by Roxane Gay
Reaching for Catharsis:
Getting Fat Right (or Wrong) and Diana Spechler’s Skinny
I went to fat camp once, the summer after my sophomore year in high school. I went to fat camp mostly against my will. I thought I was too old to be going to a camp of any kind. I told myself I wasn’t really fat enough for fat camp. For the three previous years, however, I had been eating everything in sight. Finally, forty pounds heavier, people were beginning to notice. My boyfriend made annoying comments about my moderately expanding hips when we were lying on his twin bed at boarding school. One of my classmates said, “Damn, girl,” when she noticed an extra shake in my ass.
I would come home for holiday breaks, and my parents noticed a new roundness to my figure. They did not approve. They gave me all kinds of advice about exercising self-control and eating properly. Moderation, my father would say, is the key to everything. “Moderation” is pretty much his favorite word. My parents meant well. They worried because I had always been thin, kind of lanky, and then I wasn’t. There was an incident with some boys in the woods, and suddenly, I was stuffing my face with Twinkies or ordering a pizza late at night, trying to fill this ragged, ugly thing inside me that couldn’t be filled or quieted. I ignored my parents and their worry entirely. All I wanted to do was eat. My body grew, became more significant, more noticeable and more invisible at the same time. Most important, though, the bigger I made my body, the safer I felt. Bad things, I’d decided years earlier, could not happen to big bodies. I was not necessarily incorrect in my thinking. Eating was, in part, a survival instinct.
I was reminded of my stint at fat camp as I read Diana Spechler’s Skinny. I mostly read this book because I am not skinny. The novel tells the story of Gray Lachmann, a woman in her twenties who runs away to work as a fat camp counselor in North Carolina while grieving her father, who has died. There’s a complex history between Gray and her father, from whom she was estranged prior to his death. For tenuous reasons, she blames herself for her father’s passing. When she runs away to fat camp in North Carolina, Gray leaves behind a longtime boyfriend in New York, Mikey, a comedian who loves her, and a mother who also has a troubled relationship with food.
Despite everything she leaves behind, Gray neglects to abandon her lifelong obsession with her body and being skinny and binge eating. At the fat camp, run by an incompetent group of people who have no business looking after anyone’s children, let alone fat campers, Gray has ample opportunity to continue to indulge her unhealthy behaviors. She has ample time to try to satisfy her own ragged hungers. She makes halfhearted attempts to bond with the campers even though they much prefer the time and attentions of Sheena, the younger, “cool” counselor. When Gray sees problems with the campers, she tries to bring them to the attention of the camp director, Lewis. Given how woefully unsuited she is to the task of serving as a camp counselor, she does as well as can be expected. Gray isn’t that different from most summer camp counselors.
There are other things going on in Skinny beyond grief and self-loathing and Gray trying to regain control over her body. Gray believes she has a half sister, a camper named Eden whom Gray found via the Internet after she was appointed as the executor of her father’s estate and learned that a sum of money was bequeathed to Eden’s mother. Gray spends the summer trying to insert herself into Eden’s good graces with little luck because Eden is a teenager and teenagers are often hard to get close to. Though she has a boyfriend back in New York, Gray also begins a complicated affair with Bennett, the camp’s physical trainer, who is not really a physical trainer. None of the camp’s staff members, in fact, are at all prepared to fill the roles they’ve been assigned, but they make do, unless they don’t. Bennett is very physically fit and so Gray’s obsession with her body only intensifies as she tries to whittle her body down to nothing but bone.
She spends her nights sneaking off to see Bennett, using sex to forget about her exhausting interior monologue. She spends her days trying to make herself beautiful, as if through beauty she will find happiness. “I spent my free periods doing important things: folding Crest Whitestrips over my teeth, rubbing self-tanner into my breasts, trying on my jeans that were now too big, rolling the waistband down to admire the jut of my hipbones.” The book is almost hypnotic in how intimately we are immersed in Gray’s self-absorption. At one point, Bennett and Gray are having a conversation and he says, “It’s like you’re . . . I don’t know, in love with yourself,” and she replies, “Self-absorption is different from self-love.”
The camp I attended was nestled in the Berkshire Mountains on what I was told were beautiful grounds, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder and beauty I did not behold. I thought the camp was the worst place on earth. I went there for six expensive, excruciating weeks. It was hot and there was no air-conditioning. We had to walk everywhere and there were great distances between all the buildings. The cabins were high on a hill, and when I say “hill,” what I really mean is “mountain.” If you wanted to change clothes or lie down for a minute or if, God forbid, you forgot something in your bunk, you had to scale the fat camp kid’s version of Everest. It was exhausting, which was, I suppose, the point. We spent a cruel amount of time outdoors, hiking and swimming and being eaten by mosquitoes. The weigh-ins were a humiliating affair where you removed your shoes and stepped on the scale and held your breath as the director kept sliding whatever those things are called back and forth until the scale settled on your weight. If you did well, you were congratulated and encouraged to do better. If you didn’t do well, you received a stern lecture and a disappointed look. None of the campers really gave a damn one way or the other because kids at fat camp don’t care about being really fat or sort of fat or on the verge of fat. Their parents do.
Like at most summer camps, in addition to all the exercise and dieting, there were activity nights and we wrote letters home and we gossiped and hooked up. You know what I really learned at fat camp? I learned how to smoke. I fell madly in love with smoking. I learned how to make myself throw up. I learned how to stand on the edges of the scale to throw my weight off a little. After the younger kids had their curfew, most of the counselors, a motley crew of college students not much older than us, some of whom had once been campers themselves, would gather behind one of the cabins to drink and smoke and make out.
When we hovered around their circle, the counselors rarely protested and often encouraged us to join in the fun. There is a certain thrill in corruption even though, for most of us, our corruptions had started long before we arrived at camp. The first cigarette I ever smoked was a Benson & Hedges menthol. I felt like quite the sophisticate sitting on a log, inhaling deeply, exhaling slowly, pretending I had been smoking for years. The habit would stay with me for the next eighteen years, so in some ways, fat camp had a very lasting effect.
It makes perfect sense that many of us obsess over our bodies. There is nothing more inescapable. Our bodies moves us through our lives. They bring pleasure and pain. Sometimes our bodies serve us well, and other times our bodies become terribly inconvenient. There are times when our bodies betray us or our bodies are betrayed by others. I think about my body all the time—how it looks, how it feels, how I can make it smaller, what I should put into it, what I am putting into it, what has been done to it, what I do to it, what I let others do to it. This bodily preoccupation is exhausting. There is no one more self-absorbed than a fat person, and Skinny exposes just how obsessive people are when they are unhappy with their bodies. This is not to say all fat people are unhappy with their bodies, but many are. Most of my friends are equally obsessive even though they are thin—hating themselves or specific parts of themselves: their arms, their thighs, their chins, their ankles. They do crazy diets and starve themselves and run themselves ragged trying to maintain some semblance of control over things that are somewhat out of our control. I don’t think I know any woman who doesn’t hate herself and her body at least a little bit. Bodily obsession is, perhaps, a human
condition because of its inescapability.
Skinny speaks well to how inescapable our bodies really are and how easy it is to lose control. As the summer progresses, Gray becomes, for all intents and purposes, anorexic. What starts as a desire to lose excess weight becomes a singular focus. She takes to eating nothing and exercising all the time, running, doing aerobics, pushing herself to extremes, reveling in the dramatic way her body changes, with jutting bones everywhere and loose clothing and the airy high of starvation. When Gray is having sex with Bennett, she marvels at how athletic and fit they both are and how their bodies fit together:
I would straddle him, kneeling, holding the handles of his ears. Or I would lean all the way back, my spine arched, my hair spreading over his feet. Or I would lie supine as he knelt above me, his legs as sturdy as Corinthian columns, my head hanging off the edge of the bed, a heel on each of his shoulders.
Gray drowns herself in her affair with Bennett so she can avoid confronting herself or her grief. Their relationship is born, primarily, of opportunity. Gray thinks about her boyfriend, Mikey, occasionally but shows little remorse for how she betrays the man who loves her and how she betrays herself. She is grieving, after all, and in grief, there is a certain amount of indulgence for bad behavior. Sorrow allows us a freedom happiness does not. As Gray’s body thins, the writing soars with euphoria, almost as if the writer herself feels freer.
I enjoyed Skinny because it reminded me of the misery of fat camp and because it’s rare to read well-written fiction about matters of size. At the same time, I struggled with this book. It was hard to take Gray seriously because she clearly wasn’t that overweight. The body is a personal territory and every person’s weight struggle should be taken seriously, but there’s overweight and there’s overweight. If you’re the latter, it is difficult to take the former seriously, right or wrong. No one who shops at Lane Bryant or the Avenue or Catherines is going to feel empathy for someone who is thirty pounds overweight. It’s not going to happen. There are two significant weaknesses with this book, and the way thirty pounds of excess weight is treated like it is three hundred pounds of excess weight is one of them.
It can be hard, at times, to separate the writer from the writing. I didn’t know anything about Diana Spechler prior to reading Skinny. After reading the book, I used Google’s image search to see if she was fat. I was curious to see if she wrote from experience or if she was writing what she imagined to be the interior life of a fat person. I have to believe I am not the only one who did this. I know better, I do, but I couldn’t help myself. Photographic evidence reveals that Diana Spechler is a gorgeous, thin woman with long hair. She may not have always been this way. Her appearance does not matter, but it does. It matters because we’re talking about bodies and fat and the petty betrayals of the flesh.
In graduate school, a classmate said she took a book about race more seriously when she learned a white woman wrote the book. I wanted to slam that woman’s face into the table because it offended me, to my core, that she thought a white woman deserved more respect and held more authority for broaching complex issues of race. I thought of that day with a tiny bit more understanding as I read Skinny and was willing to take the book more seriously if it had been written by a really fat woman, someone corpulent, wallowing in rolls of flesh, someone who would truly know what being fat is like, the overwhelming omnipresence of it, and be able to write that experience authentically. I wanted a lot from this book and its writer. I chose to ignore the ways in which I know better.
In Skinny, Gray has gained the thirty pounds that distress her so much because her father is dead. There’s more to the story, but the most immediate explanation for Gray’s weight concerns is grief. When it comes to fat, there has to be a reason. We need to be able to trace the genealogy of obesity. Without that genealogy, we are simply mystified. People need an explanation for how a person can lose such control over her body. They want to know if you come from a fat family or if you have some kind of medical condition or if you are simply weak and really love food that much. In Skinny, we see some of the genealogy of Gray’s fat but, perhaps, not enough for the story to feel as credible as it should.
I watch all the televised fat-shaming porn as penance and motivation—The Biggest Loser and Ruby and Heavy, some of those off-brand fat people shows on lesser cable channels, and recently Extreme Makeover: Fat People Edition. It is perversely thrilling to see the gorgeous, perfectly fit trainers yelling at and shaming the fat contestants until their vocal cords bleed, shaming the fat people into working out for eight hours a day while consuming only twelve hundred calories so the fat people can become an instantly gratificatory success story, however temporary that success might be. At some point in each episode, the trainers or the producers will get shallowly psychological with the contestants, trying to figure out why the contestants weigh 280 pounds, 357 pounds, or nearly 600 pounds, trying to uncover the fat genealogy as if all it takes to solve a weight problem is a tearful, heartfelt conversation about what went wrong or who did wrong and when and why.
There are dead husbands and dead babies and divorced parents and absent fathers and terrible abuse and all the painful things that happen to a person and the body over the course of a lifetime, the kinds of things that can be appeased, or at least numbed in part, by a quart of cold ice cream or the hot, melted cheese of a pizza. Sometimes the contestants say, “I don’t know how I got this way,” but they do. There’s always a reason. Jillian Michaels, one of the Biggest Loser trainers, loves to force her contestants into dramatic catharses. It makes for good television. In Skinny, you get the sense that Gray is reaching for catharsis too. She’s pushing herself in every way she possibly can to reach some kind of emotional breakthrough. I’m not sure she ever quite finds it.
Sometimes, a bold, sort of callous person will ask me how I got so fat. They want to know the why. “You’re so smart,” they say, as if stupidity is the only explanation for obesity. And of course, there’s that bit about having such a pretty face, what a shame it is to waste it. I never know what to tell these people. There is the truth, certainly. This thing happened and then this other thing happened and it was terrible and I knew I didn’t want either of those things to happen again and eating felt safe. French fries are delicious and I’m naturally lazy too so that didn’t help. I never know what I’m supposed to say, so I mostly say nothing. I don’t share my catharsis with these inquisitors.
Throughout Skinny, Gray writes letters to fat people. These letters, which the campers also have to write, are an opportunity for soul-searching and truth-telling and all that. Anyone who has spent time in therapy is familiar with the tool of letter writing as a step toward healing. Fat is about the mind more than it is about the body, isn’t it? Lewis, the camp director, wants the campers to write these letters to fat people to explain why they hate fat people. “You all hate fat people,” Lewis declares. These letters are the first step, he says, to help the campers accept their bodies and begin to change their bodies. The letters are full of the cruelties (or truths?) everyone thinks about fat people.
For example, Gray writes, “Excuses are worthless. Either change your life, stop slinging blame, stop stuffing food into the cracks in your heart, or give yourself over to the shortened, uncomfortable, sweaty life of the obese.” These letters are clearly supposed to add something to the narrative. They are deliberate, didactic moments. They get the job done in that you can’t help but have a reaction, but the novel would have worked just as well, or even better, without these interludes, so you have to wonder why they were included. The letters are somewhat forced, like those shallowly psychological moments in extreme weight-loss television programming, as if the letters are intended as opportunities for the reader to reach a cathartic place too, for the reader to nod and say, “Yes, I think these things about fat people too,” so they might ultimately reach a place of empathy and understanding.
At times, these letters feel hollow and indulgent because they seem t
o be written by a skinny person imagining only one possible existence for a fat person, imagining that the fat life is somehow markedly different from the skinny life. It is but it isn’t, save that the wardrobe of the skinny is generally better and the people around you are generally kinder.
There’s a letter where Gray writes, “Dear Fat People, I see you in motorized wheelchairs, in bus seats that don’t accommodate you. I see you taking breaks when you walk, pretending to admire the scenery.” I recognize what’s going on in that letter. I’m fat but I have eyes and I judge people too. The other day I was in a clothing store, and there were three very fat people on motorized carts congregating near the cash register, laughing merrily, and I thought, How can they be so happy when they are immobile? Then I felt guilty. I considered all the terrible things people must think when they judge me. We’re all complicit in these matters, and these letters function, in part, to remind us of that complicity.
It’s not that I expected these letters, or even this novel, to address the full spectrum of the fat experience. Is that even a thing? It’s more that the letters speak to the lowest common denominator, nothing more. It’s disappointing that Gray cannot possibly imagine that perhaps some fat people have amazing, athletic sex, just like she does. Perhaps they aren’t sitting around miserably stuffing their faces next to someone who doesn’t love them. Earlier, I noted that there were two weaknesses in this book—the implausibility of all this drama over a mere thirty pounds of excess weight and, of course, these Dear Fat People letters. Really, though, these issues are symptoms of the same weakness. It’s as if the author’s understanding of fat people is such that the fattest she could imagine Gray as still desirable and interesting to Mikey, to Bennett, to the reader, is with only thirty pounds of excess weight. This book would have been stunningly improved if Gray were a hundred pounds overweight, maybe more, but I got the sense that the writer was afraid to go there. The Dear Fat People letters are purportedly from Gray, but as the book goes on, you get the impression they are actually from the author herself confessing her sins, reaching for catharsis from within her own personal prejudices about fat.