In previous memoirs, Brisbane-based writer Kris Kneen has examined their life through the lens of their sexuality (Affection, 2009) and their family history (The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen, 2021). In Fat Girl Dancing, Kneen’s lens is their body, specifically the body of a ‘short, fat, ageing woman’.

The struggle with body image that Kneen depicts here – a struggle that will be familiar to anyone who has stared in the mirror at a body they don’t recognise – is candid, unflinching, and exquisitely written.

Kneen structures Fat Girl Dancing around episodes that illustrate what they characterise as the shameful failures of their body, its refusal to comply with their need to deep-sea dive, trek, wear fashionable clothes, be desired, and, centrally, relocate the ‘huntress of my youth: proud, confident, busty, self-possessed and very, very sexy’.

Having determined that the cultural, scientific, and historical research with which they began the project served only to remove them from their own experience of ‘fatness’, Kneen resolves to write Fat Girl Dancing ‘from inside my own flesh’, a body ‘[b]ulbous, blocky, disproportionately wide in the middle, top-heavy with surprisingly massive upper arms … mottled all over with the light and shade of subcutaneous fat’.