Summary

In 1991, at the age of 16, Caitlin takes a film class and befriends an attractive older boy (aged 19) named Matthew Vale. Caitlin has a crush on him, but Matthew sympathetically asks Caitlin if her classmates called her “Fatty” at school. Caitlin is shocked, thinking she has hidden her body well beneath over sized shirts and skirts. She has new store-bought clothes because she got a job at the magazine Melody Maker. Though she denied her weight as a teenager, and was hurt by Matthew’s question, the adult Caitlin can admit that as a teenager she was fat, mainly because she didn’t exercise or eat healthily. Her entire family is overweight, but no one talks about it. Mid-30s Caitlin also realizes that the word “fat” is a pejorative that ostracizes, and teenage Caitlin was an...