If you haven’t read Emma Copley Eisenberg’s HOUSEMATES, 10/10 recommend, especially if you’re from Philadelphia. It’s a tender, thoughtful look at friendship, at different kinds of love, with smart things to say about gender and money and class and gentrification, but one of the things I loved best about it was that it had a fat protagonist whose weight was not the point of her existence, and whose body was not an obstacle, or a plot point. It was just…a body; described with the same kind of specific, evocative language a good writer uses to describe anything, from a house to the weather to a piece of jewelry or a part of the landscape.
Which, sadly, makes the book a standout in the literary fiction canon.
Copley Eisenberg wrote an essay about this, entitled “The American Novel has a Major Problem with Fat People,” in which she pointed out that literary fiction does a terrible job with fat characters…that, basically, too many writers are still lazily using fat as a shorthand for a grab bag of other unwelcome characteristics. “When I do find depictions of people with larger bodies in fiction, from commercial bestselling detective or romance fiction to debut collections of literary short stories, the portrayals are nearly always pejorative, jeering or demeaning.”
She cites Jonathan Franzen’s CROSSROADS, in which a fat woman is introduced as “the overweight personal who was Marion.” “Sexually,” Franzen writes, “there was no angle from which a man on the street might catch a glimpse of her and be curious to see her from a different angle, no point of relief from what she and time had done to her.”
Oof.
These days, when it comes to race and gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity and religion, editors are not shy about flagging problematic passages or descriptions. There are words we’re no longer using; stereotypes we’re no longer invoking.
But, somehow, fat folks have been immune to that kind of consideration.
And, Copley Eisenberg notes, this antipathy toward people in larger bodies extends from the realm of the fictional into the real world. Agents and editors are uncomfortable with fat main characters, and they are uncomfortable with fat authors in real life.
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