Confession: I had no idea who Brittany Gibbons was before I started reading her book, Fat Girl Walking: Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin...Every Inch of It. Some of you may be thinking I live under a rock, and after reading her book, I'm thinking that I may actually have been. She's been in the news on numerous shows, plus she's a blogger, and I had never even heard her name.
Now that I've read her book, I can easily say I'm obsessed with Brittany Gibbons. Fat Girl Walking is a hilarious memoir of her life. She walks you through the struggles of growing up overweight with crazy parents. She recalls her life as the "secret girlfriend" to many high school guys before finding the love of her life, Andy Gibbons. She shares her struggles with anxiety in college and how she became an internet success. She shares all of these things about her life, but she also gives sound advice to those who may be struggling with the same things that she struggled with for most of her life.
This book was a quick read because it almost read like a blog. Brittany writes a blog called Brittany, Herself, and that's where she first started sharing many of the things in her book. You definitely get a sense of her background in blogging from the book, and as a blogger, I loved this.
The only parts of Fat Girl Walking that I didn't enjoy were those about pregnancy and being a mother. While these chapters were hilarious, it's not something I know anything about, and they aren't things that I'm worried about experiencing anytime soon, so these chapters kind of dragged on for me. I think future Tiffany will enjoy these chapters as well as women who have had experiences giving birth and raising children or are even just thinking about becoming a mother, but because I couldn't relate, I couldn't get into these parts.
Aside from that, this book was laugh out loud hilarious.
These are a few of my favorite quotes:
From the introduction: "This is not a diet book, guys. In fact, if I do this right, our cycles will align and we'll be eating our feelings together by the third chapter." -- How could I not be excited about reading this book after reading a line like that?
"When you get into your twenties and begin to take mental stock of your life, the good parts and the bad parts become glaringly apparent. We all have them, good parts and bad parts, but your twenties are generally the first time that you really begin to see the timeline that led you to your current existence." -- As a twenty-something, this really stuck with me and made me start thinking about how the crap I got to where I am.
When an elementary school classmate accused her of having AIDS: "I never asked who she'd heard that from. I don't even know anybody with AIDS. If by Aids, she meant IBS, then, yes, I had that." -- I laughed uncontrollably for several minutes after reading this.
Advice from her grandmother: "You are going to fail at a lot of things, so when you do, do it on such a grand scale that half the room gives you a standing ovation, and the other half gives you the middle finger." -- Quite possibly my favorite piece of advice from the entire book.
"I'm not saying I don't see fat; saying that is akin to the people who make grand statements about 'not seeing color.' Seeing color doesn't mean that you're a racist. It means your eyes work, but that you have hopefully able to see color not for a discrepancy in normal, but as a beautiful component of diversity."
I give Fat Girl Walking a 4 out of 5. There is so much to love about this book. My favorite parts were her emails with her husband, Andy (seriously, they were made for each other), recollections of a childhood with her dad after he was hit by a semi-truck, her progression into isolation due to anxiety and way too many things to name right now. I think girls of all shapes, all colors and all walks of life should read this book because there's something in it for everyone.
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Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from HarperCollins for my honest review. As always, all opinions are 100% my own.
