I've read Seeing Me Naked, Nowhere But Home and Conversations with the Fat Girl. While the main character of this book is in Conversations you don't necessarily have to have read that book.

When we left Olivia in Conversations she had gotten everything she wanted. And to the observer she has. She's not big (even though she's hungry) and she's married (although he's always gone).

I enjoy a book where someone needs to reevaluate themselves and the choices they've made. I just wish there could have been more of Maggie in the story.

DNF REVIEW • I have been a big fan of Palmer's in the past – NOWHERE BUT HOME was one of my favorite reads of 2013 and immediately led me to Palmer's backlist. I read CONVERSATIONS WITH A FAT GIRL the following year, but it wasn't one that cemented itself in my memory. It was fine, but I didn't think about it after finishing. When I learned that THE F WORD was releasing, I had to try it, even though it focused on a character from CONVERSATIONS. Would Palmer be able to redeem her? Unfortunately, I wasn't able to finish this book to find out. Very quickly, I realized that I wasn't connecting with the heroine or where the story seemed to be headed. While I don't have to root for a character to enjoy a book, I do need to be invested enough in their story to see it through to the end. Sadly, that didn't happen here. The problem wasn't really Palmer's writing – it's my complete disinterest in this character's story.

Sorry for the inconvenience but I have lost interest in the concept. But surely will look out for your other titles in the future. Thank you!

This book was totally not what I was expecting. The F Word here is not what people generally would think after reading the title. It is fat. And this might be a trigger for overweight women or anyone who has once been overweight. There should have been trigger warning.

Also, I later realised that there was a book prior to this one and I had no idea about that. If I would have read it, I think I would have better understanding of the background of the characters. This is a basic chick lit novel showcasing the issues like self-image, fat shaming, bullying, infidelity, and women’s struggle.

I wasn't impressed with the writing in this book, but overall, it was a decent story. It's not one I would go out of my way to recommend, but it wasn't bad.

I'm not sure how to categorize this book. I have read and loved every book Liza Palmer has written. I assumed that would be the case with THE F WORD as well. And I did read it. I never wanted to put it down, per se. But I also never felt that zing, that joy, that life that has always made her novels shine. Olivia's continuing story had so much potential. But the cheating husband, turning to old crush/tormentor storyline felt problematic. And also quite anticlimactic. If we were meant to buy into her actual happiness with Ben (especially with her marital history), then I feel the story needed much more development of that relationship to make it real and meaningful and lasting. Instead, it felt a bit sketched in when it needed far more page time. As it is, the whole thing felt regrettably forgettable.

Thank you to Net Galley and Flatiron Books for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I really could not get into this book at all. The characters were self absorbed, shallow and not easy to relate to. The story arc, while seemingly interesting at first, dragged and left me wanting more.
I have liked reading her other books, but this one was disappointing to me.

After not being able to finish Conversations with a Fat Girl (such navel grazing!) I wasn't sure whether this story, which features a character introduced in Conversations with a Fat Girl, would be for me. But I'm so happy to say that I really enjoyed it. I'm sure the book will be controversial because stories about overweight characters for some reason always are, but I think this is a great story about how getting what you always wanted isn't the key to happiness it may sometimes seen and that expectations often need to be adjusted. Olivia often drove me crazy, but she was still a great character that made me think. Lots of great secondary characters and other stories, too.

It wasn't what I expected. I thought that the book would be more light hearted and in the vein of Bridget Jones. The book, however, delved more deeply into body shaming than I anticipated. It was good, it just didn't blow me away. The cover and synopsis also lead me to believe that it was more of a humor book than a melodrama.

Reading this reminded me that most stories that focus on fat-to-thin characters will almost always be caricatures rather than characters.

Olivia Morten seems to have a perfect life, but it is actually a carefully crafted facade. Olivia can spin anything, in her career as a publicist or in her personal life. When her crush from high school comes back into her life, her constructed life starts to fall apart. Olivia realizes that her friends are vapid, her husband is not invested in their marriage, and her beautiful, successful life is not making her happy. She finds herself reflecting on the girl she was in high school--she was fat and unpopular, but she knew who she was. Can she find that girl again?

I am a new Liza Palmer reader. I happened to read her book Girl Before a Mirror last year and really enjoyed it. But The F Word didn't work for me quite as well. Olivia is apparently a character in another of Palmer's books, which I haven't read. She might make more sense as a character if you have the whole picture. But within this book, Olivia is a tough character to follow. She has built up such a wall that it's difficult to get to know her. Maybe Olivia herself doesn't even know, and that's really apparent in her relationships with her husband Adam and Ben, the boy from high school. She has ignored Adam's infidelity for years and when things finally explode, she decides that she's done with that relationship. Instead, she focuses on Ben, who was cruel to her in high school. I wish we had more insight into Olivia and Ben in high school and their relationship then. It would have made their interactions in the present more significant. While this story wasn't my favorite, I can certainly see myself giving another Liza Palmer novel a try.

The F Word
By Liza Palmer
Flatiron Books April 2017
288 pages
Read via Netgalley

I couldn’t finish this book after reading about 25% of it. I found the main character superficial and almost painful to relate to. She is in a bad marriage and doesn’t believe she deserves anything better but the way she acts I almost believed her. Then when her high school crush walks into her life I found her to get worse and I didn’t believe that his character felt something out of the blue so many years later. All in all I just couldn’t get into the story mainly because the character I was supposed to root for I just didn’t like.

The F-word offers an in-depth view on Olivia Morten’s curated life, which she had spent more than ten years to build in order to ultimately become someone else. Someone whose life would be envied and desired from an outsider glance, but in fact, it’s very far from it, because it’s all a make-believe. The novel develops as her life quickly starts to crumble. 

Olivia is a visibly successful PR professional, working day and night to help Hollywood stars keep their image intact and damage control the . Married to a doctor, with very little free time, she spends years convincing herself that she doesn’t need more. Until the moment she meets someone from the past who is going to be the catalyst of spinning her picture-perfect life out of control. 

Faced with a painful sequence of choices, Olivia have to finally become in terms with accepting the person she was before and the person who she is now. The novel poses a good number of questions that we are sometimes too afraid to voice. Her rich internal dialogue dissects the labels we use to define one another and does not shy from calling herself out when she realizes that after all, she might not be better than them. Olivia knows her imperfections way too well, but her perfectionism is exactly what motivates her to make sure no one else sees her the way she does. 

The F-word is not a love story or a bittersweet romantic read where a girl meets a boy and falls in love again after years of time apart. It’s a novel about identity. Can we lose ourselves in our ambition to re-invent a better version of us? How far can we go to maintain the image we believe makes us happier? What are the boundaries between others’ perceptions of us and our own? Is it ever too late to start again?

I have kindly received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley and Flatiron Books in exchange of a fair review.

TL;DR: FORMERLY OVERWEIGHT WOMAN IS PLAGUED BY HIGH SCHOOL BROKEN HEART

***

THE STORY:
Finishing this book was a struggle.

I'm not totally sure if it's because the 'women's fiction but not romance' genre, otherwise known as chick lit, is just not for me anymore, or if the book is actually not that good. I didn't connect with any of it, and not because the gist of the story wasn't interesting. It's because the actual story fell very flat for me, mostly because I kept getting pulled out of it by visceral disgust or general disagreement with some of the things that were plied off as truth.

The F Word is apparently a follow-up to Conversations with a Fat Girl, which I didn't read. That story is about Olivia's friend, and while Olivia is a character in that book, the friend at the center of the first book is barely even mentioned in this one, which is what it is. This book takes place ten years after the first one. Olivia has been living in her Hollywood life with her doctor husband and working in a PR firm for celebrities. We are supposed to be making parallels between Caroline Lang, Olivia's actress client going through a divorce, and Olivia herself. They both maintain an icy I'm-better-than-you demeanor, although it's hard to tell from Caroline whether she means it or if it's just a coping mechanism left over from her lonely childhood. Olivia, on the other hand, is just mean. She's mean to her socialite couple friends, and makes very little effort to have friends of her own. She seems closer to her mom and her mom's friends, although she doesn't bare herself to anyone. Literally. She's been married ten years and her husband has never seen her naked.

And the husband. Well, it turns out that he's been having a variety of affairs for years, and they haven't even had sex in two years. And she's fine with it, because on the outside, their marriage looks perfect. It's only when she runs into her high school crush, Ben Dunn, that she apparently starts to unravel. She calls it her "Fat Me" coming out, which I think is the most absurd way to try and get across the idea that she felt more at home in herself when she was fat. The way that it comes across is nearly that she is battling two personalities within her, and therefore she doesn't take much personal responsibility for either the life that she's made for herself or the person that she used to be.

She does blame herself for her marriage falling apart, but I didn't feel like she tried very hard to set things to right, even with shouldering some of the blame. Adam seems sort of willing to work things out, although Olivia never comes out and tells him what she wants (namely, ending his affairs. Tell him! If he refuses, then divorce). And then, Olivia lets herself be swept up in a romance with Ben, which seems entirely ridiculous. Evidently, he wanted nothing to do with her when she was fat, and now that she's not, she's miraculously desirable?

TECHNICAL ELEMENTS:
I didn't like the way this book was written. It is first person, and in present tense, but the writing tends to take on this stream-of-consciousness vibe. I had a hard time keeping up with who was speaking when, as many of the quotations skip around all over the place. But some of the random bits of this book seemed to come out of nowhere and didn't fit the flow of the book. However, the part that nearly made me quit was in the very first chapter:

<blockquote>I look at my hands. Light pink nail polish. I isolate my index finger, grab the perfect fingernail, and pull. Pain. Blood. Immediately. I pull a tissue from my purse and wrap my finger in it.</blockquote>

Just, what the hell? This isn't a precursor to a book about someone that self-harms either. Just that section was enough for my to DNF right on the spot, but I kept going. Honestly, I skimmed large sections of it just to finish this review.

FINAL THOUGHTS:
This book could have been pretty decent. I liked the idea that someone could have a 'perfect' marriage and realize how awful it was and how it was their own fault that they'd ended up in this unfulfilling life. But that's not what this book was. This book was that two awful people were mean to each other in high school, after failed marriages and weight changes they reunite, and decide to give it a go? Because she loved him in high school and her entire life is predicated on that. From the sounds of it, they barely knew each other in high school. I kept waiting for the shoe to drop about what exactly happened between the two of them in high school that was so awful, but it never came.

I could have sworn I had read a book by Liza Palmer before, but I've searched my blog and my Goodreads and must be having a moment, because I guess I haven't.

I started The F Word, thinking it meant one thing, but it actually meant something else. Fat. Olivia used to be fat. It was interesting to find out what her one moment was - it's always one moment that makes you change your life. But Olivia has changed everything in the outside of her life, and not much on the inside.

I do have to say that it took me the first half of the book to get into the story. I didn't really like Olivia, or Ben or really any of the characters except for Olivia's mother and her friends.

Around the middle, I got into the story and wanted to finish to see what happened. And there was some personal realization and growth on Olivia's part, but it kind of stuck with me that fat or thin, she just wasn't a very nice person. In the book's description, it says "maybe she used to be the fat girl, but she used to be happy, too." I would argue that point, because it never sounds like she was happy, and in high school she seemed to actually be pretty vicious. I'm not super sure that her high school crush was all that great either, and although it was a book that made me thoughtful, it wasn't a book where I walked away caring about the characters in any way.

Olivia Morten has a perfect life. She has an extremely successful career in PR, is smoking hot, and is married to a handsome doctor. She never thought that she would have any of those three things so she does not take them for granted. In high school she was overweight - she was the one that all the other kids teased. Until one day a cruel act sent her down a different path and she lost all of the weight and turned her life around. She met her husband, Adam, and the rest is history. Or at least it was - until she runs into her high school crush, and her biggest tormentor from high school, at a local coffee shop. Ben Dunn is now a divorced dad of three kids and the principal of a local elementary school. Seeing him brought up all sorts of emotions for Olivia as he forced her to realize that even though she lost the weight, she lived her life as though she were still that overweight woman seeking approval from one and all. Olivia has to make some tough decisions about her life. Will she be able to make the right decisions no matter how hard they may be?

Year after year I have read books (both fiction and non-fiction) about women who have lost weight or are trying to lose weight as a source of inspiration for my own weight loss. This time I am one of those women who is losing weight (almost 40lbs so far). I really, really liked Olivia and The F Word. Olivia is a people pleaser - she works hard for her celebrities, she works to make sure that her husband has everything he needs and even takes him dinner at the hospital when he has to work late. She works hard to be a good daughter. And she works hard so that nobody ever sees that there is still an insecure "fat girl" buried deep inside of her. Seeing Ben again brought up all of those feelings of inadequacies. Neither Olivia nor Ben was particularly proud of who they were in high school and are kind of looking for redemption. I really loved Olivia's character - I could even relate to her people-pleasing tendencies. I thought her mom was a hoot and gave Olivia the exact right advice at the exact right time. When it is time for the rubber to meet the road I wasn't sure if Olivia was going to make the right decision. But the whole thing was about more than just making the right decision - it was about Olivia finally believing that she doesn't deserve to be treated like crap. It made for a pretty powerful conclusion.

Bottom line - The F Word was a quick and engaging read about a woman who worked so hard to change her exterior that she forgot that she needed to take care of her insides as well. The F Word may not be a heavy-hitting kind of book, but it sure does have an important message. I encourage you to pick it up next time at the bookstore. You won't regret it!

Details:
The F Word by Liza Palmer
On Instagram
Pages: 288
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Publication Date: 4/25/2017
Buy it Here!

A fiercely real, funny and feminist story for any woman who realizes that food is glorious and happiness has nothing to do whatsoever to size or appearance. For those of us who have struggled to find or regain our sense of self and self love in this messed up world of diets, fanatic exercise, plastic surgery and a filtered world. I really enjoyed this story and highlighted about 15 different passages that resonated with me. If you're a diehard Whole 30/Shakeology and BBG/TIU/Beach Body, etc cult follower........maybe this will help you......or maybe you aren't ready for it yet. I found it fantastically freeing.

The "F" word in question here is not the one you might expect, nor is there only one. In fact, the title of this book very well could be The F Words.

Olivia Morten is a successful Hollywood publicist and is married to a gorgeous, successful E.R. doctor. They live in a beautiful home, drive beautiful cars, and have beautiful friends. She's living the dream, isn't she?

Over the course of a few months, though, Olivia realizes that her life is far from a show piece. For one thing, there is a fact from her high school years that she would rather keep hidden. When she bumps into Ben Dunn (that name ... it made me laugh), a former high school enemy and a guy she secretly loved, the feelings attached to that fact rocket to the surface. For another, that perfect husband might be a façade. He's never around, unless is suits him to be, and he's hardly a support system for his wife. Then there is Olivia's job, in which she perpetuates fraud. She is a professional fixer-of-reputations, even if that fixing requires faking her clients' truths.

Facts. Feelings. Façade. Fraud. Fake. Those are the F words controlling Olivia's life.

Olivia, then, needs to add a sixth F word: faithful. She needs to learn to be faithful to herself, to who she truly is. Those friends of hers? The relationships seem built on proximity rather than anything real. When they need to support each other, that support never materializes. And her husband? He presents a shiny, attractive patina, but what does he offer beneath that? Of all of the frauds Olivia perpetuates, her job - the one that requires her to trade on deception - may be the most real thing in her life.

Liza Palmer does not limit her focus to Olivia. She also turns a winking, satirical eye on Hollywood and its phoniness. The running joke on eating bread is humorous and, you sense, spot on. At the same time, Palmer makes it clear that you, the fan, are as much a part of this mirage as the actors and their teams. We want to believe the pretense, even when we know it's a lie.

Olivia is not always likable. In fact, I spent most of the book not liking her at all. There were moments, though, when I felt for her deeply. Ben Dunn (again ... that name) is a catalyst for the changes Olivia needs to admit she has to make, but he's too undeveloped to be more than that. This story sits squarely on Olivia's shoulders, whether she likes it or not, and sometimes she is not up to the task. Yet when she rises to a confrontation that Palmer builds to, you are right there with her, cheering for her and bolstering her.

Our lives consist of many F words, the most important, perhaps, being 'faithful.'

*** Scheduled for publication on the blog on April 29

"What I didn't tell Brenda is that I know. I've known it all along. And not just about this last woman Adam is cheating on me with. I've known about all of them. I just didn't want anyone else to know."

Olivia in a way was like most women that are in a marriage with a partner that plays the part but really isn't in the game anymore. She begins to do a ton of self-reflection after running into someone from high school and we see her go on a journey to figure out if her new and improved image is truly who she is and who she wants to be.

When this book was good, it was GOOD and it made a true personal connection. But, there were too many slow parts that kept me from rating it higher. Overall, it was an enjoyable book and Palmer is a new-to-me author that I'll definitely check out again!

I plunged into reading Liza Palmer's "The F Word" and enjoyed every page. I got a kick out of reading about the Los Angeles publicity scene. As the protagonist Olivia Morten's deep, painful secret is revealed, I found myself endeared to her struggle. Palmer's vivid writing never lags, and this engrossing read will be sure to keep you on your toes until the end. I wholeheartedly recommend this book!

Liza Palmer is one of my favorite women’s fiction authors. Lately, unfortunately, a lot of the quirkiness that made books like Nowhere But Home and A Field Guide to Burying Your Parents so rewarding has been exorcised from her writing. From the minute former fat girl turned skinny, successful publicist Olivia Morten runs into her old nemesis/crush Ben Dunn in the first chapter of The F Word, you know that the careful facade she has constructed for the past twenty years will crack like an eggshell. She’ll have to confront some painful truths about the shallow superficial persona she has carefully constructed before she has a chance to be truly happy, including embracing some of the Fat Girl qualities she has denied for years.

Getting there is still an interesting journey, thanks to Palmer’s skills at characterization and dialogue. With the story set in southern California she has plenty of opportunities to skewer our obsession with celebrity gossip, especially how easily our judgement of other women turns from positive to negative (and back again). I really appreciated Olivia’s close relationship with her mother and her mother’s two best friends, who are portrayed as real women, not caricatures of wacky senior citizens. I wish the book had been a little bit longer – I wanted to know more about Olivia’s past, including how and when she lost the weight, as well as how she became a successful publicist.

In the author’s acknowledgments, Palmer says that this book came about because her publisher had passed on her latest book proposal, causing her to throw a Hail Mary and pitch the plot for The F Word. I’m curious about the rejected book, and wonder if it had a more unusual plot (like a woman finding her calling cooking for men on death row in Nowhere But Home) that was deemed too far from the mainstream. Maybe she can self publish it someday – I bet it would have been even more interesting than this one.

I received a copy of this book from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.