Such a pretty fat: one narcissist's quest to discover if her life makes her ass look big

by Jen Lancaster

  “I’ll get another job in a heartbeat.”

  “Ha! Where have I heard that before?”71

  Fletch counters, “Things are very different now. We have resources . . . my 401(k), an IRA, stocks, et cetera. And I’m getting ten recruiter calls a week.” He adds, smiling, “Plus we have our ‘savings account.’ ” (Which is actually a big beer pitcher full of quarters.)

  I pull up our online bank account and examine the balances. “There’s no reason to burn these resources unnecessarily, and I guarantee none of this”—I point at the screen—“will last as long as you think. We pledged we’d never cash in our ‘savings’ at the Coinstar again.”

  Fletch says nothing, scanning the figures over my shoulder. I continue, “Make them fire you or lay you off, because you can’t walk out of there on principle alone without what’s due to you. Otherwise, you’ll have left your phone company job in vain, and if I have to worry about income, I’m going to inevitably eat so much, we’ll need the jaws of life to break me out of this house. Am I making sense here?”

  Fletch nods slowly. “Yeah, you’re right. Walking out is a bad idea, but after the day I had, it seemed like a reasonable alternative.”

  “Whatever’s bothering you now is going to get worse because they want you to check out voluntarily.”

  Fletch looks thoughtful. “Honestly, it’s probably just a matter of a couple of weeks anyway. I’m guessing they’ll do a big purge before they get stuck paying out commissions at the end of the month. I’ve already packed up almost everything, so I’m ready to be cut loose as soon as they give the word.”

  I give him a quick pat on the head. “You always do the right thing.” I close the window for my banking information and return to what I’d been doing.

  Fletch lies back down on the bed and closes his eyes for a couple of minutes, deep in thought. “Hey, wait a minute.” He sits back up. “If money’s such a concern, shouldn’t this be a team effort?”

  “Of course.” I nod. “That’s why I’m working on my novel.”

  “The Veronica Mars meets The Net thing? How’s it coming? Did you send the synopsis to your agent?”

  “Yeah, and Kate said she dug the premise. And I could so easily convert it to a screenplay.”

  “Nice. How much progress have you made?”

  I squirm a bit. “Enough.” Fletch totally supports my writing career, although he normally doesn’t read my stuff. I bounce almost all my ideas off of him, but he says he’s already lived everything I describe, so there’s no need for the blow by blow. He’s right, except he may not realize I, um, adopt some72of his funniest lines and attribute them to myself.

  “Can I hear what you have?” he asks.

  Uh-oh.

  I shift uncomfortably in my seat. “It’s, um, really rough. And since when do you want to know about the details? You always say you’re a big-picture guy.”

  “Maybe I’ll bring a different perspective.”

  “Sure, OK, but it’s so, so rough. You should wait until it’s more polished.”

  “Jen, I’m familiar with your writing process. It’s a rough draft, which means your draft? Will be rough. I’m curious to see how you work in the network security aspect of the story.”

  "I’m ... not really there yet.”

  “Then how did you explain about the protagonist being a hacker? Everything hinges on that plot point, right?”

  I am so freaking pwn3d right now.

  “Err . . . still fleshing that bit out.”

  He begins to look suspicious. “And the mystery surrounding her family?”

  I pluck my T-shirt out of my armpits because I’ve started to sweat. Hard. “Oh, yeah . . . that bit of exposition isn’t appropriate to address yet.”

  “Then read me the part where she gets busted by the NSA.”

  Straws. Me. Grasping.

  I bolt out of my desk chair. “Dogs! Maisy! Loki! Who wants to go outside? Huh? Who needs to make a potty? Oops, no; I can’t read it now; the dogs haven’t been out in hours. OK, guys; let’s go!” Both of them gaze languidly at me from their side-by-side position on the guest bed, barely thumping their tails.

  Fucking traitors.

  Fletch narrows his eyes. “Have you even finished a chapter yet?”

  “Ha! Of course!” I squawk. “Of course I have! Not completed a chapter? That’s crazy talk! You know what we should do? We should go buy you a new belt. You love belts, and you’ve been bitching that your oxblood-colored one is getting ratty. Let’s go to Coach! Right now! Belts! Yes! You had a terrible day and deserve something extraspecial.” I dash over to my closet to put on shoes. “Ready!” I grab his arm and try to pull him off the bed.

  “Jen.” His voice becomes very serious. “How much have you done?”

  “Plenty!” I giggle nervously. “Good and plenty! Like the candy!”

  His patience has worn thin, and he looks me directly in the eye. “Is this book going to be ready to send to editors in the next month? Otherwise, if tapping into our reserves is going to give you palpitations, and you don’t have any writing to sell, the most logical solution is that you start temping again, at least for a short while.”

  I gasp so hard, I suck all the air out of the room. Noooooo!

  “Now, are you gonna show me what you’ve got?”

  Very, very slowly I pull up the Word document, temporarily titled Jen Rocks Fiction. With a heavy heart, I click it open. “Keep in mind, the opening line can make or break a book, so it’s got to kick serious ass.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Really, would A Tale of Two Cities be the same without ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’?”

  He leans back against the dogs and they respond by licking his cheeks with much enthusiasm. Suck-ups. If you little bastards think we’re going on walkies later, think again. “Yes.”

  “But you don’t disagree it’s important. If I were to say, ‘Call me Ishmael,’ you’d know in a heartbeat I meant Moby-Dick , right?”

  “Is this a quiz? ’Cause if you say, ‘Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die,’ the answer is Fight Club. Quit stalling. We’ve established the importance of an opening line. Move on to the part where you read me what you’ve got.”

  I clear my throat. “This is the scene where the heroine is getting ready for a big job interview at the college placement office. So here goes: ‘I look like Donald Rumsfeld in this out fit.’ ” I stop to gauge his approval.

  He chuckles. “I like it; it’s very you. Continue.”

  I was hoping he wouldn’t say that.

  “Um . . . that’s . . . that’s kind of all I have right now. But it’s superintriguing, right? People will want to know what’s next.”

  “You’ve been writing for three months, and all you have is one line? In three months? One line?” He’s not mad so much as incredulous.

  “It’s a really good line,” I insist. “And fiction is a lot different than nonfiction. With nonfiction I just have to describe the scenes as they happen around me, and the pages sort of write themselves. With fiction I have to make everything up.”

  He glances down at his fingers. “So far you’ve made up eight words.”

  “Yet the story has taken shape nicely in my head.”

  “Then it’s a shame the oral storytelling tradition is dead or you’d be all set. What have you been doing up here? I thought you were working all this time. You spend hours, no, days on this computer. Tell me you haven’t pissed away three months playing Big Kahuna Reef.”73

  “Don’t be silly. I’ve done all sorts of stuff. I’ve been very busy dieting. And, um, researching what I need to know about her character,” I bristle.

  Fletch leans over me to pull up my cache of Web sites, and I watch him scan the list, his eyebrows going higher and higher with each line he reads. By the time he gets to the end, they’ve practically disappeared into his hairlin
e. “Really? Because it seems like you’ve mostly been cruising YouTube. How can you sit there and lecture me on what I should be doing to support this household when you’re doing nothing but watching a goddamn panda sneeze?”

  I’m silent for a minute because he’s completely right, so I have to level with him. “The truth is, I really tried to do something with this novel, but I’ve been so hungry that every time I began to type I ended up with a fourteen-page ‘Ode to the Oreo.’ I’d talk about how my character opened the bag and how the smell of chocolate cookie practically smacked her in the face. And then I’d describe grabbing a pitcher of milk—ooh, whole milk—and how it would pour out all cool and smooth and rich, and then she’d twist open two Double Stufs, toss away the clean sides, and stack the other two together to make her signature ‘Quad Stuff.’ Then she’d dunk this heady concoction, this Mother of All Oreos, into the cold milk, and she’d pop the delectable bite into her mouth and—”

  “You’re doing it again.”

  “No, I’m explaining where my time went. I’d write all this ridiculous stuff about cookies, and then I wanted to actually see someone eat Oreos—”

  “Sort of like watching food porn?”

  “Exactly! So I Googled Oreo commercials, and a bunch of them were on YouTube, and I’d never really been to YouTube before, and you would not believe the shit they’ve got there! Dogs on skateboards! Cats falling off televisions! And, of course, sneezing pandas. I, um, kind of got distracted, but the good news is, it got me to stop thinking about cookies, which is why I was able to write such a great opening line. If you think about it, finding the sneezing panda was a good thing.”

  He kisses me briefly on the forehead. “The reality is, if we want to keep our safety net, we don’t have time for you to be a temperamental artist, scanning the ‘interwebs’ to be inspired by pandas with sinusitis. I know the deal was, you’d stay home, write, and run the household, but our situation has changed.”

  I know when I’ve been defeated. “I’m not going to argue because I can’t. You’re right, and . . . the possibility exists I’ve been taking advantage of the situation.”

  “Maybe there’s a compromise here?” He looks thoughtful for a moment. “I’d say you haven’t been properly motivated. You do much better with a deadline. How many times have your manuscripts been late?”

  "Never.”74

  “Could be a hard-and-fast end date is what you need. How about we agree that if you don’t have something to show Kate by the time my company lays me off, you return to temping until I start working again?”

  My natural charm is not going to get me out of this. “I have no grounds to say no deal, do I?”

  “Not a one.”

  “But it took me months to come up with the opening line. How am I supposed to finish a whole novel in the next few weeks?”

  “Perhaps”—he smirks—“Jen Rocks Fiction isn’t the book you work on next. What about nonfiction? Don’t you have any more neighborhood stories to tell?”

  “Not unless someone new moves in.” Because it’s winter, things have been kind of quiet around the ’hood. Maybe a little too quiet.

  “Well, what else do you have? Didn’t your friend suggest you do a book about dieting?”

  “Yeah . . . great idea, but that seems like a whole lot of work. If I wrote it, I’d actually have to lose the weight, and it would be a struggle not to lapse into the Oreo Zone again. Don’t get me wrong. I want to be thinner and healthier—I’m just not sure I should stake my whole writing career on my ability to avoid Ding Dongs. After all, Atkins has been a holy disaster, and so far all I’ve done is messed up my metabolism and discovered I have a penchant for cookie-snuff films.”

  “Let me ask you this—would you rather arrange travel and fetch coffee for some random executive or write a book about losing weight?”

  “Can’t it be neither?”

  “No.”

  “Then it’s a tough call.”

  “Well, at least mull the book thing over.” He stands up and brushes the dog fur off his wool pants. “Listen, I’m going to go change so I can hit the gym and work out some of this tension. Are you coming? Here’s a perfect opportunity for you to test your mettle.”

  “Um, maybe next time?”

  “All right. I’m going.” As he heads down the hall, he calls, “And stop watching that damn panda video.”

  A-choo!

  Too late.

  Pretty Fat Memoir Proposal

  by Jen Lancaster

  It’s time to stop sweating while I eat.

  It’s time to stop driving one block to Starbucks.

  It’s time to stop having cookies for dinner.

  It’s time to stop promising to go to the gym instead of actually going.

  It’s time to stop treating my body like a fraternity party.

  In Pretty Fat, I will do all of the above.

  (If it doesn’t kill me first.)

  I’m so tired of books where a self-loathing heroine is teased to the point where she starves herself skinny in hopes of a fabulous new life. And I hate the message that women can’t possibly be happy until we’re all size fours. I don’t find these stories uplifting; rather, I want to hug these women and take them out for fizzy champagne drinks and cheesecake and explain to them that until they figure out their insides, their outsides don’t matter.

  Unfortunately, being overweight isn’t simply a societal issue that can be solved by positive self-esteem. Rather, it’s a health matter, and here on the eve of my fortieth year, I’ve learned I have to make changes so I don’t, you know, die. Because what good is finally being able to afford a pedicure if I lose a foot to adult-onset diabetes?

  LANCASTER—PRETTY FAT PROPOSAL

  CHAPTER NINE

  It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

  OK, maybe I could write a book about trying to lose weight if for no other reason than the idea of putting on panty hose and answering someone else’s phone fills my stomach hose and answering someone else’s phone fills my stomach with dread. Writing a book is a good idea, really, because I’d be forced to stick with a healthier way of life.

  Here’s the thing—no one is better than me at starting a project. But without an impending deadline, I’m awful at finishing anything. My basement is a testament to my short attention span. Shelves are stacked high with every hobby and habit I’ve ever abandoned. Decorative tiles and colorful grout from my mosaic phase share shelf space with skeins of yarn and various poke-y sticks from my knitting days. Next to them are Rollerblades still spotted with blood from my wobbly kneecaps and a dozen new-puppy manuals with their covers chewed off from my brief (and spectacularly unsuccessful) foray into dog training. Currently collecting dust are a sewing machine and a squash racquet—I told you I didn’t chase balls—and course work from the week I decided I’d become a Realtor. There are stacks of Spanish-language CDs that I quickly abandoned once I decided it would be easier if everyone else simply learned to speak English. (And don’t even get me started about the ten thousand diet cookbooks and exercise tapes I own.)

  As evidenced by my experience with Atkins, I quit whenever things get hard or boring. The only way I know to achieve success is to back myself into a corner. For example, I waited tables in college and depended on tips to pay my bills. I also hated being a waitress, so every chance I got, I volunteered to go home early, except when I’d get to the end of the month and rent was due. On those nights, I’d drop a kited check off at my landlord’s office. During my shift, I knew I wasn’t allowed to take off for the evening until I’d earned enough to cover the amount of the check I’d written. This obligation pushed me to upsell liquor and to work the dessert tray like my shelter depended on it. Because it did.

  Honestly, the only reason I’ve completed two books is that they both sold based on a proposal, rather than a full manuscript. My obligation is what drove me to put words on pages, not just blind inspiration. Left to my own devices, it’s pretty clear I’d have neve
r gotten past the opening lines of “Camille said you stole a bag from a homeless guy” and “Carrie Bradshaw is a fucking liar.” If I were to propose a book about losing weight and it sold, I’d have to do it because I care too much about my career not to. My work ethic would motivate me to get healthy in a way that doctor’s orders and vanity never have.

  Also, writing a book beats the hell out of fetching coffee.

  So there’s that.

  I could do this, especially since I’ve been way more successful in the gym lately, having added carbs back into my diet. I’ve really been pushing myself, so I’d wager I could physically handle the kind of work I’d have to put in for a book. Shoot; I’ve even worked out three times this week!75With sweating and everything! I still desperately loathe the elliptical machine, but the effort has been easier ever since I bought an iPod.

  Stacey suggested I load my iPod with audio books. She works out with them and says they help her mind disengage from all the “suck and hate” her body feels while doing cardio. I followed suit, and it was a good idea at first, but I found myself bawling during a particularly poignant moment in Joshilyn Jackson’s Between, Georgia while doing tricep curls.

  Fearing another emotional outburst, I tapped into the iTunes library. Dear God, this service is more addictive than Swiss chocolate and Internet porn served together in a Tetris-covered waffle cone.76I’ve since created the perfect mix of music to keep me going at the gym; it lasts about an hour, building at the beginning and slowing at the end. Were this list to be made public, the entire world would listen to it while getting fit and I would single-handedly destroy the diet industry, and then a lot of people would lose their jobs, and I don’t want that to happen, so please don’t share the following unless you want to be responsible for wrecking the economy, OK?