Confronting my lack of literary courage - on (not) writing fat characters
Why I feel protective of fat reader's feelings
I wasn’t the only fat woman in the pool today. For a half hour, it was just us, on either side of the pool. I thought about saying how much I loved her arm tattoos. During my last lap I heard the slap of flip flops on the wet cement and when I lifted my head she said, I like your tattoos. Right back at you, I replied. We both have bicep sleeves. We shared a look not unlike the one visibly queer people share when they encounter each other on an airplane.
I have been fat since I was 23 years old, even a fat activist in my 20s, performing in a quasi ironic dance troupe in queer cabaret settings. But I have rarely written explicitly fat narrators. I feel embarrassed to even admit that. After all, I’m queer and all of my novels have queer characters. In my last novel the main character Shelby was fat, but mostly in my mind’s eye. I implied it in several ways. I had one character describe her to another as “chubby” but her weight wasn’t on her mind. (Her wife had just died, and then she gets scammed by a woman with fake cancer, so she had a lot going on.) For most of the book she struggles to eat much at all in her grief. Very few thin authors would write a character who is fat and also struggling to eat, unless she was dieting.
I don’t want to tell anyone who they can or can’t write about, but I do wish writers could use fat accurately, as a neutral descriptor like thin, tall, short. I wish they’d acknowledge the stigma of having a fat body the way they note other obvious discriminations in a way that isn’t simply ongoing disdain and dehumanization. Most writers use fat as lazy shorthand for obvious flaws, either sloth, stupidity, or sexual voraciousness. And while yes, if you want a character to be real and in the world, they might actively hate fat people they way the majority of humans do. But is that the one thing your authorial voice simply refuses to handle with complexity and intelligence? I wish writers would challenge themselves more even while writing fat hating characters.
As a reader the most uncomfortable thing I encounter are writers who admit to their own anorexic past or present, who write characters with eating disorders, many of whom watch fat women with disgust, shame but also a perverse kind of envy, bordering on desire. The only novel I’ve read that describes this dynamic head-on was Milk Fed by Melissa Broder, who writes about an anorexic who falls in love with a “zaftig” woman. I read the novel breathlessly, waiting to be angry, but I was oddly captured. It’s a very slutty book, written by a poet, so style-wise, this is my favourite kind of novel. It felt like someone was telling this perverse truth about a dynamic that no one speaks about, from the point of view of the thin character. Every fat femme who has ever had more than two drinks at a bar has met a woman like Rachel, the narrator of Milk Fed, who slurs to you in the bathroom line about how brave and truly beautiful you are. But what they mean is free. (They wrongly assume fat women can’t have anorexia.) The way they look at and touch you is a unique kind of revolting, like you are in a freak show, but even if they are straight, it also seems like they want to make out with you. Which if you are the queer fat person in this dynamic, feels doubly awkward.
I liked the fact that Broder was unafraid to write about this complicated desire. But I longed for a book from the fat character, Miriam’s, point of view, for a sex scene where she encountered the rigid or sinewy body of her lover, or simply talked about how she felt to be desired because of, not despite, her body. Not that this is an uncommon experience – fat women can always find partners. But it can be rare to find one, on the right or left political spectrum, who doesn’t view your body as a problem even though they express clear and ongoing desire for you. Conservatives keep you a secret, corner you at the office party to flirt and then mock you in front of your friends. Leftists treat you like an oppression Olympics prize, a sign of how good they are, while ignoring other ways they might treat you like shit in private.
But finding lazy and badly written depictions of fat people is easy. Sophisticated writers I admire do this all the time, use fat in both mundane and cliched ways. Writers I know send me their manuscripts asking me to blurb work that demeans people with my body type. It happens so often I hardly stop to think about it. And I mostly avoid thinking about it, until I can’t avoid it. Like when I arrived up at an airport pick up spot for a literary festival and the volunteer driver could not square what I looked like my headshot and list of accomplishments. Or when you’re a reader in a group event and the photographer leaves you out of any media photos posted about the reading, even if you’re one of the bigger draws on the line-up. Fat women are expected not to draw attention to ourselves, and to not want any attention. And our successes are hard won and often downplayed.
I’ve hesitated to write about what it feels like as a fat reader and writer, because I don’t want to talk about representation or identity and literature. I went to university in the 90s and I’m very, very tired of that conversation. I’m afraid people will think I want adults to read YA books with two paragraph trigger warnings and didactic storylines trying to teach you a kindergarten level of basic human empathy and a little Marx 101. I’m not trying to tell anyone how to write or who to write about. But I have been thinking about why I have avoided writing about fat people for so long. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to be equated with my characters, and I don’t want to be seen as a writer of “issue” novels. (Despite the fact that even if you think you’re writing a complex work of fiction the PR machine will logline your book to death into marketable meme speak.) But mostly I think it is a simple lack of courage.
I feel very protective of fat women’s feelings. There are so few books about people who resemble us physically that aren’t also demeaning, there are so few people in the world who see us as fully human or even care if we live or die. It’s not like I want books that only talk about the positives of having a fat body – though it’s often an invisibility super power which is great for an introvert/observer – I just want complexity, for fullness of character, for writers to be fucking normal about it. One of my novels was shortlisted for the biggest prize in the country, but still I know that losing weight would be seen as a bigger accomplishment by members of my own family.
The adjectives used in reviews of my work are often words like fearless, unafraid, unflinching. But when it comes to writing fat characters, I’ve lacked bravery. But thanks to aging, and purposely trying to let go of outcomes career-wise, I’ve started reflecting on why. And lately I’ve been writing a feature length comedy that is a revenge movie on The Whale. And a new novel where the narrator is butch and also fat, or mid-size in the parlance of the internet. We’re in this together, I think, as I give her a million problems to solve.
(Note: I have been very moved by the novelist Emmy Copley Eisenberg’s depiction of fat characters in her novel Housemates and in particular the short story Fat Swim. She also writes about Milk Fed on her newsletter Frump Feelings. I would encourage you to subscribe!)