Melville House UK

And so, shamefully, I looked. I looked for evidence of their unhappiness, all the while repressing the fact that my search reminded me of a particularly dysfunctional moment in Leonard Michaels’s account of his tortured, explosive, and eventually disastrous relationship to his first wife, Sylvia. Upon learning that a friend had an equally horrible relationship with equally horrible fights, Michaels writes: “I was grateful to him, relieved, giddy with pleasure. So others lived this way, too. . . . Every couple, every marriage, was sick. Such thinking, like bloodletting, purged me. I was miserably normal; I was normally miserable.” He and Sylvia marry; a short, miserable time later, she’s dead from forty-seven Seconals.

I knew you were a good animal, but felt myself to be standing before an enormous mountain, a lifetime of unwillingness to claim what I wanted, to ask for it. Now here you were, your face close to mine, waiting.

But is there really such a thing as nothing, as nothingness? I don’t know. I know we’re still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.

I would find myself being taught by boys at school that I was unlovable and disgusting because of my fat body. I would lose sight of how magical my body was, how magical I was. I would lose the sense that my body was mine at all

As much as I wish it were, my story is not unique. It is, in many ways, the story of women’s lives in America

A woman told me she had cancer that went untreated because her doctor told her that the problem was her weight. She went in for an appointment because she was experiencing excruciating menstrual cramps and very heavy periods. She was afraid. Rather than examining her, the doctor told her that if she lost weight that everything would be fine. Had the doctor been willing to take her seriously, she could have found the lump in her uterus, but instead it grew unchecked for another three years

In many ways, however, these ideas are merely symptoms of a larger cultural problem, not least our country’s history of unresolved racism, white supremacy, classism, and misogyny

unsolicited masculine sexual attention and the drive to control feminine bodies go hand in hand.

Because of the way fat people are positioned in our culture, people learn to fear becoming fat. They are afraid of discrimination and hatred. It is normal to feel afraid of people hating you. It is not normal for people to hate anyone based on how much they weigh

The language used to sell diet products has shifted away from shame and fear in favor of aspiration and optimization. Rather than specifically focusing on weight loss, there are more references to “health” and the idea that “healthy is the new skinny.”