My first book was published in January 2020, a rewarding and exciting process, but the sudden exposure that comes with publishing a book means that your body is now part of your authorial life and the life of your book. During that book’s promotion and release, I routinely received messages from readers and from the industry that my book was excellent but my body was flawed; that my body was at odds with my excellence. One man I’d known in my twenties sent me a D.M. congratulating me on the publication of my book but asking what had happened to my body. You used to be so beautiful, he said. Is it the book that made you gain so much weight or something else? Another time, at a bookstore event, I arrived and introduced myself to the bookseller running my event and she seemed not to believe me. Oh, she said, when she finally realized it was, indeed, me, I just saw this big person in the corner of my eye and thought, that can’t be the author.
For as long as I can remember, the sensation that my body is fat and thus disgusting and wrong has run in the back of my mind like the whir of an air conditioning unit. I would be lying if I said I did not think about that age-old dieting lie, crystallized perfectly by Oprah when she said, “Inside every overweight woman is a woman she knows she can be.” I flirted with this idea being true so passionately that it alarmed me. Fiction requires a state of deep listening and focus, and for a long time when I would sit down to write the novel that became my second book and first novel, Housemates, which I’d been mulling over in some form since 2018, the whir of this message of physical disgust and discomfort would become too loud to bear. So in 2021, I decided to go hard the other way. If, I thought, I was ever going to finish this novel, I would need to systematically dismantle the idea that to become the writer I wanted to be, I needed to be thin. And I did.
These harmful ideas are beginning to fall, and lately I’ve started to see the beginning of a sea change. Andrea Long Chu has written about the fatphobia that pervades Ottessa Moshfesh’s novels. (Chu notes that “fat people—almost always women—are compared to ‘cows,’ ‘hogs,’ a ‘sack of apples,’ a ‘clapping seal,’ a ‘water bed.’”) Virgie Tovar has highlighted the strangeness of finding fatphobia in Eileen Myles’s fiction. Authors like Carmen Maria Machado, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Sarai Walker, Renee Watson, Susan Stinson, and more have written recent novels and story collections in which fat characters are nuanced, busy with other concerns, or otherwise complex and irreducible: books that made me sit up in the night with the electric feeling of seeing my embodied experience and humanity, finally, on the page. Sullivan lets the main character of Big Girl, Malaya, be hungry—for French fries but also for experience, knowledge, and sex. The narrator of Machado’s “Eight Bites” from Her Body and Other Parties feels ambivalent, lost, and literally haunted after having bariatric surgery. These books have ignited readers of all body sizes and spoken to previously untapped markets. In my novel Housemates, I wanted to write a book where the character is allowed to talk directly about their fat folds, and where their fatness is not the central subject of the story.
