The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man’s Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America by Tommy Tomlinson, 2019, available in several formats. I strongly recommend the audiobook version, as Tomlinson reads it himself and has a very distinctive voice stemming from his surgery for throat cancer over a decade ago. The voice adds to the whole experience. (Amazon Affiliate link)
I hope that Tommy Tomlinson makes a million dollars net profit after taxes from this book, and I did my part by buying the audiobook instead of putting it on hold at the library. The book is actually several genres in one, any one of which would be worth the purchase price:
1) It’s a vibrant, beautifully-written and meticulous memoir of a childhood in the Deep South. Tomlinson’s parents are descended from sharecroppers (whom we tend to think of as
black, but sharecroppers can also be white) who then went on as adults to work in factories on the Gulf Coast. The attitude towards food in that class/place/time was very much the same as it was among the peasants and serfs during the Middle Ages (or indeed any ages with peasants and serfs): eat while the eatin’s good. Feast when you can. Winter is coming; lean times are coming. Make the most of every single scrap of food, and fry it if at all possible. For people who spend their lives working hard physically, this type of eating doesn’t necessarily translate into health problems, but once life gets easier the pounds and issues start piling on. I’ve told the story in a previous post about a college friend of a cousin who’d had quadruple-bypass surgery in his forties. He’d grown up on a farm, working hard every day and never worrying about how much he ate. But then he went to college, and no one sat him down and said, “You can’t eat the way you did at home. You’re not as physically active.” And so he ended up with a heart attack.
But back to the book: I always wonder about memoirs that seem to be able to reproduce so many specific events. While I have some very vivid memories of my childhood I would never be able to write a continuous narrative of those years. Tomlinson remembers his life in gorgeous and painful detail, meals and rejections and TV shows and family gatherings. If I had to pick one character who was fully alive in my mind as I read it would be his father, who wanted badly for Tommy to know how much he loved him. Tomlinson’s parents switched off shifts at the seafood plant where they both worked so that one of them would be home all the time. On the way home every day Tomlinson’s dad would stop and buy his son some chocolate milk and a package of peanut-butter crackers. Even when his wife, Tommy’s mother, begged him to quit doing so because of Tommy’s growing girth, he just couldn’t stop himself.
Tomlinson is a master scene-setter. I was particularly struck while I was reading with one description of a typical get-together, the women in the kitchen and the men gathered around an old pickup truck telling stories. Tomlinson managed to create the feel of an old sepia photograph, in my mind anyway. There’s a golden haze over the whole picture. The book has that marvelous quality that’s usually called “a sense of place.”
2) It’s an examination of the psychology behind overeating. While I don’t buy this whole “addiction” idea when it comes to food, I do believe there’s something that can be called an “addictive personality.” Tomlinson grew up in an intact, loving family, did well in school, ended up with a writing career, and has many lifelong friends. People who love him are not in short supply. He’s now married to a wonderful woman. And yet there’s constantly playing in his head what he calls “USuck FM,” the refrain that says “you’re not good enough, you’re a fraud, you’re a mess.” He does seem to have had a problematic relationship with food from the very beginning; he was normal weight at birth, but, as he says, “By the time I was old enough to know anything, I was fat. I’ve never been not fat.” He always wants to be lifted out of himself, and one way that happens is by ingesting a huge meal. He makes a point of saying that these binges are not driven by physical hunger; in fact, he says, “I’m almost never hungry in the physical sense.” So what is driving him? He doesn’t come up with a definitive answer, although he has a memorable image: “Some of us fight holes in our souls that a box car of doughnuts couldn’t fill.” But where do the holes come from? Don’t we all have our own demons and our own ways of dealing with them? (Quotations are from the Amazon “look inside” feature. Be sure after you read this book, by the way, that you go back and read the Frank Bruni memoir Born Round.)
3) It’s a common-sense, practical, down-to-earth debunking of the current weight-loss industry. As he says in the book but also in this Atlantic article:
Here are the two things I have come to believe about diets:
1. Almost any diet works in the short term.
2. Almost no diets work in the long term.
The most depressing five-word Google search I can think of—and I can think of a lot of depressing five-word Google searches—is gained all the weight back. Losing weight is not the hard part. The hard part is living with your diet for years, maybe the rest of your life.
He talks somewhere about the “carnival barker” type of diet, the ones that promise the impossible if only you’ll follow this meal plan, take these supplements, go to this retreat. “Step right up, folks!”
The fact that Tomlinson’s not a carnival baker leads me to believe that he won’t make his million bucks. He’s just too realistic, too down-to-earth. He peddles no ju-ju. He refuses to sugarcoat anything. (Sorry.) As the title of his Atlantic article says, “losing weight is a rock fight.” If everyone listened to him about weight loss our society would be a lot thinner—and richer, because we wouldn’t be wasting our money on quackery. You go, Tommy!
I do need to address one issue in the book that will surely put off some of my readers, and that is Tomlinson’s fondness for four-letter words. Here’s a quotation from his blog in a post about his mother: “She read an early draft. She said I cussed too much.” I can’t argue with her! (Be sure you read the whole story.) I’m going to say: Read the book anyway. He’s not “cussing,” anyway—he’s not using profanity, in other words, not using God’s name in vain.
I’d better quit. Next week’s book will be a companion piece to this one, as it examines the scientific underpinnings of why we eat the way we do. I’ve barely gotten into it and am already so intrigued!