Book #95: Every Inch of Her

Book #95: Every Inch of Her by Peter Sheridan

July 10, 2014


I can't help it. No matter how many times I claim that I won't go to the library without a plan again, I always end up blinding grabbing books from the shelves. As much as that's bitten me in the ass, I've also found some quality books that might have otherwise escaped by attention. While I picked this book up the same day that I got The Casual Vacancy, I had at least been aware of the existence of the latter, though I kind of had a moment of oh, yeah, J.K. Rowling did write another book... I'd never heard of this particular book, but in this situation, I was satisfied with both of my spontaneous choices.

This wasn't a perfect story. There were some things left unsaid that I thought could have merited more time in the plot, like Sister Rosaleen's sexuality or Philo's obvious learning disability. I didn't appreciate how abruptly the reader was presented with Philo's dark secret, but it did make sense that it would come about after the reader had gotten the impression that Philo was a strong woman who used humor to fight her battles in life...this was what she'd been hiding under her good-humor and vulgarity, and under all of her fat, too, apparently, and it couldn't be laughed at.

Philo is fat. The reader (at least of the edition that I read) knows this before even opening the book. She is a compulsive eater, and her issues with food apparently stem from sexual abuse that she'd experienced as a child at the hands of a man whom her father owed money to. I found that to be a tragic and very profound revelation, but I didn't like the whole liposuction thing. She doesn't really address her problem with food in the story; she does make some half-hearted promises, but it's revealed that she's done this many times, as many people who have problems with food and weight have. She does stand up to her abuser, which is a good thing, but I would have rather seen her stand up to her father, who seemed to know about the abuse, and allowed it to continue to placate his benefactor.

Philo and her dangerously obese mother Sylvia are pretty much shit on by this man (and Philo by her own alcoholic husband Tommo) all of their adult lives. Now that I'm reflecting on it, it makes me wonder about other overweight women who are married to men who don't have weight problems, and the kinds of shit that they may have to endure. It's easy for someone who is thin and condescending to say that they should just lose the weight; Philo demonstrates that psychologically, its not so simple. But I would have wanted to see Philo, a woman who was strong in so many ways, overcome that most important obstacle in her life (now that her husband has been dealt with, you could say). Really, she was pretty clueless about the basics of nutrition, as was her mother (convinced that she could eat half-calorie cookies all that she wanted and not gain any weight); she has many startling gaps in her knowledge, but she's certainly not a dumb woman.

The book actually has a more light-hearted tone than I'm letting on. Philo, as I've said, uses humor to her advantage, and it helps her in social situations. When she seeks the aid of a convent of nuns after first running away from her husband, she charms them with her vulgarity, rather than turning them off. In fact, I'm pretty sure that Sister Rosaleen, whose "crisis of faith" is an unsatisfying brief plot point, was in love with the lively Philo. Damn, she would have treated Philo better than any of the men she'd ever encountered!

At the convent, Philo becomes popular with the local seniors when she livens up their afternoons at the center. Her version of the British show Blind Date (I only got the references because its also mentioned inBridget Jones) puts Dina and Cap together. The problem is that these two have been feuding for like 50 years. He'd been in love with her in his youth, but his best friend had also had a crush on her; a coin toss decided the matter, and Cap was best man at their wedding. They became enemies over a docking dispute; Cap didn't want to deal with the issue violently, and Dina saw that as a betrayal to the cause. Later, after Cap had opened a small vegetable shop, Dina and her husband did the same; and so the "vegetable war" had been going on for a long time. Dina's husband had left her, but she still harbored some bitterness towards Cap. Cap, meanwhile, was still in love with her, and a 71-year-old virgin to boot.

I found Cap and Dina's story to be an interesting contrast to Philo's. Cap was very sweet to Dina after they finally got together, and he studied up on sex so that he would not only know what he was doing, but so he could please her. That's pretty hot, even if they are both old farts (and by the end of the book, Dina was missing both of her legs from the knees-down). In contrast, Philo's husband Tommo had been sweet to her at the start, but had since become poisonous to her; not only physically abusive (which she could handle, and almost seemed to like to some extent), but emotionally abusive as well. The language of this book is rather, uh, realistic (it is working class Dublin, after all), so there's a lot of cursing, but the names that Tommo would call Philo were just disgusting. But besides the contrast in these love (or not-so-much-love) stories is about the only connection I can make between the two plot lines, although Philo does become a big influence in Cap and Dina's lives. I almost wanted more of each of the stories, especially Cap and Dina's; once they got together, there was less of their story than I wanted to see.

I found Philo to be easy to sympathize with. She was a battered woman in a conservative society (at least in regards to marriage and family, being Catholic and all), an overweight woman in this world that glorifies being thin and shovels unhealthy food in our faces, and undereducated to boot. And yet she was a good mother, and a good person; in spite of her need to feed her face, she was mainly a positive force in people's lives. I almost found in unbelievable that she would have once allowed herself to get pushed around by Tommo, a drunk who is full of shit. But at the end of the book, even with him out of the way and her children back in their home, she still has a long road ahead of her. She may have a love interest in an ex-monk named "Brother" Felix, who runs a boy's home that her eldest son went to to get away from his stepfather, but that's another part of the story that was a bit underdeveloped. But, at least Philo has her charm, and hopefully a renewed resolve to turn her life around, before she ends up like her poor mother.