about spending too much (‘… and then my bank manager took my credit card and CUT IT IN HALF WITH A SWORD!’), drinking too much (‘… and then I took my shoe off and THREW IT OVER THE BUS STOP!’) and working too hard (‘… so tired I fell asleep on the control panel and, when I woke up, I realised I’d PRESSED THE NUCLEAR LAUNCH BUTTON! AGAIN!’) but never, ever about eating too much? Why is unhappy eating the most pointlessly secret – it’s not like you can hide a six-KitKats-a-day habit for very long – of miseries?

Seven years ago, a friend of mine broke up with a pop star, reactivated her bulimia, binged and purged for nine days straight, and then admitted herself to The Priory.

I strapped my toddler into a buggy and went to visit her – from a combination of love, and curiosity as to what The Priory was like. I think I’d presumed it was like the Chateau Marmont, but with amazing prescription drugs. Full of interestingly ravaged celebrities clawing their way back to normality, in the midst of some helpfully gorgeous décor.

In the event it turns out that, inside, The Priory actually looks, and smells, like a lower mid-range family-run hotel in Welshpool. Faded swirly carpets, teak-effect fire doors, and, somewhere – judging by the smell – a perpetually boiling cauldron of mince, working as the world’s biggest Glade Plug-In. It was less ‘Olympia, home of the gods’, and more ‘Olympia, tube station of the exhibition centre’.

And, as my friend told me, sitting on the end of her bed, chain-smoking, an institution full of emotionally troubled substance abusers turns out to be no fun at all.

‘There’s a pecking order,’ she sighed, shredding up her cuticles with her opposing thumbnail. She was burning a Diptyque Jasmine candle to cover up the evidence she’d just thrown up her breakfast, but the bile had lingered longer than she’d accounted for.

‘The heroin addicts look down on the coke addicts. The coke addicts look down on the alcoholics. And everyone thinks the people with eating disorders – fat or thin – are scum.’

And there’s your pecking order of unhappiness, right there in a nutshell. Of all the overwhelming compulsions you can be ruined by, all of them have some potential for some perverted, self-destructive fascination – except eating.

Consider, for instance, David Bowie. Here was a man who took so much cocaine that he took to keeping his urine in bottles, in the fridge, because he was scared that wizards ‘might steal it’. And yet despite storing his rotting wazz next to his ham, it doesn’t stop him being cool. On the contrary – who doesn’t find the fact that Bowie now describes his mind as being ‘Swiss cheesed’ from coke abuse kind of, well, adorably rock’n’roll? He’s David Bowie, man!

Or think of Keith Richards, in his Glimmer Twins days – snorting, smoking, injecting, drinking and screwing everything in sight. Everyone loves him! Keef? So out of it that he doesn’t notice when two groupies, f*cking in front of him, accidentally set fire to their own hair? ROCK’N’ROLL! For many, that’s the best bit about the Stones!

Even though, by any way we can calculate it, he would almost certainly have been a complete nightmare to be around – paranoid, shaky, unreliable, prone to extreme moroseness or mania and, a good whack of the time, so deeply unconscious that the primary method of moving from one location to another would have been being dragged by the ankles – we still have a slight, cultural frisson of ‘Huh – cool’ when people get this f*cked up.

But imagine if – instead of taking heroin – Keef had started overeating and got really fat instead. If he’d really got into spaghetti bolognese, say, or kept coming on stage holding foot-long Subway Meatball Subs, and pausing in between numbers to have a bit of a chomp. Wandering down to Alphabet Street, twitching, four hours on the cluck, desperate to score Dairylea. Long, crazy, wired nights after gigs, in penthouses, nubile dollies scattered across the room, and Keith in the centre, sprawled across a silk-draped Emperor-sized waterbed, eating salt and vinegar Hula Hoop sandwiches and Tunnock’s teacakes off a tray.

By the time of Their Satanic Majesties Request, what his Satanic Majesty would be requesting was a 38-inch waistband, and everyone would have mocked the Stones for having a faintly ludicrous wobble-bot on guitar, who was ruining the concept of rock’n’roll.

But, of course, all this time, Keef would have been behaving like a total darling: waking at 8am, keeping his hotel rooms tidy, thanking everyone, working a solid 12-hour day. There would be no going AWOL for 48 hours, then coming back with a dead goldfish in your pocket and a new tramp friend called Alan F*ck.

Because people overeat for exactly the same reason they drink, smoke, serially f*ck around or take drugs. I must be clear that I am not talking about the kind of overeating that’s just plain, cheerful greed – the kind of Rabelaisian, Falstaffian figures who treat the world as a series of sensory delights, and take full joy in their wine, bread and meat. Someone who walks away from a table – replete – shouting ‘THAT WAS SPLENDID!’, before sitting in front of a fire, drinking port and eating truffles, doesn’t have neuroses about food. They are in a consensual relationship with eating and, almost unfailingly, couldn’t care less about how it’s put an extra couple of stone on them. They tend to wear their weight well – luxuriously, like a fur coat, or a diamond sash – rather than nervously trying to hide it, or apologising for it. These people aren’t ‘fat’ – they are simply … lavish. They don’t have an eating problem – unless it’s running out of truffle oil, or finding a much-anticipated dish of razor clams sadly disappointing.


No – I’m talking about those for whom the whole idea of food is not one of pleasure, but one of compulsion. For whom thoughts of food, and the effects of food, are the constant, dreary, background static to normal thought. Those who think about lunch whilst eating breakfast, and pudding as they eat crisps; who walk into the kitchen in a state bordering on panic, and breathlessly eat slice after slice of bread and butter – not tasting it, not even chewing – until the panic can be drowned in an almost meditative routine of spooning and swallowing, spooning and swallowing.

In this trance-like state, you can find a welcome, temporary relief from thinking for ten, 20 minutes at a time, until, finally, a new set of sensations – physical discomfort, and immense regret – make you stop, in the same way you finally pass out on whisky, or dope. Overeating, or comfort eating, is the cheap, meek option for self-satisfaction, and self-obliteration. You get all the temporary release of drinking, f*cking or taking drugs, but without – and I think this is the important bit – ever being left in a state where you can’t remain responsible and cogent.

In a nutshell, then, by choosing food as your drug – sugar highs, or the deep, soporific calm of carbs, the Valium of the working classes – you can still make the packed lunches, do the school run, look after the baby, pop in on your mum and then stay up all night with an ill five-year-old – something that is not an option if you’re caning off a gigantic bag of skunk, or regularly climbing into the cupboard under the stairs and knocking back quarts of Scotch.

Overeating is the addiction of choice of carers, and that’s why it’s come to be regarded as the lowest-ranking of all the addictions. It’s a way of f*cking yourself up whilst still remaining fully functional, because you have to. Fat people aren’t indulging in the ‘luxury’ of their addiction making them useless, chaotic or a burden. Instead, they are slowly self-destructing in a way that doesn’t inconvenience anyone. And that’s why it’s so often a woman’s addiction of choice. All the quietly eating mums. All the KitKats in office drawers. All the unhappy moments, late at night, caught only in the fridge-light.

I sometimes wonder if the only way we’ll ever get around to properly considering overeating is if it does come to take on the same, perverse, rock’n’roll cool of other addictions. Perhaps it’s time for women to finally stop being secretive about their vices and start treating them like all other addicts treat their habits instead. Coming into the office looking raddled, sighing, ‘Man, I was on the shepherd’s pie last night like you wouldn’t believe. I had, like, MASH in my EYEBROWS by 10pm. I was on a total mince rush!’

Or walking into a friend’s house, hurling your handbag on the table and barking, ‘I have had one HELL of a day with the kids. I need six shots of cream crackers and cheese RIGHT NOW, or I am seriously going to lose my shit.’

Then people would be able to address your dysfunction as openly as they do all the others. They could reply, ‘Whoa, dude. Maybe you should calm it down on the high GI-load carbs for a bit, my friend. You have gone a bit bongo-mondo. I am the same. I did a three-hour session on the microwave lasagne last night. Perhaps we should go to the country for a bit. Get our heads together. Clean up our acts.’

Because at the moment, I can’t help but notice that in a society obsessed with fat – so eager in the appellation, so vocal in its disapproval – the only people who aren’t talking about it are the only people whose business it really is.