I'd like to review mainstream (non-erotica) books of FA interest. As a Gen X my early FA "porn" was diet memoirs, fat celebrity bios, and such, so I have a thing for this stuff. I'll review other books if folks are into it, suggestions are very much welcome.
BIG FAT LIES by Jaimie Lopez
The popularity and accessibility of ebooks and print-on-demand services spawned a publishing revolution, eliminating traditional gatekeepers and allowing amateur writers to go pro with a few clicks. This has been good news and bad news for readers. "Good" is the greater variety of authors we encounter and subjects we can read about. "Bad" is that the gatekeepers generally assured a certain minimum standard of quality and coherence. BIG FAT LIES, Miss Lopez’s story, is genuinely interesting, and not just to FAs or other fat women. But man, did it need a gatekeeper.
Ms. Lopez is a social media influencer, former erotic web model, and entrepreneur. She's likely best known for her (defunct) Babydoll Beauty Couture BBW-oriented beauty salon in Las Vegas, which garnered mainstream media attention around the world. Her brand is of the "more is more" variety, with over-the-top styling: sequined gowns, platinum blonde wigs, drag queen makeup, and all the glitz and gilt one can pack into an Instagram frame.
"More is more" would describe her body as well. 400 to 500 pounds during her web modeling career, she would balloon to over 800 pounds in the late 2010s before health issues forced a long-term hospitalization that led to her losing almost half of it.
The most revealing and coherent parts of BIG FAT LIES focus on her heartbreaking childhood. Lopez was extremely overweight from a young age (300 lbs by 12 years old) and was abused, neglected, and rejected by her mythologically awful parents. She thus retreated into a fantasy world of superficial glamor and fairy-tale romance that she turned into multiple careers as an adult, but would become her undoing as well.
Most of the book is about the highly dysfunctional, though potentially fascinating period of her life where she was running Babydoll Beauty Couture. We glimpse her experience through disjointed, elliptical passages that defy any kind of narrative. Bad writing aside, she leaves out so many details we wind up disliking and distrusting her.
This despite her appealing candor regarding her own repeated failings as a friend and businesswoman. She was was clearly victimized by many people as well, starting with her family. That said, at least half the book is made up of rant-style grievances against such people. Not that they’re unworthy of her bile, but, you know, enough already.
Lopez obviously has talent to match her oversized body and persona, and it’s surprising how she spends relatively little time tooting that horn. The tragedy is that this talent wasn’t accompanied by focus or judgment. An honest, savvy partner would have made her a legit millionaire, rather than the false one she portrayed on the internet. Babydoll Couture was a great idea — a full-service salon specifically catering to larger women. She then did a miraculous job of promoting it, garnering millions in worldwide publicity that billion-dollar brands would drool over. But a series of shockingly bad decisions and worse relationships ensured the place would never turn a profit, and ultimately close.
Perhaps most frustrating, particularly for FAs, Lopez’s brand is wrapped up in her status as a very large woman, and yet there's oddly little about her own experiences with it. She’s vehement in her negative feelings about the size acceptance movement, and repeatedly claims to have been burned and betrayed by people within it. Though again, she’s so skimpy with details you just have to take her word for it. And unfortunately as she’s fairly specific in her other indictments of various people in her life, it’s hard to do this.
Lopez’s main gripe that despite her devotion to SA, when she was at her lowest point, broke, bed-bound and completely dependent, the community abandoned her. Basically that the movement is superficial, which is ironic given the nature of her brand. This irony is not entirely lost on her, but enough where you really, really wish she had a close family member or friend to set her straight on how the world works. To her credit, she admits she could use sometone like that herself.
Lopez is also skimpy with details about what it was like to be a full-time influencer and brick and mortar business owner while often immobilized by her weight. She talks about keeping up the appearance of being an independent, vital fat woman while she was dependent and dying, but what was that actually like? Not that we’re the target audience, but again, the frustration for an FA is particularly acute.
Fat fetishes aside, the existence of shows like My 600 Pound Life and Too Large prove there’s a fascination with the extremely overweight and the specifics of their existence. Lopez mostly sidesteps this, which seems disingenuous as from the beginning she claims to want to rip the false facade of her persona to reveal the person.
Perhaps these aspects of her life were just too painful for her to describe, which is understandable. She will however very rarely throw in a single horrific detail, such as the last-minute canceling of a reality show shoot because her legs were leaking fluid. Otherwise she's mostly telling us the practical aspects of her life were difficult, rather than showing us.
She makes it clear she’s very much still in the process of recovery, just learning to walk again after three bed-bound years. This may have been a mistake on her part — not waiting — as it’s clear she’s also very much a work in process emotionally, and it shows on the page. The rawness of this is potentially appealing, but it just comes out as raw.
This is where an old-school gatekeeper would have been handy, an engaged editor who could shape these scattered thoughts and contradictions into a narrative, filling it in with context, and creating something resembling, well, a book. Ms. Lopez went DIY however, so here we are.
Short as it is, to get through BIG FAT LIES, one has to see it as an avant garde exercise and surrender to its ADHD stream of consciousness. There are typos, errors, and malpropisms galore but they become part of the style. Imagine a late night, multi substance-fueled session with someone who has an interesting story to tell but can’t collect her thoughts into anything coherent, no matter how many times you stop and say, “Wait, so what happened with…?”
There’s a very short photo section at the end of the book, which will be unsatisfying for FAs though it does a good-enough job of illustrating who she is for those who are otherwise unaware of her persona. But again, for a book about removing illusions, that’s mostly what she shows. Just one photo of her without her extreme makeup, and perhaps with her real hair, would have been interesting. A single photo of her at her heaviest, utterly subsumed by her own fat, does more to illustrate the horrific reality of being 800 pounds, far better than anything she writes.
