Healthy Home Cooking
As one might expect from the title, the novel is filled with references to food and dieting. One particularly vibrant simile is quite suggestive of the effort that goes into a wholesale transformation of the way a person looking to lose weight cooks at home:
“Like it has been every night for more than a year now, the kitchen is thick with the scent of boiled barn and burnt vegetable, like Mother Nature on fire.”
The Darkness
The more one reads the fiction produced since the dawn of the 20th century, the one more is confronted with evidence pretty difficult to refute: writers love “darkness” as a metaphor. Keep an eye out for and see how often it is used during your reading, such as this instance here. Which, it must be noted, is not the only utilization of the darkness metaphor in the book:
“There follows another bout of darkness, in which nothing is measured or counted or weighed, in which I dress before the mirror not seeing myself.”
The Outsider Looking In
Metaphor is often an effective means of conveying a situation that may be difficult to understand or to offer a perspective by one character on the actions of another. One of the recognized strengths of this novel is its unflinching insight into the psychology of overweight people living in a society that daily reinforces an ideal of physical attractiveness at odds with their own situation. This particular metaphor offers insight into the perspective of the outsider looking in, for example, when the protagonist engages in her nightly ritual eating a small square of chocolate:
“like watching a woeful squirrel hunched over a piece of trash he has mistaken for a winter nut.”
Character Delineation
Through the use of metaphor, the author is able to provide insight into two different characters for the price of one. The protagonist watches as her goth friend China applies eyeliner:
"No color is black enough for China except for this one kind she says she gets at Target that I can never find. I feel it now as a cold stabby stream across my waterline. Sharp feathery strokes like little knife swipes that make me flinch every time."
What's so Great about Metaphor?
Sometimes a writer is inspired to produce a metaphorical image that is just absolute poetry; a work of literary art that is so good, it almost feels like showing off. Here’s the thing: with so much dreadfully competent and uninspired use of metaphor, when a writer nails it, they should be celebrated for showing off. For everyone who has ever wondered what’s so great about metaphor, here is the answer:
"My wide slash of bared stomach feels like an emergency no one is attending to."
