On Body Image

It being the season of Easter and Passover, memoir like Judith Moore's Fat Girl makes me think of ways I've personally been delivered from the need for sacrifice. I lift my head and admire the green shoots on the trees. I take a deep breath and recognize, with the attendant mixed emotions, that I've been spared the terrible fate of bodily self-hatred and food obsession.

I can't wait to get my hands on Moore's book. According to the reviews, Moore uses bold, irreverent language to describe her life-long fat body and others' responses to it. Through her, we glimpse a personal reality anorexics will die to avoid: "...when I walk, my buttocks grind like the turbines I once saw move water over the top of the Grand Coulee Dam." I wonder if Moore plays these descriptions consciously, to neutralize the social dread of fat, much as Lenny Bruce repeated taboo words during his famous routine, to "claim" the terms, to take away their power.

I can't imagine Judith Moore publishing anything that's less than superb. But, too, I've always been drawn to women's writing about body image, particularly women's "fat" memoir.

Thin-fat-thin-fat-thin. Fat.

It's a pendulum I've personally stayed off of, so far, only observing. I was always slim. My body has maintained itself at an un-troublesome weight with little or no effort on my part. Overall, I regard my physical appetite as a trusted friend.

How different it is for so many others. I read of tedious, lonely struggles with food, I observe them first-hand, and I am sobered by the destruction, even as I myself have been spared. How different it could have been for me.

There are fine examples of "fat" and "anorexic" memoir, though it's the "fat" memoir, the quality being equal, that compels me more.

"Fatso," in our culture, is synonymous with "loser." Writing graphically about fat, as Judith Moore does, takes a peculiar courage. It means the willingness to look "failure," as society defines it, squarely in the eye.

To be fat, for a woman, is to fall short of ironclad cultural expectations: be attractive; please those that matter; be disciplined and successful; "have it all together"; "tow the line." Above all, "look good"; look like it's easy.

I've never struggled with food. The Angel of Death missed me on that pass through. But I am not off free. I have been as out-of-touch with my real needs as any food-obsessed person. Many a "successful" woman will tell you you can "make it" in the world without hearing your insides. Except that I lack the instinctive feminine knack of pleasing. This gift is supposed to be unquestioned in females--forever looking outward, as we're expected to do, for approval. Lacking the knack of pleasing, on the one hand, and on the other, being deaf to my intuition, I've been unable to buoy myself to the point where the consequences of failing to please don't hurt.

I've never been fat. But I haven't lacked for opportunities to fail, and fail as grandly and as humiliatingly as any fat woman.

"Nadine" was my supervisor at an unpaid internship I held at a major nonprofit organization back when I was fresh out of college. I should have quit after a week, or she should have let me go that early. Not heeding what my insides were clearly telling me from the moment I walked in the door, I was going to stick it out at the internship, come hell or high water, because I thought I "needed" it for my career. I thought I "should."

This was before computer word-processing; I'm a shit-poor typist and a worse proofreader, and the position at the nonprofit demanded a lot of both. Somebody else who decided to stick it out would have practiced their typing and improved and not thought about it. But I despised typing and I still do. Nadine was a stickler, and our relationship was anything but smooth. That relationship also came to be anything but simple.

Nadine, in her thirties at the time, had talked to me about the drive and perfectionism with which she'd succeeded at work up to that point, to overcome her very difficult personal history. I'd confided my own early hurts. I looked at Nadine as a sort of friend, and both of us wanted our working relationship to succeed. We both attached lots of personal stigma to the prospect of it not succeeding--Nadine, because she'd identified with me.

"I am giving you every chance," she implored once, flinging a sheaf of my typo-laden pages on the desk in front of me one day, her eyes wide with incredulity. "Can you see that I'm giving you every chance, that others in my position would be much less understanding? You aren't mentally retarded! You have to stop making these mistakes!"

She could see me trying, and inexplicably failing, where she herself was terrified of failure.

As the months wore on, Nadine was increasingly free in lecturing me about my supposed shortcomings. I was "addicted to failure," she said; it was my "drug of choice."

As I've said, it breaks my heart to this day that I did not stand up and walk out. Instead, I looked at the floor during Nadine's rantings, praying my chin wouldn't wobble. If I just try harder, I thought. I have to try harder.

During these dark days, for some reason, the topic of food and eating disorders once came up between Nadine and me. I told her I was glad to have been spared.

Nadine told me darkly, without missing a beat, "Your serious problems don't concern food."

At the time, I experienced Nadine--in that context, a terrified, befuddled woman, after all--as godlike. More precisely, I weighted Nadine's assessment heavily in the scheme of my life. It has taken me years and years to heal the pain her words caused.

Memoir about body image appeals to me because the personal struggles described are as epic as mine have felt. The stories about food obsession inspire my empathy. Yet, I experience them at a remove, as I would watch a play or diorama, where I already have a crucial piece of knowledge the main character is still braving torments of the damned to acquire: I know being effortlessly slim will not fix your life! It will not remove self-doubt! I want to trumpet it at the fat people, the anorexics, and the bulimics from the rooftops, in my puny, solo voice: "Give it up! It is a losing battle! LISTEN TO YOUR OWN WISDOM! ACCEPT YOURSELF!"

Anorexics and food-obsessed people scorn their bodies as a sacrifice to keep at bay the biblical Angel of Death, whose ruthlessness is commemorated each spring, at Passover. "If I can just control my appetite, everything will be all right. I'll be safe." But, who is the Angel of Death that the Israelites had to propitiate to flee Egypt safely? Is the "danger" external to the human psyche?

I see the Angel of Death as a rapist. I mean that, less in the sense of perpetrating sexual violation, more in the sense of the original meaning of "rape": "to seize, to carry off." Before you know it, the dark angel will carry you off and drop you in a dark place where the clamor of your fears drowns out your own sacred gut wisdom. If you get out and find your way home again, it will be through your own trials and your own labor.

In a sense, I have been spared. The divide-and-conquer angel of bodily self-hatred seems not even to have seen me. Whew. I have a bit of additional perspective a food-obsessed person might need, if I could impart it. From their camp, if I can hear it, might come wisdom I lack.