ME & the Fat Man - Hardcover

Myerson

3.21

156 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0880016493 ISBN 13: 9780880016490

Publisher: ECCO Press, 1999

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A frigid English waitress uses her looks to make extra money by having sex with strangers. One day she meets a very fat man with connections to her drowned mother--she was orphaned as a girl--and a love affair blooms.

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Review:

What is reality and what is truth, when your whole life has been shrouded in secrets? Julie Myerson's narrator in Me and the Fat Man, her third novel, is 27-year-old married woman who works as a waitress in a market town restaurant. Amy has never known much about her early childhood and her mother, who drowned when Amy was only seven years old. Her foster parents were grim and secretive. Bored by her work and depressed by her marriage to a computer salesman whom she doesn't love and whose dog dislikes her, she has fallen into a secret life as a prostitute more or less by accident. In between shifts at the restaurant, she sits in the Park for the Blind waiting for men to accost. Amy's deadpan cynicism-- masking an unpredictable passion--is jolted by the unexpected arrival in her life of a man claiming to be an old lover of her mother's.

He would like to spend some time with her and also wants her to meet his friend Gary. Amy hopes to confront some of the ghosts of the ghosts of her past but instead of making the past clearer, her involvement with him and Gary only leads to greater mystery and greater psychological--maybe actual-- dangers. Part mystery, part thriller, part eccentric romance, Myerson's novel draws one into a weird and disturbing world in which reality becomes less and less important and sex is both a source of empowerment and happiness and a potentially destructive instinct. Myerson writes brilliantly about sex in all its sensuous, farcical and cruel manifestations. In the end, her book is about finding love but the macabre journey her heroine takes to discover it steeps the reader in suspense and tragedy. --Emily Ormond

Review:

� ‘A beautifully written, powerfully felt novel about sex, love and innocence.’ Independent on Sunday

� ‘A warm, intimate novel, full of surprise’ Daily Telegraph

� ‘A scintillating literary kiss’ Independent

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