Bad Feminist: Essays (15 page)

There are dead husbands and dead babies and divorced parents and absent fathers and terrible abuse and all the painful things that happen to a person and the body over the course of a lifetime, the kinds of things that can be appeased, or at least numbed in part, by a quart of cold ice cream or the hot, melted cheese of a pizza. Sometimes the contestants say, “I don’t know how I got this way,” but they do. There’s always a reason. Jillian Michaels, one of the
Biggest Loser
trainers, loves to force her contestants into dramatic catharses. It makes for good television. In
Skinny
, you get the sense that Gray is reaching for catharsis too. She’s pushing herself in every way she possibly can to reach some kind of emotional breakthrough. I’m not sure she ever quite finds it.

Sometimes, a bold, sort of callous person will ask me how I got
so
fat. They want to know the
why
. “You’re so smart,” they say, as if stupidity is the only explanation for obesity. And of course, there’s that bit about having such a pretty face, what a shame it is to waste it. I never know what to tell these people. There is the truth, certainly. This thing happened and then this other thing happened and it was terrible and I knew I didn’t want either of those things to happen again and eating felt safe. French fries are delicious and I’m naturally lazy too so that didn’t help. I never know what I’m supposed to say, so I mostly say nothing. I don’t share my catharsis with these inquisitors.

Throughout
Skinny
, Gray writes letters to fat people. These letters, which the campers also have to write, are an opportunity for soul-searching and truth-telling and all that. Anyone who has spent time in therapy is familiar with the tool of letter writing as a step toward healing. Fat is about the mind more than it is about the body, isn’t it? Lewis, the camp director, wants the campers to write these letters to fat people to explain why they hate fat people. “You all hate fat people,” Lewis declares. These letters are the first step, he says, to help the campers accept their bodies and begin to change their bodies. The letters are full of the cruelties (or truths?) everyone thinks about fat people.

For example, Gray writes, “Excuses are worthless. Either change your life, stop slinging blame, stop stuffing food into the cracks in your heart, or give yourself over to the shortened, uncomfortable, sweaty life of the obese.” These letters are clearly supposed to add something to the narrative. They are deliberate, didactic moments. They get the job done in that you can’t help but have a reaction, but the novel would have worked just as well, or even better, without these interludes, so you have to wonder why they were included. The letters are somewhat forced, like those shallowly psychological moments in extreme weight-loss television programming, as if the letters are intended as opportunities for the reader to reach a cathartic place too, for the reader to nod and say, “Yes, I think these things about fat people too,” so they might ultimately reach a place of empathy and understanding.

At times, these letters feel hollow and indulgent because they seem to be written by a skinny person imagining only one possible existence for a fat person, imagining that the fat life is somehow markedly different from the skinny life. It is but it isn’t, save that the wardrobe of the skinny is generally better and the people around you are generally kinder.

There’s a letter where Gray writes, “Dear Fat People, I see you in motorized wheelchairs, in bus seats that don’t accommodate you. I see you taking breaks when you walk, pretending to admire the scenery.” I recognize what’s going on in that letter. I’m fat but I have eyes and I judge people too. The other day I was in a clothing store, and there were three very fat people on motorized carts congregating near the cash register, laughing merrily, and I thought,
How can they be so happy when they are immobile?
Then I felt guilty. I considered all the terrible things people must think when they judge me. We’re all complicit in these matters, and these letters function, in part, to remind us of that complicity.

It’s not that I expected these letters, or even this novel, to address the full spectrum of the fat experience. Is that even a thing? It’s more that the letters speak to the lowest common denominator, nothing more. It’s disappointing that Gray cannot possibly imagine that perhaps some fat people have amazing, athletic sex, just like she does. Perhaps they aren’t sitting around miserably stuffing their faces next to someone who doesn’t love them. Earlier, I noted that there were two weaknesses in this book—the implausibility of all this drama over a mere thirty pounds of excess weight and, of course, these Dear Fat People letters. Really, though, these issues are symptoms of the same weakness. It’s as if the author’s understanding of fat people is such that the fattest she could imagine Gray as still desirable and interesting to Mikey, to Bennett, to the reader, is with only thirty pounds of excess weight. This book would have been stunningly improved if Gray were a hundred pounds overweight, maybe more, but I got the sense that the writer was afraid to go
there
. The Dear Fat People letters are purportedly from Gray, but as the book goes on, you get the impression they are actually from the author herself confessing her sins, reaching for catharsis from within her own personal prejudices about fat.

By the end of
Skinny
, everything has fallen apart. The camp is shut down. The campers return to their lives, skinnier, certainly, but only by happenstance. They haven’t confronted their issues or learned about healthy eating and healthy ways of dealing with difficult circumstances. They haven’t acquired the tools to prevent their bodies from further expanding. Bennett returns to his home, and Gray returns to New York, though not to her relationship with Mikey. She regains most of the weight she lost. The ending is a bit rushed, so it’s hard to know if Gray has learned much of anything. At the end, Gray is sitting in an empty room with Bennett. There is a new distance between them even though he does not know it yet. “And for just a second, I forgot where I was. I forgot the things I always wished to forget. And I felt a remarkable lightness.” We are led to believe something profound has happened in this moment, but the moment is not convincing.

In the last Dear Fat People letter, Gray writes, “You wonder why we hate you? You are the visible manifestation of the parts of ourselves we hide.” There is truth in that too. Fat people wear their shit on the outside, with sagging breasts and swollen ankles and heavy thighs. Unlike a heroin addict, who might be able to cover track marks with long sleeves, a fat person cannot hide the fact that something has gone awry. Fat people have secrets, and you may not know what those secrets are, but they can be plainly seen. By the end of
Skinny
, we know many of Gray’s secrets but we don’t seem to know or see the secrets that matter.

When I left fat camp, I had lost the weight I needed to lose, mostly because the food at camp was terrible and there was so much walking. Anyone can lose weight if her only culinary options are Jell-O and salad with light dressing and grilled chicken breasts and she’s never given a minute to sit and relax. In the first few weeks after fat camp, it was fun to feel like myself again, to feel light and somehow freed. When I returned to school, there were compliments and other expressions of appreciation for my much thinner body. That felt good too. But then I started eating again, worked even harder to make my body fill as much space as possible, tried to fill that ragged need inside of me. Very little had changed. I had not really found catharsis. Oh, how I hungered.

Happiness is not a popular subject in literary fiction. We struggle, as writers, to make happiness, contentment, and satisfaction interesting. Perfection often lacks texture. What do we say about that smooth surface of idyll? How do we find something for narrative to hold on to? Or, perhaps, we fail to see how happiness can have texture and complexity so we write about unhappiness. That at least seems easier for me. I am probably too comfortable
going there
, wallowing in darkness, suffering, unhappiness. Misery loves company. In fiction, we can be unhappy together.

I have been thinking about happy endings. I am always thinking about happy endings. I am always thinking about happiness.

During an interview, I was asked if I ever write happy stories or happy endings. I considered that question for days. I hear it a lot from people I’m close to as well. Almost every story I write is a happy story, a fairy tale of some kind. Yes, you’ll find death and loss and betrayal and darkness and violence in my stories, but there’s often also a happy ending. Sometimes, people are unable to recognize happiness because all they see is the darkness. I look at many of my stories and I see a woman who has found some kind of salvation after enduring seemingly unsalvageable circumstances, a hero who helps her to that place of peace, however incomplete that peace might be. The details change, but that underlying structure, that fairy tale, is often there. I’m as intrigued by happy endings as I am by the deeply flawed ways people treat one another, even if I don’t quite know what to do with that behavior.

Fairy tales have happy endings. There are often lessons to be learned, and sometimes those lessons are learned the hard way, but in the end, there is happiness, at least in the fairy tales I like best. My novel,
An Untamed State
, is in its own way about fairy tales. The story follows a woman who was living a fairy tale and then she is kidnapped and her fairy tale ends. Every story can usually be broken down to what it’s
really
about in one sentence. I thought it would be interesting to start with the happy ending and see how that might unravel. It didn’t just unravel. In the novel, Mireille Duval’s happy ending comes all the way apart and then I had to figure out how to put the pieces back together, how to get my characters back to something resembling happiness.

I really enjoyed writing
An Untamed State
. I learned so much about pushing myself to write the same project every day and how to tell a story in long form and how to really slow the story down and give it the room it needs. The first draft of
An Untamed State
did not have a happy ending, but I received feedback indicating a happy ending of some kind, however imperfect, was needed to make things seem less hopeless. I tried my best. As I started thinking about the next novel, one that’s about motherhood and surrogacy and a marriage of convenience and the incomplete choices we make when we’re too young to know we’re doing the wrong thing, I decided that no matter what, no matter how implausible it might seem, this book was going to have a very happy ending. I have no idea how I’m going to get there in a way that doesn’t defy credulity, but I am going to try. Maybe it won’t be completely realistic and maybe that’s okay. Realism is relative. My fantasy life often feels quite real.

Contemporary art often unites the real and the fantastic. Contemporary art inspires, often because it is so difficult to explain or contextualize. In 2011, I saw the brilliantly curated exhibit
Hard Truths
, at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, featuring the artwork of Thornton Dial. It’s hard to define Dial’s style: he works across many mediums—sculpture, drawings, assemblages, collage, much of it socially conscious, all of it gorgeous, passionate, visceral.

Born in 1928, Dial grew up in the rural South and endured a great deal of economic hardship. He began working full-time at the age of seven. He experienced a great deal of racism, the untenable burden of segregation. The indelible mark of racism can be seen throughout much of his work—torment, anger, sadness, pain are all palpable. Unhappiness as muse is not solely the purview of writers.

The scale of Dial’s art is often imposing. Most of his pieces are massive, taking up entire walls or floors, like he needs that much room to best express himself. My, and how he does. The scale of the art really reinforces the scale of the dark, emotional influence. That scale certainly made me feel grateful art exists as an outlet.

Trophies (Doll Factory)
is one of the first pieces in the
Hard Truths
exhibit. Women raised Thornton Dial, and their feminine influence marks a great deal of his art. In
Trophies
, the dolls are garishly painted, half dressed, many of them painted gold like trophies. It’s an interesting commentary on modern womanhood, perhaps even more interesting given that the commentary comes from a man. There is so much to look at in
Trophies
, in all of Dial’s pieces. The level of detail is remarkable. I would have been content standing in only one of the many rooms of the exhibit because there was that much to see. The way the dolls are splayed across the canvas, how their breasts are bared, legs spread amid the chaos of the rest of the assemblage, really sets the tone for the exhibit. As I moved on, I thought,
There won’t be any happy stories here.

Dial imbues his work with suffering. The companion volume to the
Hard Truths
exhibit, edited by Joanne Cubbs and Eugene W. Metcalf, details how Dial’s art functions as social commentary on race, class, gender, war, politics, all human concerns. In 1993, Dial was interviewed by Morley Safer for
60 Minutes
. He thought the interview was going to be about his art, but instead, Safer took the opportunity to do an “exposé” on how southern black vernacular artists were being exploited by white art dealers. Dial was and felt ambushed and misled and misrepresented by Safer. He carried a lot of anger about the incident for years, anger you can see in
Strange Fruit: Channel 42
. Dial’s work really gave me the opportunity to think about art as a narrative. In
Strange Fruit: Channel 42
, you see Dial as the man hanging in effigy, self as strange fruit, and the TV antenna (channel 42 was the station that aired the Safer interview where Dial lived). There are smaller details you can’t see unless you are standing in front of the piece, but they all work in concert to tell the story of Dial’s anger and frustration. He was angry for many reasons, but mostly because he thought the
60 Minutes
interview was going to be his big break, that finally his work was going to be recognized. There’s a bitter humor to the piece that holds the weight of the artist’s disappointment. Dial also created another piece in response to the interview; this one,
Looking Good for the Price
, is much darker and angrier: a slave auction scene with a macabre white auctioneer, everything abstract and quite tortured, the images spread across the canvas at awkward angles.
Looking Good for the Price
tells another story about the artist’s anger, his sense of humiliation, another story about unhappiness, one without a happy ending.