https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/12/fat-cow-fat-chance-by-jenni-murray-review-well-meaning-but-haphazard

Murray’s memoir-cum-polemic about her lifelong struggle with her size is a lightweight in a crowded field

Jenni Murray’s book about her long struggle with her weight begins as a memoir. The presenter of Woman’s Hour grew up in Barnsley, a beloved only child in a working-class family. Having been through rationing, her parents and grandparents regarded food as an expression of love, sugar as the greatest possible treat, and the cleaning of one’s plate as a moral duty. To be full was to be happy, and a sign of success. Both her grandmothers were fat.

All this contented eating, however, ran alongside ideals in the matter of female bodies that were, for her as for most women, hard to meet. Pressure came from within, and without: there was Twiggy, with her swizzle-stick figure, and there was Murray’s mother, Win, who had firm ideas about women who “let themselves go”, and who took huge pride in her tiny ankles. Win, though, seems also to have been motivated by a certain envy in the case of her daughter. When Murray went to university, where she put on a lot of weight, her mother didn’t hold back. “What the hell has happened to you?” she asked. “You look like a baby elephant.” Her daughter’s success, in later life, did nothing to mitigate this attitude. No wonder Murray gravitated towards radio, rather than television, where the double chin with which Win was so weirdly and cruelly preoccupied could not be seen.