Just how long does a person have to go without being happy to forget how it feels like? For 28-year-old newspaper features writer Cannie, the heroine in Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner, it’s been too long. She’s stuck in a career limbo, her dad’s been AWOL for more than a decade, and her mom had just come out of the closet. To top it all off, her ex-boyfriend Bruce started a magazine column that he called Good in Bed (though Cannie knows he isn’t) and the first installment, "Loving a Larger Woman," divulged more information about her than Cannie cared to share with the world, like the fact that she weighs more than Bruce.
Being publicly humiliated because of her weight is nothing new to Cannie. Anyone who’s even one point beyond his ideal BMI knows it can happen at any time, anywhere. When you’re fat, everyone feels free to comment on it. For Cannie, it started when she was nine and an old woman came up to her to tell her not to eat the ice cream cone in her hand because she was chunky enough as it was. For someone else, it could be her first time to wear a sleeveless dress in public when a pastor’s wife jiggled her arm and remarked over and over how plump she is, making her banish the dress to the back of her closet.
It happens often enough so that even though we strive to remain positive and believe in ourselves, the smallest setback sends us reeling, and the negative messages we’ve tried to keep at bay comes back with more bile than ever. I’m dumb. I’m stupid. I’m fat and nobody would ever love me. I’d be a fool to even believe that’s a possibility.
So yet again, Cannie finds herself pushed to lose weight as the first step in her attempt to give her life a makeover. She joins a study for a new weight loss drug which also requires her to go to "fat class." It’s funny when a skinny nurse tries to teach a group of big women about portion size, the food pyramid and the virtues of broiled food. They finish the nurse’s sentences for her: one portion of meat is the size of the palm of your hand; one portion of butter is as big as your thumb. They also demonstrate that they’ve committed to memory every food item’s corresponding amount of Weight Watcher points. It only goes to show what I’ve long suspected: It’s the fatties who know the most about diets because we’ve been in and out of them since puberty. In a perfect world, two people who exercise and eat only lean meat and brown rice should lose the same amount of weight. But of course, for a lot of us, the scale reading remains the same, mocking us, week after week, while a few can sneeze and a pound magically melts away.
I have to admit that I felt smug when I started reading this book because I’m in no imminent danger of ballooning from a size 8 to a 16 like its central character. But chapter after chapter, Cannie deals with her problems with more grace than I’ve demonstrated my whole life. She can even laugh at some of her misfortunes. I felt humbled. It doesn’t matter that an old fogey at work tramples her at every opportunity. Or that when she reconsiders the wisdom of letting Bruce go (he might be a directionless slacker, but at least he loved her) and asks him back, he leaves her dangling for weeks without a definite answer. She dares to do what many of us who are just a fraction of her weight cannot. Despite her confidence being wobbly at times, she trudges on as if she had the same right as everybody else to live her life the way she wants to.
Never mind the disapproving looks from other people. If she wants to eat heartily, she would, even if her lunch companion is her diet doctor. She stands up for herself in the workplace and everywhere else. She stops running after Bruce even when the world is telling her that she should cling to him because another man might not come along. She lets go of the things that fall short of her expectations and keeps her eye on the ball. Soon enough, things start happening for her, with a surprise bonus – a rendezvous with Hollywood.
But like how it happens a lot in real life, just when Cannie thinks that she can breathe easy again, she is plunged into a woman’s worst nightmare. She tries to pull herself up by the bootstraps and rebuilds her life on her own but it proves to be too difficult. This is when she makes her most courageous decision – she admits that she needs help, a struggle for someone like her who’s been abandoned one too many times and might have trust issues, and rightly so.
So, does Cannie get her happy ending? Well, this is chicklit after all. Some would say that this is pure escapism sandwiched between the covers. It may look that way at the surface, but when you factor in the fact that this book delves into women’s psyches, it ceases to be fluff. Good in Bed takes us with Cannie as she pursues her dreams and aspirations, and we feel that we are part of her victory when she gets all that she ever wanted without having to lose any weight.
One might wonder if there is a weight requirement to appreciate this book. I dare say that there is none. Good in Bed is for everyone who ever felt they weren’t good enough. Anyone who ever cringed at the labels that other people gave them: fat, short, dark, pango… and yet wished to be like those charmed people who seem to have everything go their way. Like Cannie, we all hope that one day, we won’t have to sette for a man who’d cringe at the mention of our problems because immediately, he’d think about how the situation will inconvenience him. Maybe one day, we’ll also meet a man who’d laugh at our jokes, remember our favorite foods, and like us for who and what we are, whatever shape, size or weight that would be. Then maybe, just maybe, we will begin to remember what happy feels like.