Graphic Novel Review: Fat Free by Jude Milner and Mary Wilshire

The cover to Fat Free, Jude Milner and Mary Wilshire's "Amazing All-True Adventures of Supersize Woman," is more than a little ironically misdirecting. Centered on the image of a spandex-clad fat woman confidently flying above the city toward the reader, the graphic deliberately recalls cartoonist Ned Sonntag's fat-acceptance superheroine, Dimensia, even as the text between the covers undercuts Sonntag's original iconic message of self-esteem.

The Jude Milner we see within this 64-page black-and-white graphic novel definitely lacks a Wonder Woman-ly sense of confidence. Interior Jude is a self-flagellating supersize woman who regularly browbeats herself with a phrase she first started using as an eight-year-old: she's a "rooner" who consistently "roons" everything. Jealous of the slender women (who she calls "Ginas") around her, addicted to comfort eating and growing larger as she continues to overeat, Jude spends her young adulthood flitting from uncompleted project to project, "partay"ing at NYC dances and social functions put on by the size acceptance group P.H.A.T. (People Honoring All Themselves - a names-have-been-changed version of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance), all in an attempt at tamping down the memory of two disastrous moments from her childhood. (If you guess that one of these events is a sexual assault, than give yourself a Little Debbie.)

Though she marries and presumably is happy with her hubby Richard (who's credited in the inside of the book as "producer/scriptwriter," leading one to wonder just how much of this book is actually in Jude’s words), she continues to lament her life as a fat woman. Seeing two of her supersized P.H.A.T. compatriots with a walker or wheelchair, she dreads what she sees as her inevitable incapacitation. "It's not beautiful to be an obese invalid," she tells herself, even as she imagines herself standing in a firing squad for being a "traitor" to the size acceptance movement. After a series of failed attempts at self-restraint and group counseling, our heroine ultimately resorts to weight loss surgery to change her life for good.

One of the challenges with reviewing confessional memoirs like Fat Free lies in separating the life from the work, and I have to admit I wasn't always able to do that here. Many of the events and details in Milner's life -- childhood sexual assault, use of food to provide a sense of security that circumstances kept her working class parents from providing, a self-perpetuating sense of outsideness — are the stuff of a thousand daytime talk shows, so familiar they've become Doctor Phil-isms. Fat equals history of sexual abuse? Check. Fat people eat all the time? Double check. (In addition to the repeated panels showing Jude compulsively snacking, we're given two scenes showing a group of P.H.A.T. women chowing down.) Fat means miserable. How could it ever be anything else?

Article Author: Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is a Books editor for Blogcritics. With his lovely wife Rebecca Fox, he has recently co-authored a sudsy comic fat acceptance novel entitled Measure By Measure.

Visit Bill Sherman's author page — Bill Sherman's Blog