- Paperback: 326 pages
- Publisher: Vintage; New edition edition (18 Jun 1992)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0099908301
- ISBN-13: 978-0099908302
- Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 12.8 x 2.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 354,023 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
A story about two women, contrastingly different but powerfully drawn to one another. As their relationship develops, they reveal what lies beneath the surface of their suburban childhoods - violence, pain, intimacy, isolation, denial, fulfilment and the betrayal of love and innocence.
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First Sentence
I entered the strange world of Justine Shade via a message on the bulletin board in a laundromat filled with bitterness and the hot breath of dryers. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
I entered the strange world of Justine Shade via a message on the bulletin board in a laundromat filled with bitterness and the hot breath of dryers. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Mary Gaitskill's Two Girls, Fat and Thin is a brilliantly satiric but nonetheless disturbingly realistic story of how cults appeal to the alienated and confused precisely by providing them with a sense of belonging and simple answers to complex questions. And, given the mixed messages they receive daily about gender, sexuality, identity, empowerment and the body (see any issue of YM, for example, or, for that matter, Cosmopolitan), it's hard to imagine anyone with greater potential for alienation and confusion that the adolescent American female. In Gaitskill's hilariously parodic roman a clef, the two girls of the title, "fat" Dorothy and "thin" Justine, are taken in by the "Definitivist" philosophy of one Anna Granite, in a transparently veiled, hysterically accurate spoof of Ayn Rand's "Objectivism." Anyone who's suffered through Rand's didactic, overwrought novels will be delighted by such details, such parodies within the parody, as Granite's fictional fictions, The Bulwark and The Gods Disdained. And given the essential similarities between Granite and Rand, Definitivism and Objectivism, Gaitskill's novel makes it difficult to see how anybody takes the latter seriously, although the Rand cult continues apace nonetheless (see Jeff Walker's excellent study, The Ayn Rand Cult [LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1999]). It's funny, and disturbing, beacuse it's true ...
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
As disturbing as this book was, it held my avid interest throughout. It is one of my favorites.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Gaitskill is funny and heartbreaking, and her descriptions of the cruelty and sexual confusion of Junior High School struck (uncomfortably) true, but the ending felt forced and totally out of line with the overall tone of the rest of the story. I loved her treatment of Rand and loved the switches from first person to third
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Shows the weakness of Rand's view of sex...
I'm not part of the "Leonard Peikoff Objectivist Jihad", but I agree with Ayn Rand on 95% of her points. Read more
Published on 16 Jun 1999
Run, don't walk away from this book
This book was dreadful. I figured a book that got so many flattering blurbs from reputable reviewers couldn't be all that bad, but I was mistaken. Awful. Just awful. Read more
Published on 7 May 1999
So bad, I threw the book away.
I really disliked this book. I think the only reason I finished it is because I hoped it would get better at some point. Read more
Published on 6 Mar 1999
excellent not for those with digestion sensitivities
A meticulous graceful and merciless exploration of the inner worlds of young women coping with an abusive past is connected to the wider reality in the context of Ayn Rand's... Read more
Published on 4 April 1998
TWO GIRLS, FAT AND THIN: a caricature of Rand's Objectivism
A reader may reasonably hope, in the opening chapter of TWO GIRLS, FAT AND THIN, that novelist Mary Gaitskill, with skillful writing talents, will develop her characters into... Read more
Published on 26 Feb 1998
TWO GIRLS, FAT AND THIN: a caricature of Rand's Objectivism
A reader may reasonably hope, in the opening chapter of TWO GIRLS, FAT AND THIN, that novelist Mary Gaitskill, with skillful writing talents, will develop her characters into... Read more
Published on 26 Feb 1998
Like Mary G.'s short stories, you'll like her first novel
I must admit that I have been waiting to read this book for some time now, as I have read Mary. G.'s two books of short stories and found them quite enjoyable -- and at times... Read more
Published on 18 Feb 1998
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