‘F*ck Your Diet’ Uses Levity to Talk About the Difficult Things

Chloe Hilliard’s “F*ck Your Diet and Other Things My Thighs Tell Me” is not about a diet.

Certainly, eating and dress size play a significant role throughout Hilliard’s memoir, but, more centrally, “F*ck Your Diet” is about race, love, societal standards (read: societal misdemeanors), and growing up. Food is simply the thread that unites skin color with sex and prepubescence with passive-aggressive office culture.

Hilliard is a comedian, writer, and media personality. In the past, she has written for publications including “The Village Voice,” “The Best American Essays: 2009,” and “The Source,” and she has performed standup comedy on NBC’s “Last Comic Standing,” Comedy Central’s “The Nightly Show,” and MTV’s “Acting Out,” among others.

“F*ck Your Diet” is Hilliard’s debut book, and as such, it is a tour-de-force. It progresses chronologically, beginning with Hilliard’s childhood in a Hasidic neighborhood of Brooklyn and ending with an acceptance of what she is not and will never be: “I’m no food guru, life coach, or empowerment princess.” It covers her childhood as the bullied overweight kid on the playground, her basketball-dominated adolescence, her stint in corporate journalism, and her transition at once into her self-created career and her own skin.

What makes “F*ck Your Diet” so pleasant to read is Hilliard’s omnipresent, tongue-in-cheek humor. That Hilliard moonlights as a comedian (or perhaps moonlights as a writer) is self-evident. Seldom does Hilliard address topics in her novel that are not serious — institutionalized racism, sexism, and the prevalence of body-shaming culture in the United States are not necessarily fodder for jokes, unless done with adroit skill. But Hilliard picks this exact skill neatly out of her sleeve time and time again. During high school, when Hilliard developed anorexia, she describes the time she fainted on the subway: “The only time I knew black women to faint was at funerals and when the Holy Ghost hit them. Otherwise, fainting was reserved for petite white women in movies when they got bad news.” Shortly after losing her virginity to an emotionally stunted boy who, in the midst of the encounter, promptly told her, “Look, it’s gonna hurt,” she describes a discussion they had about green card marriage. “Bruh, slow you roll,” Hilliard writes. “Being a child bride was not in my cards.”

Hilliard’s sense of humor is, in fact, what makes so many somber subjects palatable in a single, 300-page book. Memoirs, even when done successfully — and a successful memoir is a rare find indeed — are often the result of sorrow and pain. The seminal classics, important and moving as they are — Jeannette Walls’s “The Glass Castle,” Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” and Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” among others — frequently deal with tears, not laughter, and if they do involve the latter, they do so sparingly.

However, Hilliard accesses the gravity of everyday life with levity. When writing about her stint at the short-lived “Lifetime” magazine, where she experienced incessant microaggressions and systemic racism, she cracks a joke about the problem of speaking with a deep voice on the phone. “Sound happy and less black, got it,” Hilliard says. “Damsels in distress never have bass in their voice. If Britney Spears spoke with more bass, we’d all expect her to have her life together. But, alas, she talks like she’s still in the Mickey Mouse Club.”

Most powerful, though, is how Hilliard speaks about self-acceptance and the love of her own body. The shaming of women is a popular topic of conversation in the 21st century, particularly in the post-#MeToo era, but it’s also a deeply necessary one. Hilliard fully rants about how a woman’s “value is determined by a set of draconian standards better suited to accommodate the male ego than the woman’s emotion and physical needs… The berating continues until it’s drilled into the subconscious.”

The party line at the heart of “F*ck Your Diet” is, admittedly, a little trite and more than a little overdone. “Love yourself” is plastered over half of every HomeGoods and three-quarters of most Pinterest discover pages. “F*ck Your Diet” is not particularly inventive, or riveting, or groundbreaking.

But it is funny, and even if its message has been said time and time again, it is still critical to the growth of women in a society that rarely accepts them as such, choosing instead to label them as girls because girls are far easier to understand. One of the final lines of “F*ck Your Diet,” in a section in which Hilliard outlines what she hopes her readers learned, is also one of its best: “I’ve given you reason to reexamine the things you thought made you undesirable or unworthy.”

—Staff writer Emerson J. Monks can be reached at emerson.monks@thecrimson.com.