Carol Sturm Smith
Carol Sturm Smith has co-authored cookbooks, turned movie scripts into novels, and edited projects as diverse as mushroom books and historical romances. Fat People is her first work of serious fiction; it earned her New York State Council on the Arts grant. Born in Trenton, New Jersey, she has lived in New England, but claims Manhattan — where she holes in, part of the time with her daughter, Dove — as home. She is currently drafting Cosmic Clowns, the second in a series of related novels.
Fat People
Smith’s Sarah Campbell gets going nicely, with a wry randiness, stray sorrow (like bone in a hamburger), and a humorous self-deprecation
Fat People
Carol Sturm Smith
1978
Hardcover
ISBN 978-0-914590-46-0
Seeking redemption through booze, hard driving and bouts of gorging, Sarah Campbell leaves her New England home, her husband Sweep and her lovers, Will, Hangrove the local plumber, Young Viking, Ernest, and Bailey. In her red Porsche, she attacks the western landscape, stopping along the way in roadside rest areas to exorcise demons with her hand drum, sampling diners, sleeping in motels, until an unlikely encounter in the middle of the desert forces her to slow down and begin the painful process of digesting her experience and coming to terms with herself. Armed with a guitar and protected by 80 pounds of “insulation,” she returns home to face her friends. It is Sarah Campbell who contributes the first-person voice to this fast, tough, funny investigation of sex, excess, music and the power struggle between men and women, but in some sense all the characters in Fat People are heavy — fat or made plump for slaughter, oily or unctuous, corpulent, substantial, rich in some desirable element, or pregnant.