The title character of Fat is Rita Formica, a sixteen-year-old, two-hundred pound teen-age girl. She says, "I had always been fat—a fat baby, a fat child, and now I was a fat teenager." While she talks forthrightly and even humorously about her weight, Rita also struggles with it, and the novel is a record of her internal struggle. She deplores her name, her weight, and her chances for romance—leading her to create an alter ego: Skylar Cunningham, a rich, thin (on the inside, at any rate) health club devotee.

Rita believes she is in love with Robert Swann, who is "tall, beautiful, upper-class, aristocratic. And thin." Looking like he just stepped out of Esquire magazine, Robert is a health nut and car fanatic who "was going to be a stockbroker like his dad, and make millions to add onto the...