by Lindy West
Begin Reading
Table of Contents
Newsletters
Copyright Page
Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
For Dad
Lady Kluck
Why is, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” the go-to small talk we make with children? “Hello, child. As I have run out of compliments to pay you on your doodling, can you tell me what sort of niche you plan to carve out for yourself in the howling existential morass of uncertainty known as the future? Also, has anyone given you a heads-up that everyone you love will die someday?” That’s like waking a dog up with an air horn and telling it that it’s president now. “I don’t know, Uncle Jeff. I’m still kind of working on figuring out how to handle these weird popsicles with the two sticks.”
There was a time, I am told, when I was very small, that I had a ready response to the question. The answer was ballerina, or, for a minute, veterinarian, as I had been erroneously led to believe that “veterinarian” was the grown-up term for “professional animal-petter.” I would later learn, crestfallen and appalled, that it’s more a term for “touching poo all the time featuring intermittent cat murder,” so the plan was abandoned. (The fact that ANY kid wants to be a veterinarian is bananas, by the way—whoever does veterinary medicine’s PR among preschool-aged children should be working in the fucking White House.)
That period—when I was wholly myself, effortlessly certain, my identity still undistorted by the magnetic fields of culture—was so long ago that it’s beyond readily accessible memory. I do not recall being that person. For as long as I can recall, anytime I met a new adult—who would inevitably get nervous (because what is a child and how do you talk to it?) and fumble for that same hacky stock question—my imagination would come up empty. Doctor? Too gross. Fireman? Too hard. Princess? Those are fictional, right? Astronaut? LOL.
While we’re interrogating childhood clichés, who decided that “astronaut” would be a great dream job for a kid? It’s like 97 percent math, 1 percent breathing some Russian dude’s farts, 1 percent dying, and 1 percent eating awesome powdered ice cream. If you’re the very luckiest kind of astronaut ever, your big payoff is that you get to visit a barren airless wasteland for five minutes, do some more math, and then go home—ice cream not guaranteed. Anyway, loophole: I can already buy astronaut ice cream at the Science Center, no math or dying required. Lindy, 1; astronauts nada. (Unless you get points for debilitating low bone density, in which case… I concede.)
Not that it mattered anyway. Astronaut was never on the table. (Good luck convincing a fat kid that they should pursue a career in floating.) Thanks to a glut of cultural messaging, I knew very clearly what I was not: small, thin, pretty, girlish, normal, weightless, Winona Ryder. But there was precious little media telling me what I was, what I could be. For me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” was subsumed by a far more pressing question: “What are you?”
I’d squint into the future and come up blank.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
I can’t tell. Static? A snow field? A bedsheet? Sour cream?… Is sour cream a job?
As a kid, I never saw anyone remotely like myself on TV. Or in the movies, or in video games, or at the children’s theater, or in books, or anywhere at all in my field of vision. There simply were no young, funny, capable, strong, good fat girls. A fat man can be Tony Soprano; he can be Dan from Roseanne (still my number one celeb crush); he can be John Candy, funny without being a human sight gag—but fat women were sexless mothers, pathetic punch lines, or gruesome villains. Don’t believe me? It’s cool—I wrote it down.
Here is a complete list of fat female role models available in my youth.
Lady Kluck
Lady Kluck was a loud, fat chicken woman who took care of Maid Marian (and, presumably, may have wet-nursed her with chicken milk!?) in Disney’s Robin Hood. Kluck was so fat, in fact, that she was nearly the size of an adult male bear. Being a four-hundred-pound chicken, she wasn’t afraid to throw down in a fight with a lion and a gay snake* (even though the lion was her boss! #LeanIn), and she had monstro jugs, but in a maternal, sexless way, which is a total rip-off. Like, she doesn’t even get to have a plus-sized fuckfest with Baloo!†
(It’s weird that motherhood is coded as sexless, by the way. I know most of America is clueless about the female reproductive system, but if there’s one thing most babies have in common it’s that your dad goofed in your mom.)
Baloo Dressed as a Sexy Fortune-Teller
In order to assist Robin Hood in ripping off Prince John’s bejeweled decadence caravan, Baloo adorns himself with scarves and rags and golden bangles and whirls around like an impish sirocco, utterly beguiling PJ’s guard rhinos and incapacitating them with boners. Baloo dressed as a sexy fortune-teller luxuriates in every curve of his huge, sensuous bear butt; self-consciousness is not in his vocabulary. He knows he looks good. The most depressing thing I realized while making this list is that Baloo dressed as a sexy fortune-teller is the single-most positive role model of my youth.
The Queen of Hearts
I do not even know this bitch’s deal. In Alice in Wonderland, her only personality trait is “likes the color red,” she doesn’t seem to do any governing aside from executing minors for losing at croquet, and she is married to a one-foot-tall baby with a mustache. She is, now that I think about it, the perfect feminazi caricature: fat, loud, irrational, violent, overbearing, constantly hitting a hedgehog with a flamingo. Oh, shit. She taught me everything I know.
That Sexual Tree from The Last Unicorn
This fine lady was just minding her biz, being a big purple tree, when Schmendrick the garbage sorcerer came along and accidentally witchy-pooed her into a libidinous granny. Then he’s all mad when she nearly smothers him twixt her massive oaken cans! Hey, man, if you didn’t want to get motorboated to death by a fat tree, you should have picked something thinner and hotter to transform into your girlfriend. Like a spaghetti noodle, or clarinet.
The sex-tree that launched a thousand confusing fetishes taught me that fat women’s sexuality isn’t just ludicrous, it’s also suffocating, disgusting, and squelchy.
Miss Piggy
I am deeply torn on Piggy. For a lot of fat women, Piggy is it. She is powerful and uncompromising, assertive in her sexuality, and wholly self-possessed, with an ostentatious glamour usually denied anyone over a size 4. Her being a literal pig affords fat fans the opportunity to reclaim that barb with defiant irony—she invented glorifying obesity.
But also, you guys, Miss Piggy is kind of a rapist? Maybe if you love Kermie so much you should respect his bodily autonomy. The dude is physically running away from you.
Marla Hooch
A League of Their Own is a classic family comedy that mines the age-old question: What if women… could do things? Specifically, the women of A League of Their Own are doing baseball, and Marla Hooch is the most baseball-doingest woman of them all! She can hit homies and run bases and throw the ball far, all while maintaining a positive attitude and dodging jets of Tom Hanks’s hot urine! The only problem is that she is not max bangable like the other baseball women—she has a jukebox-like body and makes turtle-face any time she is addressed—which, if you think about it, makes her not that good at baseball after all. Fortunately, at the end, she meets a
man who is ALSO a jukebox turtle-face, and they get married in a condescending-ass ceremony that’s like “Awwwww, look, the uglies thinks it’s people!” (Presumably they also like each other’s personali—What? Doesn’t matter? Quarantine the less attractive? ’K!!!)
The thing about Marla Hooch is that the actress who plays her is just a totally nice-looking regular woman. I always think of this thing Rachel Dratch said in her memoir: “I am offered solely the parts that I like to refer to as The Unfuckables. In reality, if you saw me walking down the street, you wouldn’t point at me and recoil and throw up and hide behind a shrub.” Hollywood’s beauty standards are so wacko that they trick you into thinking anyone who isn’t Geena Davis is literally a toilet.
The Neighbor with the Arm Flab from The Adventures of Pete & Pete
Big Pete and Little Pete spent an entire episode fixated on the jiggling of an elderly neighbor’s arm fat. Next, I didn’t wear a tank top for twenty years.
Ursula the Sea Witch
The whole thing with Ariel’s voice and Prince Ambien Overdose is just an act of civil disobedience. What Ursula really wants is to bring down the regime of King Triton* so she and her eel bros don’t have to live in a dank hole tending their garden of misery slime for the rest of their lives. It’s the same thing with The Lion King—why should the hyenas have a shitty life? History is written by the victors, so forgive me if I don’t trust some P90X sea king’s smear campaign against the radical fatty in the next grotto.
Morla the Aged One from The NeverEnding Story
A depressed turtle who’s so fat and dirty, people literally get her confused with a mountain.
Auntie Shrew
I guess it’s forgivable that one of the secondary antagonists of The Secret of NIMH is a shrieking shrew of a woman who is also a literal shrew named Auntie Shrew, because the hero of the movie is also a lady and she is strong and brave. But, like, seriously? Auntie Shrew? Thanks for giving her a pinwheel of snaggle-fangs to go with the cornucopia of misogynist stereotypes she calls a personality.
Mrs. Potts
Question: How come, when they turn back into humans at the end of Beauty and the Beast, Chip is a four-year-old boy, but his mother, Mrs. Potts, is like 107? Perhaps you’re thinking, “Lindy, you are remembering it wrong. That kindly, white-haired, snowman-shaped Mrs. Doubtfire situation must be Chip’s grandmother.” Not so, champ! She’s his mom. Look it up. She gave birth to him four years ago. Also, where the hell is Chip’s dad? Could you imagine being a 103-year-old single mom?
As soon you become a mother, apparently, you are instantly interchangeable with the oldest woman in the world, and/or sixteen ounces of boiling brown water with a hat on it. Take a sec and contrast Mrs. Potts’s literally spherical body with the cut-diamond abs of King Triton, father of seven.
The Trunchbull from Matilda
Sure, the Trunchbull is a bitter, intractable, sadistic she-monster who doesn’t even feel a shred of fat solidarity with Bruce Bogtrotter (seriously, Trunch?), but can you imagine being the Trunchbull? And growing up with Miss Effing Honey? The world is not kind to big, ugly women. Sometimes bitterness is the only defense.
That’s it.
Taken in aggregate, here is what I learned in my childhood about my personal and professional potential:
I could not claim any sexual agency unless I forced myself upon a genteel frog; or unless, as part of a jewel caper, I was trying to seduce a base, horny fool such as a working-class rhinoceros; and if I insisted on broadcasting my sexuality anyway, I would be exiled to a sea cave to live eternally in a dank garden of worms, hoping that a gullible hot chick might come along once in a while so I could grift her out of her sexy voice. Even in those rare scenarios, my sexuality would still be a joke, an oddity, or a menace. I could potentially find chaste, comical romance, provided I located a chubby simpleton who looked suspiciously like myself without a hair bow, and the rest of humanity would breathe a secret sigh of relief that the two of us were removing ourselves from the broader gene pool. Or I could succumb to the lifetime of grinding pain and resentment and transform into a hideous beast who makes herself feel better by locking helpless children in the knife closet.
Mother or monster. Okay, little girl—choose.
Bones
I’ve always been a great big person. In the months after I was born, the doctor was so alarmed by the circumference of my head that she insisted my parents bring me back, over and over, to be weighed and measured and held up for scrutiny next to the “normal” babies. My head was “off the charts,” she said. Science literally had not produced a chart expansive enough to account for my monster dome. “Off the charts” became a West family joke over the years—I always deflected, saying it was because of my giant brain—but I absorbed the message nonetheless. I was too big, from birth. Abnormally big. Medical-anomaly big. Unchartably big.
There were people-sized people, and then there was me.
So, what do you do when you’re too big, in a world where bigness is cast not only as aesthetically objectionable, but also as a moral failing? You fold yourself up like origami, you make yourself smaller in other ways, you take up less space with your personality, since you can’t with your body. You diet. You starve, you run till you taste blood in your throat, you count out your almonds, you try to buy back your humanity with pounds of flesh.
I got good at being small early on—socially, if not physically. In public, until I was eight, I would speak only to my mother, and even then, only in whispers, pressing my face into her leg. I retreated into fantasy novels, movies, computer games, and, eventually, comedy—places where I could feel safe, assume any personality, fit into any space. I preferred tracing to drawing. Drawing was too bold an act of creation, too presumptuous.
In third grade I was at a birthday party with a bunch of friends, playing in the backyard, and someone suggested we line up in two groups—the girls who were over one hundred pounds and the girls who were still under. There were only two of us in the fat group. We all looked at each other, not sure what to do next. No one was quite sophisticated enough to make a value judgment based on size yet, but we knew it meant something.
My dad was friends with Bob Dorough, an old jazz guy who wrote all the songs for Multiplication Rock, Schoolhouse Rock’s math-themed sibling. He’s that breezy, froggy voice on “Three Is a Magic Number”—you’d recognize it. “A man and a woman had a little baby, yes, they did. They had three-ee-ee in the family…” Bob signed a vinyl copy of Multiplication Rock for me when I was two or three years old. “Dear Lindy,” it said, “get big!” I hid that record, as a teenager, afraid that people would see the inscription and think, “She took that a little too seriously.”
I dislike “big” as a euphemism, maybe because it’s the one chosen most often by people who mean well, who love me and are trying to be gentle with my feelings. I don’t want the people who love me to avoid the reality of my body. I don’t want them to feel uncomfortable with its size and shape, to tacitly endorse the idea that fat is shameful, to pretend I’m something I’m not out of deference to a system that hates me. I don’t want to be gentled, like I’m something wild and alarming. (If I’m going to be wild and alarming, I’ll do it on my terms.) I don’t want them to think that I need a euphemism at all.
“Big” is a word we use to cajole a child: “Be a big girl!” “Act like the big kids!” Having it applied to you as an adult is a cloaked reminder of what people really think, of the way we infantilize and desexualize fat people. (Desexualization is just another form of sexualization. Telling fat women they’re sexless is still putting women in their sexual place.) Fat people are helpless babies enslaved to their most capricious cravings. Fat people do not know what’s best for them. Fat people need to be guided and scolded like children. Having that awkward, babyish word dragging on you every day of your life, from childhood into maturity, well, maybe it’s no wonder that I prefer hot chocolate to whiskey and substitute Harry Potter audiobooks for therapy
.
Every cell in my body would rather be “fat” than “big.” Grown-ups speak the truth.
Please don’t forget: I am my body. When my body gets smaller, it is still me. When my body gets bigger, it is still me. There is not a thin woman inside me, awaiting excavation. I am one piece. I am also not a uterus riding around in a meat incubator. There is no substantive difference between the repulsive campaign to separate women’s bodies from their reproductive systems—perpetuating the lie that abortion and birth control are not healthcare—and the repulsive campaign to convince women that they and their body size are separate, alienated entities. Both say, “Your body is not yours.” Both demand, “Beg for your humanity.” Both insist, “Your autonomy is conditional.” This is why fat is a feminist issue.
All my life people have told me that my body doesn’t belong to me.
As a teenager, I was walking down the street in Seattle’s International District, when an old woman rushed up to me and pushed a business card into my hand. The card was covered in characters I couldn’t read, but at the bottom it was translated: “WEIGHT LOSS/FAT BURN.” I tried to hand it back, “Oh, no thank you,” but the woman gestured up and down at my body, up and down. “Too fat,” she said. “You call.”
In my early twenties, I was working a summer job as a cashier at an “upscale general store and gift shop” (or, as it was known around my house, the Bourgeois Splendor Ceramic Bird Emporium & Money Fire), when a tan, wiry man in his sixties strode up to my register. I remember him looking like the infamous Silver Lake Walking Man, if anyone remembers him, or if Jack LaLanne fucked a tanning bed and a Benjamin Button came out.
“Do you want to lose some weight?” he asked, with no introduction.
I laughed uncomfortably, hoping he’d go away: “Ha ha, doesn’t everyone? Ha ha.”
He pushed a brochure for some smoothie cleanse pyramid scheme over the counter at me. I glanced at it and pushed it back. “Oh, no thank you.”
He pushed it toward me again, more aggressively. “Take it. Believe me, you need it.”
