Andrew Limbong - Hey, it’s NPR’s book of the day, I’m Andrew Limbong. Nobody tells it to you like your mom. That’s something author Rabia Chaudry says in today’s interview, and ooh boy is it true. Her new memoir is titled Fatty Fatty Boom Boom, and it examines her relationship with food, eating, and body image issues. And a lot of it deals with her relationship with her mom. Who, like a lot of moms I know, mine included–shout out to moms–can say just the right thing to needle you into a shame spiral. But in this interview with NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe, Chaudry shares a pretty revelatory bit of empathy for her mom, and shares what her eventual turning point was that led to her being encouraged to eat.

Advert

Ayesha Rascoe - One of the ways we honor and cherish our families is through food, and that couldn’t be more true for lawyer, podcaster, and author, Rabia Chaudry. Growing up in a Pakistani household, she’s familiar with the sights and smells of spicy biryani and sticky treats like jalebis. But as Chaudry chronicles in her new memoir Fatty Fatty Boom Boom, sometimes that love for culture and family can become fraught. Rabia Chaudry, who was best known for her work on the Adnan Syed case and host of the Undisclosed podcast, joins us now. Welcome.

Rabia Chaudry - Hi Ayesha, how are you?

Ayesha Rascoe - I’m fine, thank you so much for joining us. Before we just dive into your story of family, and food, and everything in between. I want to acknowledge the end of a different chapter in your life, the freedom of Adnan Syed. Syed was imprisoned in 1999 for the murder of his girlfriend at the time. Through your help, his conviction has been overturned, and now he’s free. How does it feel to be on the other side of that fight?

Rabia Chaudry - Oh, I mean sometimes I forget, sometimes my eyes will fly open at night, and i’m like, wait, what’s next. What appeal do we file next. And when you’ve been carrying that around your entire adult life, it feels quite amazing to be able to finally put it down and check it off your list.

Ayesha Rascoe - So tell me why, with your memoir, you wanted to tell the story of your life through the food that you grew up eating?

Rabia Chaudry - You know, anybody can write a memoir of their life in so many different ways, right. It can be about my career, it can be about advocacy work, it can be about so many things. And I decided that those were a lot of stories that I told all the time, but there was a theme in my life that I’ve never spoke about publicly but has just been with me since childhood, and that is issues around body image and weight, and so Fatty Fatty Boom Boom was born, which was one of my childhood nicknames. But you know, at the same time, I can’t divorce it from this issue about body image and weight, from my love for food and especially for Pakistani cuisine, and my family stories around it that bring me so much joy.

Ayesha Rascoe - So I mean, the book really walks us through how you developed your relationship with food from a very young age. You know, talk to me about the food you were eating, and how you felt about it?

Rabia Chaudry - Yeah, you know, so when I immigrated to the United States I was 6 months old, and I was the first born. My parents were discovering this country in a lot of ways, and one of the ways was through its food. And in my parents’ imagination nothing could be stocked in an American grocery store that wouldn’t actually be healthy, and wholesome, and better than the foods we had back home in Pakistan. So we just dove right into all the processed foods, and I grew up eating just so much baloney, and crackers, and processed snacks a lot of us grow up with.

Ayesha Rascoe - I mean, you talked about how even as a baby, kind of to fatten you up, it was some miscommunication, but you were drinking like half and half, and also your mother had you teething on a stick of butter, which is quite the image, right.

Rabia Chaudry - Yeah, there was a tragic miscommunication. I had gotten jaundice, and I was really scrawny, so my mom asked a friend of hers, who was a nurse, how can I chubb her back up, and she said “oh, give her some half and half”. She meant like a little bit, a couple of tablespoons, or something, in my bottle, and my mom started giving me two bottles a day, and that’s a lot of fat. And again, my mom is a mother here in the United States without her support system she would have had back home who would have told her, what are you doing. And she just thought a frozen stick of butter makes so much sense, she won’t choke on it, it’s soothing to the gums, and of course delicious.

Ayesha Rascoe - It’s very delicious, I mean butter, it does taste really good. I’m sure as a baby you were really enjoying yourself. You know, you talk about in the book, you didn’t look at yourself as overweight as a kid, like when did shame come in?

Rabia Chaudry - I just didn’t think it was a big deal, you know, what I necessarily looked like, or weighed, but I had so many other interests in my head. It wasn’t until, really, my first marriage that it became top priority because I was constantly shamed in that marriage by my ex, who was an abusive spouse, but also by his family that we lived with, about my weight. And that’s when I really internalized the shame, and the self-loathing, and hatred, and all that stuff. And my relationship with food got really, really contentious.

Ayesha Rascoe - And because at that time you realized that you were eating when no one was around.

Rabia Chaudry - Yeah, I would eat in secret, but even as I was eating, even when I was done I would constantly feel like I was starving. And there was a different kind of emptiness that I was trying to fill for sure.

Ayesha Rascoe - We know how people who are overweight, fat people in this society, are mistreated all the time. But is there a difference when it comes to being within a Pakistani household? Particularly for women?

Rabia Chaudry - The real big concern in a South Asian household then, I mean now it might not be as much but at least then, was will or will she not be able to get married. Like, if you cannot get your daughter married, she has failed life, you have failed life, what is she going to do? That fear lurked in the back of my head, and frankly I think it fed into the fact that kind of the first guy that came along that seemed interested, I leapt at because I thought I might not get another chance at this.

Ayesha Rascoe - I think about your mother, she would be concerned about your weight. Like, how did that relationship with your mother evolve when you think about weight, and food, and all of those issues?

Rabia Chaudry - You know, when I started writing this book I didn’t realize that I was almost in a way kind of journaling about this issue, and I don’t really journal. And it helped me connect so many dots, including understanding my mother’s eating patterns. My mother, her entire life, including up to this day, and she’s in her 70s, won’t eat with us as a family, she’ll eat alone. And I was lucky enough to be able to interview her and my father, understanding how she grew up, and why she would have done that. I noticed that I picked up, obviously, some of my mother’s patterns throughout my life. At the same time, nobody tells it to you like your mom, sometimes. And she read maybe the first ten pages of the book and she put it down, and ever since then she just refers to it as the book I wrote about her.