Your Fat Friend

A simple but effective study of a vital activist voice, this documentary is a powerful force for change.

It helps that Gordon is a dream of a subject: funny, frank and eminently likable, she challenges preconceptions and prejudices about fatness with wit and grace.

It’s a realistic, sensitive but never cloying call for kindness and empathy – something that shouldn’t feel novel in this day and age, but sadly does – and encourages viewers to reconsider how they view fatness, and in turn, fat bodies.

It would have been great to have seen even more myth-busting around weight and health in this doc (presumably that’s covered in her book ‘What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat’), but Gordon is a funny and frank subject: a tour of her vintage diet book collection is a treat.

This engaging, eye-opening documentary follows Gordon over six years, as a book deal forces her to give up her anonymity and she further explores her own relationships with food, her family and society at large.

Your Fat Friend succeeds in offering a nuanced portrayal of a writer and the views that made her beloved. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that the film actively infantilizes the very demographic that it wants to elevate.