#saraiwalker

I just finished Dietland by Sarai Walker. It felt like reading a feminist version of Fight Club. Throughout the whole book you are watching the main character battle with her real self, Plum, and the skinny person she has always wanted to be, Alicia. 

It was amazingly easy to follow this character through her struggle with a Weight Watchers-esque dieting regime, to avoiding work and people because you don’t feel good enough, to engaging in radical forms of self-love, and finally to acceptance. Plum is every woman in America: thin, fat, tall, short, blonde, brunette. She is the woman who has taken every social construct of what is considered beautiful and internalized it to the detriment of her own self. 

We all feel not good enough and struggle day to day with feelings of inadequacy. As women we are asked to look sexy and then when harassed told we shouldn’t look so sexy. We live a never ending slut-shaming, fat-shaming, insert another type of shame here society. Virgie Tovar summed up my feelings about the book in one simple tweet (taken from The Militant Baker):

We are all Jennifer. We are just too afraid to show it.