All of you out there who love historical romances… anyone forgotten Lisa Kleypas’s Derek Craven? Craven was the ultimate bad boy — and I mean bad. No prissy aristocrat, but the owner of a gambling club who knew all about crime, prostitution and generally sinful stuff (Dreaming of You, in case you’re lucky enough not to have read it yet). Like a lot of Lisa’s heroes, he started out a nobody. A man who rose from the bottom and got it all, including a deliciously aristocratic wife.

But the hero of It Happened One Autumn isn’t a self-made man: he’s the top of the top, Lord Westcliff. This is the first time in years that Lisa has written about an aristocrat. How to characterize him? Well, let’s just say that you couldn’t find a more arrogant, bossy nobleman this side of New York (and there aren’t any noblemen in New York, so you know what I mean).

I love this book. It played to all my dormant American distrust of upperclass Englishmen. There’s Westcliff, roaring along in his aristocratic male way, and then comes… Lilly. Go America! She’s a rude, nouveau riche American, and you have to love her. She buys a love potion and uses it against her host (Westcliff). She pretty much breaks every rule of the game, including getting rip-roaring drunk in Westcliff’s library. One thing I loved is that Lilly is the queen of the inadvertent dirty joke. Here’s one of my favorite lines from the scene in the library:

Lillian let out a bubbling laugh. “How very English of you. How you all love to suffer with your stiff . . . stiff . . . ” She peered at the book in her hands, distracted by the gilt on its cover. “. . . upper lips,” she finished absently.

I have to give you one more. Lilly is trying to get a pear out of the neck of a brandy bottle:

“How did it get in there, d’you think?” she poked her finger experimentally into the neck of the bottle. “I don’ see how something so big could fit into a hole that small.”

Well, yah… isn’t that what every woman asks, at some point or another?

Now… the inside scoop. Lisa’s on the Squawk Radio blog with me so I twisted her arm. Guess which movie star she modeled Westcliff on? I’ll put it at the bottom under my review of Fat Girl, in case you haven’t read It Happened One Autumn yet. Go out and get the book and check back for the spoiler at the end — tell me if you had it right and I’ll put you in a Hall of Fame next month!

Fat Girl is a memoir. It opens like this:

“I am fat. I am not so fat that I can’t fasten the seat belt on the plane. But, fat I am. I wanted to write about what it was and is like for me, being fat.”

This is one of the saddest, most angry books I’ve ever read. Judith Moore wasn’t always fat; she turned to food as an antidote to the cruelty of her mother and grandmother (her mother literally should have been thrown in jail for child abuse). But food provided its own cruel cage, as school friends insulted her, and then men wouldn’t go to bed with her because she was too fat. But the worst thing, I thought, was how much she drew in the poison that the outside world handed her for her irregular body:

“I hate myself. I have almost always hated myself. I have good reasons for hating myself, but it’s not for the bad things I’ve done… I hate myself because I am not beautiful. I hate myself because I am fat.”

Of course, she learned that hatred at her mother’s knee:

“I see her now, not that sweet pretty Mama of the Mom and Dad fantasy, but a madwoman, her heart-shaped face as wild as the face of a Greek tragedienne. She wept with fury. I was that fury’s cause. She said that. Then she said, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? You with a face not even a mother could love. You.”

Judith Moore says that “Terrible childhoods are difficult to write; I have been frank here.” Well, I can tell you — frankly — that terrible childhoods are also very difficult to read. But Fat Girl feels like a book that everyone should all read, particularly people who don’t wrestle with their weight (much). It doesn’t explain how so many people in America became obese, but it illuminates what some of those people must feel, as they walk down the street, hissed at by passing teenage males. Or when they have to ask for the extra belt in the airplane.

Judith Moore is a strong person because she survived her mother’s cruelty and beatings. She is not a strong person in that she has absorbed every bit of poison handed her, from the junk food to the cruel comments. This is not a book that ends with a miracle weight loss, or a more cheerful adulthood following the bad childhood. This is a book about someone who was never able to move away from her mother’s hatred and its connection to her body. One she gets rid of her mother, she still is her mother. Moore speaks of herself with precisely the same brutal precision with which she reports conversations with her mother. It’s as if she turns all of us into her mother. She writes the awful things about herself, so we read them and in a sense ventriloquize them to her. We affirm her self-hatred by reading the book. She says: “I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. I do not feel sorry for myself.” No: what she wants is that we feel the same loathing for her that she does for herself. And she makes it very hard, with her detailed descriptions of her ungainly body, of the terrible things that happened to her.

It’s an odd book for a romance writer to read because it is so important to the romance genre that the heroine be loved by the reader, be lovable. Judith Moore is anything but lovable, and that’s her point.

I read this book six months ago, and I am still thinking about it often. I recommend you steel yourself for the horror of it, and then read it.

SPOILER / IT HAPPENED ONE AUTUMN :
Marcus is modeled on the British actor Colin Firth (Darcy in the BBC Pride and Prejudice)