You Either Get It, or You Don't

By Valerie X Armstrong

 I thought my book, "The Survival of the Fattest/ A Fairy Tale for Fat Kids", was pretty simple. But it has been misinterpreted so much. It's really amazing to me that this book can be seen so differently by different readers.   It's like Aesop's "Bat" fable.   To some it's a bird and to others a mammal.  It has the tendency to polarize people, as can be seen by the reviews.  They are either five stars or one star, nothing in between, at least, so far.   They either love it or hate it.  It's not unlike the story of the elephant and the blind men where each one felt  a different part of the elephant and each one determined it to be something else altogether. The same with my book.  Certain readers took it piecemeal and read into it their own past experiences and biases and formed opinions that had nothing to do with the story as I had intended it.

I was told by someone holding a high position in a well known fat advocacy organization that my book wasn't "fat positive" enough.  I don't know how much more "fat positive" it could be than having the only humans left alive on the planet be the fat ones.  The argument was that the heroine had lost weight before she found love.  Hello??? There had been world wide famine.  Her fat saved her life.  That's why she lost some weight, from surviving off her body fat. She was by no means thin at the end of the story as the picture on the last page clearly illustrates.

And another thing, Maya, the heroine of the story was happy, working, dating, and enjoying life while she was still fat.  Once she got out of school, things changed for her.  She just happened to find the man of her dreams, also a fat person, after the nuclear holocaust.

Then, there are the complaints from the opposite camp saying that it's bad for me to advocate being fat.  I NEVER advocated the idea that one should become fat or stay fat on purpose to survive a famine,  but, in my story, if you happened to be fat, then good for you.   I'm not encouraging kids to overeat.  Some people are just born to be fat and some people are not.  In some scenarios thin works better than fat, but, in my story, it did not.  The fat haters, some of whom are actually fat themselves, believe that people of size aren't supposed to thrive, survive or be happy.  They are supposed to be punished for letting themselves "get that way". They think fat folks aren't supposed to be portrayed as heroes or heroines, but as buffoons.  They think they should hang their heads in shame, and it really irks them whenever it doesn't turn out that way...

Then there are those that think the story is too gruesome for kids.  No one batted an eyelash when God wiped out all of humanity, good and bad alike, plus every other living thing, except for one family, and a handful of animals, in the beloved tale of Noah's Ark...It's even represented on nursery furnishings and baby clothes.

No one cried "foul" when an innocent grandma was eaten by a big bad wolf in Red Riding Hood's story.  Nobody became irate and screamed "elder abuse" when an old lady, minding her own business, in her own home was baked alive in her own oven, by two home invading hoodlums in the story of Hansel and Gretel...That was deemed okay for kids to read.  Then there's Snow White, whose very own step-mother wanted her killed and her innards brought back to her as proof that she was actually dead...and Jack and the Bean Stalk...a selfish kid invades a big guys home, steals his prized possessions and when the giant tries to catch him,  the brat kills him....And lest we forget,  the infamous tale of Blue Beard where a whole room filled with bloody corpses of his ex-wives was discovered  by his next victim....and these are just a few.  Come on now, if these stories pass muster for kid's reading, how can my story not?   How is reading about a couple of young fat  people surviving a fictional nuclear incident in my book,  going to damage kids psyches if the old classic  time honored, fairy tales don't?  Give kids some credit.  It's just a story, folks...fiction...nothing more...nothing less.  Kids know it's not real.

  I'm grateful for those that actually "get" the book and understand what the story is about and don't try to make it into anything other than what it is. I want to thank them all right now.

My book, if anything, advocates world peace, by illustrating that if people, even kids in school yards, can't get along with each other, then bad things, like a world war can happen, and the ones that start it don't always come out on top.  Kids need to learn, early on, to be nice to each other, even if someone looks different than they do, or is different in some other way. The moral here, if there is one, would be a basic karmic one:  Always be nice to our fellow man, and we will never have to worry about my fairy tale coming true.