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Aubrey Gordon is fat. “Not curvy or chubby or chunky or fluffy,” she says, but fat — and a fat activist. Gordon, from Portland, Oregon, began blogging her thoughts on body size and identity, writing anonymously as Your Fat Friend. That is now the title of a documentary about her by British filmmaker Jeanie Finlay.
Finlay follows Gordon as she boldly decides to drop the anonymity, then lands a book contract and eventually becomes a best-selling author. Behind what might seem an archetypal American underdog success story, Your Fat Friend is very revealing about the struggles that Gordon has endured. These involve not only daily physical challenges and the anguish of air travel, but facing virulent online hostility.
What we hear of Gordon’s writing suggests an earnest tendency to the registers of manifesto and neo-hippie poetry — “let (your body) grow wild and untamed as a garden you loved as a child.” These are at odds with her brashly urbane wit in person: she describes herself as living with “a charcuterie platter of anxiety disorders”.
Her take is political: she critiques the ruthlessness of the “wellness” industry, and sees the body mass index as essentially a scam by insurance companies. But her affirmative take on fatness — which seems to downplay genuine health issues — is left unquestioned.
Nevertheless, Gordon is entertaining and eye-opening in her satirical take on the cult of body norms, as seen in the diet books she has collected over the years. Titles such as I Prayed Myself Slim, What Would Jesus Eat? and Help Lord . . . The Devil Wants Me Fat suggest that fat isn’t just a feminist issue, as per Susie Orbach, but that, in conservative America, it can also be a deranged ideological one — which makes this presentation of Gordon as a freedom fighter all the more plausible.
★★★☆☆
In UK cinemas from February 9
