Me and the Fat Man - Softcover

Myerson, Julie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1857028333 ISBN 13: 9781857028331

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 1999

Synopsis

Myerson’s third novel, her most uninhibited and powerful, 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, 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

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1857028333
• ISBN 13: 9781857028331
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224