Judith Moore is fat.

That would seem an unkind assessment, but that’s the way the author of “Fat Girl: A True Story” starts her new book about being obese.

“I am not so fat that I can’t fasten the seat belt on the plane,” she writes. “But, fat I am. I wanted to write about what it was and is like for me, being fat.”

In the memoir, Moore – also author of 1998’s “Never Eat Your Heart Out” – writes about what it was like to grow up as an obese child, unloved and unwanted by her divorced parents.

As painful as “Fat Girl” is to read, it’s also difficult to put down.

Moore’s memories are sharp and her description powerful. The reader can almost taste the cheeseburgers and onion rings she lusts after and can just as easily picture the terrified youngster as she’s weighed on a nurse’s scale in front of her elementary school classmates.

The honesty with which she writes about her lonely childhood search for love and acceptance is often heartbreaking.

Moore, a former resident of Olympia and Ellensburg, describes how her thighs were always chafed from rubbing together when she was a child and how elastic bands in clothing would cut into her flabby arms and legs and make them bleed.

Much of the book revolves around Moore’s depressing relationship with her thin mother, who berates and abuses her, and her longing to have a relationship with her father, who abandons her after the divorce.

“You make me sick, just to look at you,” her mother tells her.

The young Moore wonders if she were thin, would her mother love her and not chase her with a belt?

Hardly anyone refers to her by her name, Judith. She’s called “pig face” and “fatso” countless times, and her mother calls her “Sister Sue” when she’s constantly scolding her.

Moore asks the reader not to pity her. She accepts who she is. But it’s difficult to read her sad story without wincing.

She longs to be invited to “thin girl” birthday parties but knows that no one wants to befriend her when she weighs more than other girls’ mothers.

And in a bizarre confession, Moore tells about the times she would sneak into her pastor’s home and eat his food, wishing that she could be part of his family.

“I was hungry for love. I know that. But so are many sad hungry children and they don’t rummage people’s living quarters and eat their food,” she writes.

Thankfully, Moore, a Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts award-winning writer, keeps the psychological self-assessment to a minimum and allows the reader to draw his or her own conclusions.

The book ends rather abruptly, skipping from her childhood to her teenage years, a mention of college and her unhappy marriages, all in the last 15 or so pages.

Despite this, Moore’s pathetic and sometimes shocking story will appeal to anyone who has struggled with self-image and his or her relationship with food.