Fugly

DNF at 15%
Free pre-publication copy provided by NetGalley. I did not finish, but I'm providing my opinions on what I did read voluntarily.

How is this being praised as “honest”?! It's not. Unless “girls who wear revealing clothes deserve mistreatment,” “heroin addiction is easier to overcome than food addiction,” “people who post images online deserve to be bullied,” “it's okay to threaten your little brother that you'll tell his idolized father he's watching porn unless he does the dishes,” and “overweight people are hideous” are what you consider honesty. I don't, not one bit.

But let's back up and explore what I did experience of this book. I wanted to take a clue-by-four to the main character, Beth, after roughly three paragraphs and the urge only grew stronger as time went on, until I gave up dealing with this book entirely. She's a horrific person who hates anyone prettier or thinner than herself - along with children and her sick/disabled mom, for good measure. That's right, she even uses ableist garbage phrases like “this pain she is supposed to be in” when lamenting how oh-so-tiresome it is dealing with her ill mother while living with her into adulthood rent-free. What a whiny, intolerable, annoying brat! (Yet she thinks her brother's the brat, ha!)

I hated Beth from the start... and I think that's the point. This book aims to show us how someone can end up that low - not to make everything perfect and happy and body positive from the start. It's not proposing to be empowering or politically correct or easy to read. I understand that, to a degree, but the way the narrative handles body image goes above and beyond “honest” or “realistic” to land firmly in “grotesquely hateful” territory.

Not only does Beth hate everyone who's thinner, she also hates herself. That's realistic. She drones on and on about double chins and being “fugly” and being overweight and all these things which paint her in a very unflattering light. That's excessive, but not entirely unbelievable. She complains every time she's in public about how society and media have taught her that fugly people like her don't have a place in the world. That's hyperbolic, unrealistic nonsense. Sure, someone may think that when reflecting or writing a blog or vlogging... but not every time they go outside over the course of normal, daily life.

This is not a good book for someone who struggles with weight-related self image issues; my self-hatred flared several times, triggered by the way Beth spoke of her own body. Therein lies where I'm super conflicted, though. I wouldn't have been bothered if not for how horribly realistic the self-hatred element is. I related too much, and then I was disgusted at myself both for existing in all my fugly glory and for relating to such a hateful character.

No, not just hateful. DESPICABLE. Imagine having to read a first-person narrative for a story about hate crime, from the attacker's perspective, and that's about how this book feels. Dirty. Gross. Unsettling. An exercise in remembering that drop kicking the device you're reading on won't actually kick this fictional person no matter how much you wish it were possible.

Beth's a horrible bully, even to her little brother, but pretends she's a good person in real life (she is not) for simple things like cooking when her sick mom can't find the energy to make dinner. And maybe she has enough of a heel turn in the change of heart the book synopsis promises to make her less loathsome, but I personally will not be getting far enough to know. I can't do it. I tried, I honestly did, but I just can't handle being exposed to this. I don't want to be in the head of such a toxic character, reading things that make me feel so uncomfortable in my own skin and so disgusted.

I hated everything about the experience of reading what I did of this book, especially the molestation on public transportation which was basically just an attempt to make Beth a #metoo girl (literally the name of the following chapter) and garner sympathy for her while she complains that she can't say anything because she's so fugly nobody would believe she got groped. Oh, and in that “#metoo” chapter she says that girls who wear skimpy clothes are asking for it and she should have worn baggy jeans instead of leggings so the guy would molest a different girl. (Yes, really!)

While I was still reeling from that, I landed on the part where Beth callously says heroin addicts can “just stop doing heroin” and therefore her food addiction is worse because people die without food. That's where I stopped. It's bad enough she's a disgusting human being but that combined with the nonsense surrounding the molestation was too much for me. (For the record: food addiction is indeed comparable to any other addiction, but it is not harder to conquer and you won't die without junk food or without emotionally binging.)

I'm disappointed in myself for reading past the first couple chapters and actually expecting it would get better. It never did. It just kept getting worse and worse like a snowball of frozen sewage water rolling down a hill toward a pack of innocent, unsuspecting orphans with puppies. I had to look away.