Recently, I was slung across the couch with my young daughter, both of us blissfully full from dinner, limbs intertwined as we read before her bedtime. Her face was hidden behind a beloved Phoebe Wahl picture book, and perched on my soft belly was Emma Copley Eisenberg’s Housemates, a road trip story about two friends in pursuit of art and purpose. While a small bony knee dug into my armpit, I braced myself as the author began describing her characters’ bodies. It’s a make-or-break moment for me as a plus-size reader, when a riveting plot or beloved character may spoil, tarnished by the slip of an author’s anti-fat bias.
Eisenberg doesn’t shy away from highlighting protagonist Leah’s size, rather she revels in it often: “She was big. Big breasts atop big stomach atop thighs in men’s khaki pants, big long legs that terminated in round-toed soccer sneakers.” At first this put me on high alert, waiting for this character’s size to become a flaw, a conflict, a source of tension. But I exhaled in relief when it quickly became apparent that Leah’s body would be presented neutrally, a stark departure from the literary representation I’ve grown accustomed to. Being barraged by anti-fat bias in an otherwise admirable novel is an experience that both Virgie Tovar and Eisenberg herself have written about in their respective Substacks, so while I needn’t have worried, this habit has developed out of necessity. Books have been letting me down with their representations of fatness since I started turning to them.
I developed early as a kid: period at ten, tall enough to be mistaken for a teacher by fourth grade, boobs big enough to make the comparison realistic. With the concurrent influx of hormones, I was a hot, horny mess. I scavenged my mom’s bookshelves for romance novels, legal dramas, presidential biographies—anything that might include even a whiff of sex. The jackpot was Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone, chockful with nipple tweaks, dick pics, and “lovemaking.” Entranced, I hid it at the bottom of my backpack and brought it to my seventh grade history class to share the bounty. I pointed out passages I’d earmarked to my friends as they crowded around, nearly all of them thinner than me. Already, I was excruciatingly aware of my extra curves, and Lamb’s novel taught me to fear them.
She’s Come Undone offers a cautionary tale, a “story of craving,” following Dolores as she reaches 257lb, a number that’s branded on my brain. In its nearly 500 pages, the novel details Dolores’ countless hardships: an abusive father, a rapist neighbor, the death of her mother, merciless teasing about her body—and on and on. Her body is presented as monstrous as it scares small children and horrifies doctors. I re-read the book recently and cackled at the near-slapstick presentation of it all: at one point Dolores can’t fit in a car, at another, she faints and shatters through a staircase. But I also felt bereft for my young, impressionable self who inhaled this book and hung on its every word, whose own weight gain was blighted by this book’s legacy. I’d found the book in a youthful search for smut, an attempt to connect with my changing body. But I came away untethered, frightened by my own flesh.
I developed early as a kid: period at ten, tall enough to be mistaken for a teacher by fourth grade.
The beauty of fiction is that it gives authors space to explore and experiment and imagine and create. It’s the ultimate freedom. And yet, freedom still carries responsibilities. There has been a concerted recent effort to eradicate racism, ableism, ageism, classism, tokenism, anti-semitism, xenophobia, transphobia, and homophobia from literature, and yet anti-fat bias can still be found with abundance. It’s no surprise that literature of yore is rife with the issue—Don Quixote’s Sancho Panza, Piggy (RIP) in Lord of the Flies, and Stephen King seems to think that being fat is the scariest thing a woman can be—but the problem is just as rampant today.
Modern heavy-hitters like Otessa Moshfegh, Haruki Murakami, and Tess Gunty incorporate casual fatphobic descriptions in which a person’s larger size is meant to signal their unsavory personality. As highlighted in a recent installation of Delia Cai’s Hate Read, Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus—a blockbuster bestseller—peddles gratuitously in this brand of anti-fat representation. But as a fat reader myself, my least favorite and most oft-encountered examples are the ones that are a little more insidious. A story without a single fat character can sometimes expose the author and their biases most of all. Per Carmen Maria Machado, “It’s like writers can’t imagine fat women having sex or agency or complex lives. They’re just bodies for thin people to bounce off of; funny and unserious as a whoopee cushion or unconsidered as a chair. If they’re even there at all.”
When multiple characters share the same discriminatory leanings, my hackles shoot up. This prevalence is found in She’s Come Undone. Dolores is “locked in fat and self-hatred,” but she isn’t the only person who despises bigger bodies: her college roommate would rather die than end up fat like her, she is ostracized widely by strangers, characters are celebrated for thin waists, and perhaps most telling, her mother “[grows] herself a big rear end,” as a warning signal for an impending mental health crisis. In Eisenberg’s excellent newsletter, she points out the anti-fat bias among several characters in Lauren Groff’s Fate and Furies, arguing that the fatphobia is, “endemic to the author rather than salient to any particular character’s development.” As a plus-sized reader—as so many of us are—my experience is spoiled when hostility toward big bodies is on the page, and especially if it becomes clear the author harbors these feelings themself.
A story without a single fat character can sometimes expose the author and their biases most of all.
Two of my favorite books in recent years are exquisite and tender and important except regarding one detail: they center characters harboring anti-fat bias. In one, the main character’s fatphobia prevents her from sexually pursuing the person that becomes her best friend. When she, herself, gains weight by the end, it’s up to the already-fat friend to comfort her. In the other book, one of the protagonists is plus-size as a teenager and observes an even fatter classmate bullied mercilessly for his size. When the characters become adults, they bond over making fun of a peer who’s joined their ranks by gaining weight. Both books are queer, nominated for prestigious awards, and deeply beloved—including by myself—and yet left me feeling uneasy. Anti-fat bias is, of course, accurate to both history and our present, but unless characters are allowed to realize their small-mindedness, then at best, many readers are alienated, and at worst, those with similar worldviews are affirmed. Research shows that while American attitudes have either improved or plateaued toward sexual orientation, skin tone, age, and disability, sentiments of anti-fat bias have worsened.
And yet, nearly half of Americans qualify as fat. These people realize goals, salvation, and great loves, all while being fat, all the time. Why don’t we see this in books?
In Housemates, Leah doesn’t live in a bubble; they still encounter fatphobia. But what Eisenberg conveys so deftly is that the discrimination Leah faces doesn’t define them. Eisenberg allows the reader to witness some of the negativity Leah experiences, particularly through their parents and an incident with a malfunctioning diner chair. But these biases reflect much more on those putting it forth. Their father is stagnant and boring in his steadfast hatred of bigger bodies. The inadequate seating is the catalyst for Leah’s relationship with friend Bernie to progress into something deeper. The two enjoy a sex scene that includes self-consciousness on Leah’s part, but no more than any other person might harbor about their own corporeal hang-up.
Housemates should be studied by every contemporary author as the finest departure from the fatphobic hellscape of fiction that exists yet. There are others out there (The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow, The Manor House Governess by C. A. Castle) that succeed in portraying fat bodies as neutral, but with secondary characters. Eisenberg gives a fat body the lead and allows nuance, heartache, foibles, and growth. This isn’t by accident. At one point, Eisenberg writes in the novel, “A shocking number of the books lefties loved revealed a plain hatred of fatness.” The books being published today are at such high caliber, but they can still do better on this point, with Eisenberg as their example. Authors can write exquisite prose and gripping narratives without alienating half of their readers. It is boring to tether a character, an arc, a life, to the irrelevance of size. It is lazy to look at a fat body and assume you already know the whole story.
The freedom of fiction allows authors to opt out of participating in fatphobia, which doesn’t mean they can’t write fat characters—please, if anything, write more! An easy way to tell if the depiction is problematic is to look at the way a body is being presented: if it’s happenstance, that’s fine. A fat person can be a great villain. But if it’s a defining characteristic, if it’s what’s used to convey negativity, that author needs to do better. A fat person isn’t a villain because they’re fat. In Lindy West’s review of the somehow Oscar-winning film The Whale, she writes that, “Fat people are already trapped, suffocating, inside the stories the rest of you tell yourselves about us. We have plenty of your stories. What we don’t have is the space to forge untainted relationships with food and our bodies, to speak honestly about our lives without being abused, to explore our full potential…” When stories are written in which fat people are confined and limited, there are consequences.
When stories are written in which fat people are confined and limited, there are consequences.
Wally Lamb’s depiction of Dolores affected my self esteem for decades. In my twenties, I watched the scale creep past the dreaded number of 257 and steeled myself for impending devastation depicted by Lamb—but it never came, and if anything, my life has only improved. It wasn’t until I started reading expansive work by authors like Eisenberg, West, Machado, and others, that I began to remedy literature’s legacy of damage on my psyche.
I weigh more now than Dolores ever did, and spoiler alert, my life is great. I’m surrounded by people who love me, fulfilled by my work, and enjoy a marriage teeming with both joy and sex! I’ve never broken a chair, but if I did, I wouldn’t internalize it as personal failing, I’d understand it as neglect by an establishment to be inclusive in their seating. My weight is irrelevant to my worth. My body has always and will always be big; weight loss is not an element of my redemption.
This past summer, I went whale watching, just as Dolores does at the end of She’s Come Undone. All I saw from the pitching boat was a quick slice of dorsal fin, just enough to convey something majestic and potent and big underneath. I remembered in that moment, as Eisenberg so clearly already knows: to be big is to be powerful. To be big is to be worthy of whole, nuanced representation.
