Me and the Fat Man - Hardcover

Myerson, Julie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1857028228 ISBN 13: 9781857028225

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 1998

Synopsis

Myerson’s third novel, her most uninhibited and powerful yet, is Amy’s story – a journey of sexual desire and her strange relationship with the fat man who rescues her from the past.

Amy is a waitress in Bath. She is married and she also finds men in the Garden of the Blind who pay to have sex with her. And then Harris arrives in the restaurant one day; he knew Amy’s mother, who drowned in the Aegean when she was a young girl. It is not clear why Harris wants Amy to meet Gary, a young fat man he shares a flat with, but it is the beginning of a strange relationship that will take them back to Greece, where the past is confronted and the future buried.

Julie Myerson’s prose is so spare, hypnotic and nerve-jangling it leaves you winded. Amy’s story so compulsive and frightening it is impossible to put down. Me and the Fat Man establishes this highly acclaimed writer as one of the finest young novelists at work today.

About this title

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

About the Author:

Julie Myerson was born in Nottingham in 1960, read English at Bristol University and has worked for the National Theatre and Walker Books. She is married and has three young children. Her first two novels were widely acclaimed and are published by Picador.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1857028228
• ISBN 13: 9781857028225
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224