Twenty years of teaching English to teenagers has taught me one thing: the books that make students most uncomfortable are usually the ones doing the real work. Dietland made me uncomfortable. And I mean that as the highest compliment.
I finished this one during a late-night grading session - red pen in hand, Tara Sands in my ears, a stack of sophomore essays about The Great Gatsby that all somehow managed to miss the point about wealth and self-invention. Meanwhile, Sarai Walker was delivering a master class on exactly that subject, just aimed squarely at the beauty industry instead of East Egg mansions.
The Narrator Understands That Pause Is Punctuation
Tara Sands earned that AudioFile Earphones Award. Her Plum Kettle is sardonic without being bitter, wounded without being pathetic - and that's a tightrope walk. There's this ironic nonchalance she brings to Plum's internal observations about her own body, her job answering fan mail for a teen magazine, her careful invisibility. Sands knows when to lean into the dark humor and when to pull back and let Walker's prose do the heavy lifting.
But here's the thing - and one listener nailed this - there are moments where Plum becomes genuinely difficult to spend time with. Not because Sands fails, but because she succeeds too well. Plum's internalized self-hatred, her complicated relationship with food and visibility, her defensive mechanisms - Sands doesn't soften any of it. My students would call this "cringe." I call it honest characterization. The discomfort is the point. That same unflinching honesty about uncomfortable truths shows up in Tao Te Ching, though it's interrogating entirely different questions about acceptance and resistance.
What Hemingway Never Said About Fat Women
Walker is doing something I rarely see in contemporary fiction: she's writing a fat protagonist whose entire arc isn't about becoming thin. The weight-loss surgery Plum is saving for isn't the happy ending - it's the question the book interrogates. When she falls into the orbit of Verena Baptist at Callie House, surrounded by women who challenge everything Plum has accepted about her body and her worth, the novel becomes something genuinely subversive.
This reminds me of what we lose when we only assign the canon. Fitzgerald wrote about the American Dream as a lie, sure. But Walker is writing about a different kind of lie - the one that tells women their bodies are problems to be solved, that visibility is earned through thinness, that the beauty industry is selling empowerment when it's actually selling shame. My juniors reading The Scarlet Letter could learn something about bodily autonomy and public judgment from Plum Kettle.
The satire gets sharp. Really sharp. There are content warnings here for violence, language, and sexual content - this isn't a gentle meditation on body positivity. Walker has fists flying, as the description promises. The feminist underground elements veer into territory that will make some listeners uncomfortable for entirely different reasons than Plum's self-perception. Good. Literature should occasionally make you argue with it.
Better Than the TV Show (As Usual)
Listeners who've seen the AMC adaptation with Julianna Margulies consistently prefer the audiobook. That tracks. Television has to externalize everything; audiobooks let you live inside Plum's head, which is where Walker's real work happens. Sands gives you access to Plum's running commentary on her own existence - the constant calculations about space, visibility, judgment - in a way a camera simply can't capture.
At ten and a half hours, this isn't a quick listen. It demands focus. I wouldn't recommend this for background listening while you're pretending to pay attention to budget presentations (not that I would ever do such a thing). The satire requires engagement, and the emotional beats hit harder when you're actually present for them.
Worth Pausing the Faculty Meeting For
Who should listen? Anyone who's ever felt like their body was public property for comment. Anyone who's tired of "empowerment" that looks suspiciously like more self-improvement homework. Anyone who teaches young women and watches them internalize impossible standards while reading about Daisy Buchanan's carelessness. (That's me. That's definitely me.)
Who should skip? If you want your feminism gentle and affirming, this will frustrate you. If you need your protagonists immediately likeable, Plum's early chapters will test your patience. If you're looking for a weight-loss success story, you've fundamentally misunderstood the assignment.
Denise asked me what I was listening to when I laughed out loud during a particularly savage passage about diet culture. I tried to explain and ended up just handing her my phone. She's on chapter three now. The prose deserves to be savored, and Sands delivers it at exactly the right tempo. Listen at 1.0x. The author chose those words.
