WHEN MONA AWAD’S debut book of fiction, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, won the 2016 Amazon.ca First Novel Award, some readers might have had reason to be puzzled. The book, which comprises 13 discrete pieces addressing issues of body image as they relate to a single central character, has all the properties of a collection of linked short stories. Though there is an ad hoc narrative arc, and the segments are arranged in roughly chronological order, each of the putative “chapters” stands alone, and can be read as a distinct and fully realized individual story with a recognizable beginning, middle, and end. How is it, then, that a book with all the attributes of a story collection came to be awarded a prize explicitly devoted to first novels?
The book itself is little help in this regard: the all-text cover bears the title, the name of the author, and the vague descriptor “fiction.” This lack of specificity, it turns out, was intentional. According to Nicole Winstanley, publisher of Penguin Canada, which brought out 13 Ways domestically, there was “a lot of discussion” behind the scenes about how to position the book. In the end it was decided the most advantageous route was to leave the generic designation vague. “In this particular case,” says Winstanley, “we wanted to leave it up to the reader.”