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The New Yorker Radio Hour
“Fat Swim” and Literature’s Fatphobia Problem
00:19:54
The novelist Emma Copley Eisenberg discusses her short-story collection “Fat Swim,” and the fatphobia she finds in contemporary fiction, with the critic Jennifer Wilson.
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A
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC and the New Yorker.
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B
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Jennifer Wilson writes about culture for the New Yorker. Culture in many forms. Everything from the latest in literary fiction to the boom in prenup agreements. Jen sat down the other day for a conversation with the author of a new book called Fat Swim.
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C
I first met Emma Copley Eisenberg around seven years ago in Philadelphia, where we both lived at the time. She had created a literary organization called Blue Stoop to help connect the city's community of writers. Now she's out with Fat Swim, a short story collection set in Philadelphia. The characters are vibrant and many identify as fat and are resentful that they live in a world that wants to, you know, limit their cravings for food, for one another and for life. Emma is one of the foremost thinkers about fatphobia in literature, but also in American culture more broadly. And it was one of the reasons why I was just very excited to have the opportunity to talk to her.
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B
Here's Jennifer Wilson talking with Emma Copley Eisenberg.
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C
So the book is called Fat Swim. It's a collection of short stories. And the first story is also called Fat Swim, and it begins with an eight year old girl named Alice looking out her window.
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D
Yeah, that story was sort of the first time I was like, okay, I think I'm writing a collection of stories that has like a real coherent, I would call it a plot through line, through the stories. And she sees this group of fat women who live in her neighborhood. She lives in West Philly and has some sort of complicated where she's sort of identifying with them and sort of aroused by them and sort of wants to be a part of their group, but also feels foreign because she's a kid and they're adults. So, yeah, there's this moment, I think, where Alice sees just like some long leg hair on one of the women at the pool and the wind is blowing it and they see her looking and they're like, do you want to touch it? And she's like, yeah. And I think it's an interesting moment because, like, leg hair is not. It's not like forbidden. It's not like one is like, I cannot have long leg hair. You know, it's certainly part of like feminist reclamation movements of like, I can have whatever body hair I want, et cetera, but it is still this very intimate thing where we don't usually touch each other's leg hair, I guess, or body hair. At all. And so I thought there's something interesting to me about, like, what it just. It just happened as I was writing the story. Cause I was just like, Alice wants to be close to them. She wants to be close to their bodies. And I think also we underestimate, like, how much kids are always looking at. At the bodies of adults, being like, am I like that or am I different from that? So I think that the whole story is, in many ways, Alice asking, like, who am I? What does my body mean? And do I get to say what it means? Or are other people gonna tell me? And so that she's kind of looking at these adult women who are sort of like her, but also really far away.
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C
And then you have another story called Beauty, which to me is about the real material economic consequences of. Of that phobia. Can you set up that story for our listeners?
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Yeah, Essentially it's a story about a woman who works at a beauty startup with these friends and then is essentially cast out.
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It's a beauty brand for athletes.
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Yeah. Like athletics.
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C
It's called Lavender. But she, you know, once the company starts to get, you know, some interest from investors, they start to have opinions about, you know, what these three women look like.
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D
Exactly. It's like the people that are associated with a beauty brand become not just like spokespeople, but, like, physical manifestations of what the brand means. And this character does not fit what they want the brand to mean as her body changes. And I think there's a lot in here, too, of, like, people's bodies change over their lifetime. Like, I feel like that's something that I've thought a lot about. And, like, I keep hearing about, about this book and readers, you know, reacting to it of, like, people are like, we think there's this category called fat people. And then there's other categories called thin people. And there's all these, like, ways that people are like, oh, you're a former fat person or something. But it's also like, you don't know what your body will become in 10 years or 20 years. Like, the way of talking about people's bodies may become surprisingly relevant to you reader who is not yet ready for that. So this person's body changes a lot, and she's living in this really isolated part of Pennsylvania that barely has Internet. And I think the story for me is also a lot about the Internet and a lot about what it feels like to kind of try to drop out of the Internet and how impossible that is and the sort of, like, ways that Being perceived and being reflected back on the Internet can become this, like, place where without that, we hardly know ourselves anymore.
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C
So I wanted to ask you about Ozempic because, you know, related to this story, Beauty. There's been some reporting on people who take Ozempic and other, you know, other brands of GLPs because they say that they feel like they need to. To get ahead at work.
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I saw that article. I know, yeah.
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A lot of people are. Are saying that they're using ozempic and other GLPs not because they necessarily have a problem with the way that they look, but because they feel the outside world does. You know, there was an article in the cut about, you know, ordinary people, real estate agents, saying, you know, they. They felt they needed to, you know, to lo. To keep their job. That our images are everywhere now and we were supposed to all be brands. And so I just was wondering, I mean, you know, what has Ozempic meant for the fat liberation movement?
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D
I feel it would be impossible to summarize, like, all of the discourse around that because it's so variant and multilayered, but I think there are a few different sort of views on that. One is indeed that like taking Ozempic or any other DLP1 and becoming smaller to conform to a societal norm is counter to the fat liberation movement. I think there's certainly people who believe that. I think there's also a lot of folks who want to acknowledge, like, medically there's like, many reasons why people take GLP1s that are productive and important. And actually GLP1s have been around since 2006 or so and been prescribed, like, relatively safely. I think it is certainly, certainly challenged the fat liberation movement. To clarify, like, is the fat liberation movement fundamentally fat positive or is it more about body autonomy, which again, is self determination? And I think there has not been a real answer to that. And I don't know that we'll see one for quite some time. But it's prompted that conversation.
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C
You know, it's incredible because the CDC, I think, most recently reported that around 75% of Americans are overweight. We can talk a bit about that term, but it's just sort of unbelievable because when you look at popular culture, I mean, I don't know if there have been studies, but I'm just gonna spitball here. I think it's less than 75% of characters and movies and TV shows are fat or, you know, overweight, as the government says.
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D
Totally. I mean, it's so interesting to me that, like, so Quote, unquote overweight. And also like obese. Those are words that, yeah, they come from medical community, like you're saying. And I think like, for me, they're such bummer words because one, it kind of like implies like, there is a correct weight or correct size to be, which like, has been debunked so many times by scientists and medical folk. And also, like, I think even taking the health issue out of it, I don't want to be, I don't want to be described in a medical context when I'm writing art or when I'm reading art. It's very strange. And I think also, like, for me, it's just really lazy craft, like on a craft level. I see so much use of those words in contemporary fiction, literary fiction. And I'm like, that doesn't tell me anything. Like, to say the character is overweight. I have no further visual information. I have no further insight into like, their presence or the way they would be in a room, which is like, what I care about as a reader. I'm like, I want to know how they are in the scene and what's happening and how to visualize them.
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Emma Copley Eisenberg speaking with Jennifer Wilson of the New Yorker. More in a moment. Foreign
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You're also a literary critic.
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Occasionally I do Moonlight.
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You have a newsletter called Frump Feelings and you wrote this entry that was titled fatphobia Is the Literary World's Final Frontier. And in that post you talked about fatphobia in contemporary fiction and the work of, you know, writers like Zadie Smith, Gillian Flynn, Lauren Groff. Yes.
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Jonathan Franzen.
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Yes. I'm thinking of, you know, when you write about Gone Girl, you talk in particular about a scene where Amy is telling, you know, the reader that she's gained weight and, you know, that she wants the public to remember her as sort of pale, thin Amy. I mean, you kind of point out that moment as an example of, like, a fatphobia in the text. And I'm wondering, how do you decide when a text is fatphobic versus representing fatphobia, Including a character's internalized fatphobia, for sure.
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D
I mean, I think how I personally think of it is, is the body's changes, the body's desires, the body's size, all these things. Are those elements crucial to the text, crucial to the plot, or not? And I think in the case of Gone Girl, they're not. Like, there's nothing in that book that really explores Amy's experience of or ambivalence about being embodied, except for perhaps her ambivalence about having a child. That is explored a bit. But if the book had really delved into, like, the experience of Amy sort of trying to maintain this small body and, you know, and we learned about her food intake or we learned about the way that she moves through the world, if we saw her sort of obsessing over that or going to the gym or having friends, for which that was really a important element of her story, I would be like, that comment makes complete sense, you know, but it just was completely ancillary to the plot or to the. Which, again, by plot, I mean sort of the main thread or the logic of the book. And I also look at point of view a lot. So, like, for example, in a Jonathan Franzen novel, I should say, you dedicate
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one of your stories, Beauty, to Jonathan Franzen.
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I did. And it's like the youth are like, dedicate parentheses, pejorative, or dedicate parentheses, complimentary. And this is definitely dedicate, parenthes, parentheses, pejorative. So, yes. So in Crossroads, which is a multi POV novel, and the introduction of one of the main characters is the overweight person who was Marian. And then a few sentences on. I'm paraphrasing, but it's like there was no relief from her body, and there was no angle that you could see her on the street that would make you want to see more of her. And I thought I felt sort of slapped, I think, when I read that sentence in the book, because to me, it was so dehumanizing. And that kind of idea that Marian is disgusting and also pathetic and also aesthetically intolerable is present in many POVs throughout the novel. So I think it's a POV thing to me as well. Or in the case of like Ottessa Moshfegh, like over a body of work, you can sort of see the same themes emerging which critic Andrea Langchu wrote about at length. So yeah, I think about it like over the course of a book, in many different characters, points of view, or over a body of work, but it's impossible to know for sure. And the thing is, like, all of us have internalized Fev. We live in America, like every single one of us, me, all the people I know have internalized this idea that to be fat is to be disgusting is to be less human. And so it's impossible to not have that. And I am not really interested in. And I don't do this in Fat Swim. Like, I don't create a world that's a utopia, where like these sites of oppression, not just fatphobia, but also racism, also prejudice against folks with disabilities, like that all exists in the book because it exists in the world. I feel like my sort of main promise to the reader as a fiction writer is to represent the world as it is, which includes all of those things. And the story Beauty includes a lot of internal, what we might call internalized fatphobia, even though it's dedicated to Jonathan Franzen. Because I was like, I want to write a Marian. So the main character of Beauty is named Marian. I want to write a Marian who is who the reader is begging to see from every angle. You know, who is has a kind of self possessed sexuality that is really unapologetic and also quite strange. And so in that way I'm very grateful because writing out of spite can be extremely motivating as well.
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So all of these stories are either set in Philadelphia or what I think of as like the Philadelphia diaspora, which includes the Jersey Shore, the Poconos, New York City, New York City. So what does it mean to you to be a Philadelphia writer?
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Yeah, I mean, I think I did not set out to write another Philly book. Like my.
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You last book was a novel, Housemates, which was set in a kind of communal living situation in West Philly.
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Yes. I was like, I've written my Philly group house novel, but I think Philly just kind of has its hooks in me and I can't seem to get away, which I think is an experience for a lot of people, for one. But yeah, I think I've always been really excited and like nerding out about books that have a geographical center and the characters kind of orbit about that geography. So like Bryan Washington's lot, I love what he does with Houston and the way all the characters kind of orbit around these different neighborhoods of Houston and connect and date each other and hurt each other and go back into their apartments, which are in different parts of town. So even though I wasn't conscious, I think I have always kind of had a soft spot for. For those kinds of books. But I think Philly is. I've been there, like, 15 years now, and Philly is an extremely. I think we're an extremely sensory city. Like, everyone's always yelling at each other. People are sitting outside in the stoop, talking, constantly throwing stuff, chatting, sweating, cursing, whatever. There's a glorious, glorious. I know there's a sense of just like. Like, they grease the poles so that people won't climb them. Like, I think there's just, like. There's a real sense of, like, the public street as a place where stuff happens, I think in Philly, which I'm really interested in. And I think there's also just, like, a. There's an interconnectedness that, like, you've probably experienced being a native Philadelphian, where it's like, anywhere you go, you're like, oh, that person knows my cousin who knows my friend. Like, it's just. You always find someone, you know? And I think that that sense of, like, being linked is very in the book, too. And so I. To me, I think that sort of.
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It helps create a short story collection. Where there's interconnectedness.
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Exactly. I think it's just like, Philly is really interconnected, like, whether you want it to be or not.
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Emma, you have a book coming out, but you also have a billboard. Can you tell us a little bit about the billboard that you took out to. Not just to promote your book, but to convey a plethora of messages. So it's someone in a pool.
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So the figure on the billboard is sort of subtle, if you will.
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Yeah. I didn't notice that there was a
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person there at first. Exactly. Underwater, under pool water.
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Under pool water?
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Yes. It's blue. Has this sort of pool water effect. And then layered underneath the pool water effect is like a voluptuous, naked figure with a very delicious bottom and some fat folds and, like, a stomach that, like, protrudes over the thighs. And the words are, your gut is a terrible thing to lose. And obviously, like, ha, ha, play on. Like, the mind is a terrible thing to waste. But also, with all these messages, it's like, everyone's like, the body keeps the score, and the body knows things that the mind doesn't. And I'm like, hmm. But, like, who am I? Like, am I my body or am I my mind or am I both? Like, no one really has the answer to that. But yeah, I wanted to sort of think about the script idea of like, the gut. Everyone's always like, trust your gut, right? And that's where the wisdom is supposed to live and that's where your most, like, self selfiness is supposed to live. But at the same time, like, our gut is disgusting and something to be lost and made smaller. And I'm like, well, that is a strange contradiction. So I hoped that the, by having that message up there with this kind of sensual, subtle, fat flesh that it would be a way for people to just kind of start to ask that question of like, yeah, what's in the gut? Is it. Is it disgusting and like, morally bankrupt? Or is it all knowing and the root of all the meanness? And if it's both, what does it mean that everyone's trying to lose theirs?
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Thank you so much for being here, Emma.
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D
It was such a delight.
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Emma Copley Eisenberg's new book is called Fat Swim. She spoke with Jennifer Wilson. And you can find Jen's writing, including recent pieces on Elle Fanning and a memoir by Arsenio hall, at newyorker.com and you can subscribe to the New Yorker there as well. New yorker.com I'm David Remnick and that's our program. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
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The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yard with additional music by Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul and Ursula Sommer with guidance from Emily Bottin. And we had assistance this week from Pram Bandy. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment.
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