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In Marian Keyes' Sushi for Beginners, London fashion editor Lisa Edwards gets exiled to Dublin to launch a new magazine called Colleen. There she shops in the local market, where her new assistant editor Ashling sees her for the first time: "In fascination, Ashling checked out the contents of the woman's basket. Seven cans of strawberry Slim-Fast, seven baking potatoes, seven apples, and four … five … six … seven individually wrapped little squares of chocolate from the pick'n'mix. … Some irresistable instinct told Ashling that this paltry basketful constituted the woman's weekly shop." Indeed it is: Lisa, exiled in Dublin, still keeps up her high-fashion eating habits. ("She coiled in an armchair, slowly removed the paper, and ran her teeth along the side of the chocolate, shaving away tiny curl after tiny curl, until it was all gone. It took an hour.")
As it turns out, Lisa Edwards isn't the real heroine of Sushi For Beginners. Even though she tries to seduce the handsome manager of Colleen, Ashling—who is described as having "no waist"—gets him instead.
She isn't alone. Although chick lit is filled with calorie counting, there's a moral in all of these books: Don't try to be as thin as a fashion model. Sometimes, the heavy girl gets the guy.
Unfortunately, "heavy" turns out to be a relative term; chick-lit heroines have an unnerving tendency to lose 20 pounds and then declare their independence from society's obsession with weight. In The Devil Wears Prada, Andrea finally quits her job at Runway, goes home, and gains ten pounds: "Now that I no longer had to resort to gulping down a bowl of soup or subsisting on cigarettes and Starbucks alone, my body had adjusted itself accordingly and gained back the ten pounds I'd lost while working at Runway. And it didn't even make me cringe; I believed it when … my parents told me I looked healthy, not fat." (Unless my math is even worse than my calorie intake, Andrea went from 115 pounds to 105 and then back to 115, which means that she still has the circumference of a toothpick.) In Jemima J., size-20 Jemima meets a gorgeous guy named Brad on the Internet and tells him that she's thin and beautiful. When he insists on meeting her, she loses 97 pounds, exercises herself into sleekness, gets blond highlights, and flies to California. Unfortunately, it turns out that Brad is having a fling with his enormously fat personal assistant; he wants Jemima around only as a trophy, because he owns a gym and needs a California-thin girlfriend to improve his public profile. ("Is it possible that men would have found me attractive then, despite being hugely overweight?" Jemima gasps.) Enlightened, Jemima allows her weight to soar back up: "Jemima is no longer skinny," the epilogue tells us, "no longer hardbodied, no longer obsessed with what she eats. Jemima Jones is now a voluptuous, feminine, curvy size 10 who is completely happy with how she looks." (A "voluptuous" size 10?)
Even the occasional author who breaks this mold displays an unseemly preoccupation with food. Jennifer Crusie's Bet Me makes a valiant effort to demonstrate that size-14 Minerva Dobbs is truly attractive. "Her lips were full and soft," Crusie writes, chronicling the gradual realization of hero Cal Morrisey that big is beautiful, " … smooth milky skin, wide-set dark eyes, a blob of a nose, and that lush, soft, full, rosy mouth." But while Bet Me insists that eating is good, Min and Cal still treat food like something illicitly delicious, an ecstatic but anarchic pleasure, as naughty and luscious as …
Er, well, as sex. In chick lit, a startling number of carnal liaisons actually take place in restaurants (lobbies, coatrooms, kitchens, and—in one memorable instance—under the table while the waiter is in the middle of listing the chocolate-and-cream-laden dessert specials). And Bet Me's descriptions of Minerva eating come awfully close to food porn. When Cal takes Minerva to his favorite Italian restaurant and tempts her with carbs, he "broke the bread open and the yeasty warmth rose and filled her senses. … She closed her eyes and her lips tight, which was useless. … Cal watched her tear off a piece of the bread and bite into it. 'Oh,' she breathed, and then she chewed it with her eyes shut and pleasure flooding her face. … Her face flushed."
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