Fat Girl
by Judith Moore
Profile £12.99, pp196

Judging from the author photo on the back cover, Judith Moore is not a fat girl any more. She has been fat (eight stone at seven years old, 11 stone at 10) and she has been thin. But whatever weight she has achieved, there is something wrong with her that's more than being fat: 'I considered myself more animal than human.'

As the confessions come spewing out of Judith's mouth, forcing the reader to digest tales of sweat and self-disgust and the kind of loathing that comes of giving mean men oral sex, it becomes clear that Judith would probably always have ended up a fat person even if her parents had loved her. It made Judith ill to write this book and there is no doubting her admirable honesty, despite the awful taste it leaves in the mouth.