National Post (National Edition)
Roxanne Gay reveals the unspoken truth of living in a large body.
ON NAVIGATING A WORLD NOT DESIGNED FOR ONE’S SHAPE
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body By Roxane Gay Harper 320 pp; $31.99 Roxane Gay writes books you need to recover from.
Her two most recent fiction entries — Difficult Women and Untamed State — are books that devastate in the best possible way. They make it hard to find something worthy to crack open next.
Rarely, for me at least, does non-fiction have the same effect. But Gay’s latest offering, and her first memoir, Hunger, is a catalogue of the indignities inflicted upon fat bodies and it punches, well, in the gut.
Gay rips herself open and lays bare her own history to display how our world doesn’t welcome different shapes and sizes. After a brutal gang sexual assault at the age of 12 in a cabin by boys from her nearby suburban community, Gay put meat on her bones to create an armour, which then became its own burden. It is an intensely personal story that becomes a universal musing on the state of fat bodies in a society that doesn’t want them to fit. In her bare and punchy prose, in short staccato musings and longer personal narratives, Gay gives the reader both her own story and the toooften unspoken truth of living in a fat body.
“I was thinking about what I want to do next, and I was thinking the book I want to write least is a book about fatness, so I was thinking, OK, this is a book I need to write most,” she says in an interview from Los Angeles where she now lives part of the time. “What no one else is doing and what do I want to do the least — that let me know there was something interesting here that was worth exploring.
“Anything I’m afraid of oftentimes is a fight for really good writing from me.”
Hunger teems with (societally created) shame and (unfair) embarrassment, the moments of pain for fat bodies inflicted often through callous best intentions. The doctor who writes “obesity” on a chart before an actual diagnosis — strep throat; The family members who can’t stop talking about “your problem” as a communal shame; the stranger in the gym who looks on with pity and tells you to keep at it. Every fat person has their own versions — reading the book I spent as much time working through some of my own worst memories as I did absorbing hers.
The doctor who didn’t diagnose an ulcer when I was 13 because he thought I just needed to “cheer up about the end of March break” and “lose the weight.” The friend’s mom who once told me how “lucky” I was to find a partner “as I am” after decades of veiled comments about my weight (I wanted to scream that he’s the lucky one).
The discomfort of shopping with friends at tiny boutiques for tiny people, and not being comfortable until my late 20s saying where I got that cute dress someone commented on. The looks friends exchange when you have to shift a table ever so slightly to fit on a banquette. A shame for your body so strong you allow it to be debased — until you find a way to love it so someone else can too.
Hunger is a series of “me too’s” for anyone who has lived in a fat body. It should reveal to those who haven’t the way they too, even with their loving smiles and suggestions and gifts of healthy cookbooks, compound that pain. From the medical establishment to airlines to clothing stores, Hunger tells the ugly truth of navigating a world that isn’t designed for your shape. It shows how institutions have failed fat bodies because, like so many people, they want to look away from them, away from the humanity inside and its needs.
“I definitely hope that people gain a different empathy for different bodies,” Gay says. “I would love for doctors to read it and remember their oath and treat fat bodies better. As I say in the book, you can talk to me about my weight as a medical professional, but when I come into the office because of a sore throat you can’t write on my chart ‘obese.’ That’s not why I’m there, I’m really there for some penicillin. Give me the penicillin.
“And I would love if the fashion industry would give me some awesome clothes that are more widely available. There are some boutiques that sell clothes for fat women, thank god, but they’re mostly online and not all of them (are) close to my taste,” Gay says.
“I don’t wear dresses, so there’s not a lot out there,” she says (stores like Lane Bryant stop at size 26). “I wish they had more options for us. You can’t make me a nice pair of slacks? You can’t size that up?”
Hunger unpacks the same themes that have been emerging in the body positivity movement online, and Gay has worked through some of them on her own Tumblr. She takes those narratives form digital communities to the printed page, and says that as much as she didn’t want to write it, that’s another reason she knew she had to.
“There are not many booklength works where someone writes about fatness without tying it exclusively to a weight-loss narrative, and without going into just like what daily life is like in a fat body and how this world is really constrained and discriminatory toward fat bodies.”
For all the media’s coverage about the obesity epidemic and the problem with sugar, the human inside the fat body is a side of the story that has not only been missed, but has been trampled over. Gay hopes her book can help nudge the discourse in a more constructive direction, and help doctors better treat fat patients as more than just their bodies.
“I think that one of the key things is for people to recognize that studies are just that. They’re studies and they’re grounded in specific circumstances, but they don’t necessarily account for every fat person — they don’t speak for all of the fat community,” she says. “Why not talk to actual fat people in addition to talking to actual medical professionals?
“Ask (doctors) how they accommodate fat bodies in your practice, because I think the answers would be very eye-opening.”
Hunger also reveals how those with smaller fat bodies often lose empathy for those even bigger than themselves (There’s a telling anecdote in the book’s first few pages about “that thing fat people tend to do around other fat people” — measuring themselves to see who is fatter). Many fat bodies, mine included, can nod along to much of her narrative, but we are what she calls “Lane Bryant fat” — a reference to the American clothing line that’s akin to Canada’s Additionelle and carries Ashley Graham’s line among others.
Gay laughs a bit when I ask if Graham appearing in Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Issue and gaining national prominence gives her hope, if it’s a sign things are getting better.
“C’mon? She’s wonderful, but c’mon, really? That’s because people have very f--ing low bars for what better is. That’s not better. We’re not making progress, we’re nowhere near. We can — and I hope we will — but we’re not there yet.”
Because if Graham, whose body has its curves in all the right places, represents the biggest body we can deem palatable (and even then there are many who can’t) we have a long way to go. Most fat bodies are bigger, even Graham’s Instagram account is littered with women saying her body “is goal.”
“Lane Bryant fat bodies” are the ones in this slow-butgrowing movement toward body positivity that get the best play. They make people less uncomfortable. They also fit better, not just into clothing that many fat bodies size out of, but in chairs and airplane seats and on doctors’ examination tables.
As Gay puts it: “the bigger you get, the smaller the world becomes.” For a very fat body, a trip to the theatre results in rough bruises, and choosing a restaurant requires checking out its seating to ensure they aren’t those teeny armed chairs that cut into your frame.
Gay also talks about how living in a fat body makes her more aware of how different abilities navigate spaces differently; she’s more aware of how persons with disabilities face barriers in their day-to-day lives. Reading Hunger made me more aware of the privileges I enjoy, the plethora of shopping options, an ease of movement.
“I think that most of our experiences are very similar. I think the takeaway is to recognize there are levels to this, as the kids say. We have lots and lots of common ground but there are also ways in which we do not share common ground. So let’s have some empathy for each other about the ways in which we do not,” she says.
So what will better look like? When will we starting inching toward a world truly tailored for all bodies? Right now, the first truly fat character on TV, a woman in the Story of Us, is portrayed by an actress who is contractually obligated to lose weight as part of the role to fulfil her character arc.
“What does it say about our cultural imagination that we can’t imagine a fat person being happy, valued and valuable simply as fat?” Gay asks. “That weight loss has to be part of this redemptive arc, when her existence as it is should be redemptive. That’s how she’s happy, or in this instance, how her character is happy.
“We just don’t live in a world where people can imagine fat as a positive thing. That’s what progress will look like: when we can imagine the fat body as a valued body.”
WE’RE NOT MAKING PROGRESS, WE’RE NOWHERE NEAR.