Skinny

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to all the folks at Harper Perennial and ICM. Special thanks to Jeanette Perez for her brilliance and support, and to my incomparable super-agent Kate Lee. Thanks to Cristina Henriquez and Aryn Kyle, cherished readers and confidantes, and to Chris Iacono, my portal into the New York stand-up circuit. Endless love and gratitude to my friends and family.

  P.S.

  Insights, Interviews & More . . .

  About the author

  A Conversation with Diana Spechler

  1. How did the idea for the plot of Skinny first come to you?

  At some point in my early adulthood, it occurred to me that most people I knew had body-image issues or unhealthy relationships with food. People are shackled to sugar or salt or GNC or plastic surgery or their skinny jeans or their elastic-waistband sweatpants. Roomfuls of bodies sit on stationary bikes and pedal nowhere, drenched in sweat. We eat a casual handful of M&M’s, and then can’t stop looking at the M&M bowl. We weigh ourselves five times a day or have never been on a scale. We call women whose bodies we envy “anorexic,” and people with weight problems “lazy.” We push seconds and thirds on our loved ones. We eat ice cream that makes us sick and then chase it with Lactaid. We count calories. We count fat grams. We deprive ourselves of carbohydrates until our bodies produce ketones and our mouths taste like nail polish remover. Finally, we binge on croissants. We avoid mirrors. We worship mirrors. We raid the fridge in the middle of the night. We buy Spanx. We celebrate with cake. We drink protein shakes. We Photoshop. Just on the other side of all this effort is a lot of pain. I felt desperate to explore it. Because weight-loss camps are microcosms of the racket that is the diet industry, I thought I should infiltrate one. So I worked at a weight-loss camp for ten weeks. Skinny is based partly on that experience.

  2. Writers often talk about the difficulty of writing their second novel due to their audience’s expectations or perhaps publisher demands. Did you find starting and finishing Skinny was tough for you at all since it’s a sophomore effort?

  After I wrote Who by Fire, I was asked a number of times if I thought of myself as a “Jewish writer.” Although I don’t really consider myself any particular kind of writer, I did worry at times during the writing process that Skinny wasn’t Jewish enough. But I think I was projecting my own insecurities onto my book because I worry that I’m not Jewish enough. There is Judaism in Skinny, but mostly it’s a book about food and body image, not about Judaism. So I thought I might disappoint people. That gave me pause now and then. Sometimes those pauses distracted me.

  3. Judaism and, more important, its role in your characters’ lives have influenced the plot in both your books. Are you religious? How does religion help you build a character or story?

  Currently, I’m not religious, a fact that is directly connected with my upbringing, my education, my attachments and resentments and life experience. Religion has always intrigued me, less ideologically than anthropologically. What a person believes or doesn’t believe, how vociferously he asserts his beliefs, how he responds to others’ beliefs, and whether or not his stated beliefs contradict his actions provide priceless insight into his character.

  4. Both of your books include scenes in which the female characters use sex or perhaps distract themselves with sex in order to deal with other issues in their lives. How does sexuality help you to mold your characters?

  When I write, my goal is to make my characters rub up against each other (both emotionally and physically) intensely enough to create friction. I’m sort of a sadistic matchmaker.

  Sex can be a powerful, fleeting, often dangerous bond. I do mean “dangerous” in the obvious, high school health class sense—that sex can result in unwanted pregnancies and diseases—but I also mean that people do crazy things for sex, and that sex can make people crazy. It can make one person fall in love and make the other repulsed. It can make strangers speak freely about their darkest desires, sometimes in voices unlike their own. Most of all, sex can be a vice, a distraction from the parts of life that hurt us. I’m interested in what happens when vices stop working—when our zealotry is challenged; when cigarettes stop calming us; when food can’t satisfy us; when we need alcohol not to feel better, but to function.

  5. Your first book, Who by Fire, examined the guilt felt by a family after their youngest sibling and daughter goes missing. Skinny examines the guilt Gray feels after losing her father. What attracts you to stories about blame and guilt?

  One of my pet peeves is that cliché about guilt being “a pointless emotion.” Intellectually, I understand that guilt can be pointless or even self-destructive, but so what? Everyone grapples with it, so it deserves to be written about. Besides, what’s wrong with engaging in something pointless? I lie awake in the middle of the night, wishing I could sleep. That’s pointless. So is paying for the brand name instead of the generic. So is the Magic Eight Ball. So is that game the guys from my high school played at parties—throwing beer bottle caps into cups of warm beer. So is wishing on a star. Farmville. The Macarena. But we all do the Macarena sometimes.

  6. Do you have any writing rituals? Or perhaps any vices that help you get through the process of writing a novel?

  Coffee, yoga, crying, running, trusting the process, hating the process, wishing I were a different kind of writer, shielding my ego, ignoring my ego, rewriting, rewriting, rewriting.

  7. If you were not a writer, what would be your dream job?

  The alternate careers that pop into my head excite me solely because I’d like to write about them—handwriting analyst, astronaut, pimp. But if writing were off the table, none of them would interest me much.

  8. Who are some of your writing influences?

  I am influenced by countless writers. I love so many, and who’s exerting the most influence changes all the time. A few writers that accompanied me while I was writing Skinny were Aimee Bender, Robert Boswell (particularly the title story in his collection The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards), Antonya Nelson, and Amy Bloom.

  9. When you are writing, do you have a particular audience in mind? Are you writing for someone in particular?

  I write most passionately and prolifically when I have a muse, but muses come along rarely, and they never stick around. They often take the form of someone whose approval I long for, someone I feel a little bit in love with from afar. Because I can never sustain that dynamic, the best, most reliable substitute is fiction. I always keep short story collections that I love near my computer. I page through them when I’m looking for inspiration. In a way, I’m writing for those writers, or to those writers.

  Meet Diana Spechler

  DIANA SPECHLER is the author of the novel Who by Fire. She has written for the New York Times, GQ, Esquire, Details.com, Nerve.com, Glimmer Train Stories, Moment, and Lilith, among other publications. She received her MFA degree from the University of Montana and was a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University. She lives in New York City.

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  About the book

  Ten of My Favorite Not-Entirely-Likable Protagonists

  by Diana Spechler

  IT MADE ME SELF-CONSCIOUS, writing a novel about a woman who feels fat, but isn’t. What’s more annoying than that girl? Ugh. So it occurred to me that some people might not like my protagonist, Gray Lachmann. At times, I didn’t. But I love many unlikable protagonists. I’ve compiled a list of some of them. My hope is that Gray, who condemns overweight people, who’s a little self-absorbed, a little whiny, and maybe a little delusional, is in good company.

  1. Humbert Humbert of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita

  What would a list of controversial protagonists be without Humbert Humbert at the top? When Lolita was published, readers liked Humbert Humbert so much, they felt ashamed. At least, that’s my theory on why the book was banned, and on why the prettiest girl in high school is always labeled a slut, and on w
hy it’s trendy to rail against McDonald’s. (Well, maybe that last one is an oversimplification.) Even Nabokov wanted to divorce himself from Humbert Humbert, calling Lolita’s themes “so distant, so remote, from my own emotional life that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinational talent to make it real.” Incidentally, I find Nabokov’s claim questionable, mostly because who besides Nabokov would casually drop the word “combinational”? No one, except Humbert Humbert.

  2. The unnamed narrator of Tobias Wolff’s Old School

  He’s a plagiarizer. Yet he’s vulnerable and hungry in the most human ways. When he gets caught, and life as he knows it is about to crumble around him, he notes, “During our worst dreams we are assured by a dog barking somewhere, a refrigerator motor kicking on, that we will soon wake to true life.”

  3. Lee Fiora of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep

  She has no social graces. She’s lazy. She’s ungrateful. She’s rude to her parents. She underachieves. But she’s hilarious and authentic. I read this book as soon as it came out, and have often thought of Lee since. I remember her the way I remember old friends. And I love her particular sense of nostalgia: “Did we believe we could pick and choose what passed quickly? Today, even the boring parts, even when it was freezing outside and half the girls were barefoot—all of it was a long time ago.”

  4. Holden Caulfield of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye

  Apparently, I love boarding school novels and their entitled protagonists. Why should we feel sympathy for a privileged teenager who gets expelled from his elite prep school? Because he’s Holden, and as readers, we get so deep inside his head, we’re thinking his thoughts with him, seeing things as he sees them, and his worldview is convincing and timeless: “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

  5. Arthur Camden of Michael Dahlie’s A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living

  This is a novel about a wealthy older man whose wife has left him. He is socially inept and is the butt of every joke, but he doesn’t quite know it. He has horrendous judgment. He steals and gets caught. He accidentally burns down a house. He leaves the country and runs into trouble with the French police. And if I knew him in person, I can imagine everyone saying about him, “But he means well!” That’s the tragedy of him, and what makes him lovable.

  6. Alex of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange

  Alex is a classic sociopath, inflicting the worst sorts of harm on others, showing no remorse. But how can anyone hate the narrator who says things like, “The Korova milkbar sold milk-plus, milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom, which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultraviolence”?

  7. Siddhartha of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha

  Admitting to liking this book, and this protagonist, makes me feel like a college boy with a lava lamp and a crush on my Introduction to World Religions professor. In fact, because that association has always existed in my head, I didn’t even get around to reading the book until about a year ago, at which point it became one of my favorite novels. What sets me apart from the college boys (not that there’s anything wrong with being a college boy, and I’d be lying if I denied swooning over a Siddhartha-loving college boy or two back when I was a lava lamp-owning college girl) is that I find Siddhartha, as portrayed by Hesse, to be an insufferable egomaniac. College boys can’t be expected to see that; they’re still working on becoming insufferable egomaniacs. (Okay, I’ll stop with the man-bashing; it’s a relic from my college women’s lit class anyway.) What a great irony: the egomaniac who shuns egomania. I love Siddhartha.

  8. Marie of Marcy Dermansky’s Bad Marie

  Bad Marie is the most contemporary of the books on my list, and the one I read most recently. Marie, as the title implies, is bad. She’s a thief, a kidnapper, and a husband-stealer. But she’s unapologetic about it. And she genuinely loves the girl she’s kidnapped. I kept feeling guilty for rooting for her.

  9. Esther Greenwood of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar

  Few novels are as unnerving as Plath’s thinly veiled account of her own depression, and few protagonists in contemporary literature are as frustratingly self-defeating as Esther Greenwood, but her fragility is intoxicating: “I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.”

  10. Medea of Euripides’s Medea

  Medea, though not a novel, deserves inclusion on this list. Although Medea commits the most despicable of crimes—killing her own children—she does it to hurt her husband who left her for another woman. Who doesn’t love a good revenge story? Who doesn’t love a character who exacts the kind of revenge most people wouldn’t even fantasize about? There’s a gulf between the tire-slashers of the world and the people who wish they could slash someone’s tires. Every now and then, I like to give some credit to the tire-slashers.

  Read on

  Have You Read?

  More from Diana Spechler

  WHO BY FIRE

  Bits and Ash were children when the kidnapping of their younger sister, Alena—an incident for which Ash blames himself—caused an irreparable family rift. Thirteen years later, Ash is living as an Orthodox Jew in Israel, cutting himself off from his mother, Ellie, and his wild-child sister, Bits. But soon he may have to face them again; Alena’s remains have finally been uncovered. Now Bits is traveling across the world in a bold and desperate attempt to bring her brother home and salvage what’s left of their family.

  Sharp and captivating, Who by Fire deftly explores what happens when people try to rescue one another.

  “Impressively executed. . . . [The characters’] voices are strong and convincing. . . . Spechler is a talented writer who transcends melodrama and cliché with striking sensitivity and delicate touch.”

  —Boston Globe

  An Excerpt from

  Who by Fire

  Prologue

  April 24, 2002

  AT THE BACK OF THE PLANE, twelve men bow and mumble and sway, masked by thick beards and crowned by black hats. They wear angelic white shawls over demon-black suits. Their eyes are shut. They hold their prayer books closed, using their thumbs as bookmarks. I face the front of the plane again, and return to the article my mother e-mailed me: “How to Cope When Your Loved One Joins a Cult.” For peace of mind, I’m supposed to get a support group, to eat whole wheat bread and peas, to breathe deeply and remind myself that I’m not to blame. I inhale sharply through my nose. The air smells stagnant—transatlantic airplane air. I try to exhale some blame.

  After Alena disappeared, my mother was brimming with blame. She blamed the state police for not making enough effort. She blamed other families for not understanding. If my father sat down to watch TV, she would say, “You think your daughter has the luxury of watching television?” She started grinding her teeth so hard, she had to wear a mouth guard. For a year, she dragged Ash and me all over New Jersey, making us tape flyers to telephone poles, as if we had lost her favorite cat. She never directly blamed us, her two remaining children, but she often began a thought with, “If it had been you, instead of Alena . . .” Of course, she always followed that up with “Don’t give me that look. I never said I wished it had been you. God forbid. What do you take me for?” But we have always understood: Alena was the baby. Alena was the favorite. Six-year-old Alena, with the paintbrush-black hair and the chin dimple and the jeans rolled halfway up her calves, Alena imitating our eighty-four-year-old neighbor’s smoker voice, Alena whizzing through the kitchen on roller skates with pink wheels—Alena was the irreplaceable one.

  After losing its baby, its best member, especially if a family can’t properly mourn, it begins to decay like a corpse. At ten years
old, I didn’t know yet that my father would leave us, that my mother would grow old while she was still young, or that Ash would swing from obsession to obsession like a child crossing the monkey bars. All I knew for sure was this: We had lost everything we had been.

  Ash might remember it differently. Perhaps he remembers the voice of God saying, No one will ever forgive you. I wait a while before unbuckling my seat belt and making my way to the bathroom at the back of the plane. The praying men have dispersed, but as I walk down the aisle, I can pick them out. I can see their hats towering over the seat backs. I can see their plain wives, their squirmy broods of children. I want to tell them that they are no match for me, that for ten days now they have been no match for me, ever since I heard the news that I know will get Ash to come home.

  I plan to catch Ash off guard, to show up at his yeshiva, to tell everyone there that he used to eat baseball stadium hotdogs that couldn’t possibly have been kosher; that he fidgeted restlessly during Schindler’s List; that at Yom Kippur services, he used to fart on purpose during the silent meditation. I will tell them, This is my brother you’ve taken! And now I’m taking him back.

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  Also by Diana Spechler

  Who by Fire

  Credit

  Cover design by Robin Bilardello

  Cover photograph by Marcy Maloy/Getty Images

  Copyright