Tolstoy and the fats Seeing all of the diversity in the misshapen, lumpy bodies of the hamplanets that ooze over these pages from day to day, and reading about them complain how nothing ever fits them got me thinking not only about the unpredictability of the body of the insulin injector, but also the predictability of the body of a normal person. And that in turn led me to the first lines of Anna Karenina, and what Tolstoy might have said were he alive today: Thin people are all alike. Each fat person is fat in his own way.