Eat the Damn Cake

Bear and I got married nine months ago. Not to the day, or anything. I’ve never been like that.

Sometimes I feel a little like a wedding veteran, when people are talking about planning one. They always sound so young and ambitious, and I lean back in my chair, fold my hands over my belly, and say, “Alright now…Alright now, kid…But let’s just slow it down for a minute, here…”

No, I would never say that.

But I feel like I learned a lot from planning a wedding. And I realized suddenly that I never really took the time to write a post that summed up my experience into a neat little post with a moral at the end and a set of convenient bullet points for reference. And I’m a blogger, so that’s sort of unforgivable.

Instead, after I got married, I was really excited to not have to think about weddings ever again. A few months ago, I clicked on some fluff piece called something like “The Post Wedding Blues: Are You Feeling Depressed and Down During Your First Months of Marriage? It May Be Because All That Wedding Excitement is Over!”

I was like, “Wait, what? Are you kidding me? THIS is the good part.”

But sometimes I think I’m too hard on my wedding. It was a great day. I wore a stunning gown. I still remember exactly how Bear looked, and how he looked at me.

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I am moving to Brooklyn. This doesn’t sound like a big deal to people who don’t live in New York City. One of my friends who doesn’t live in New York City was silent for a long time after I delivered the dramatic news. Then she said, “Isn’t that, like, a mile away?”

“It’s Brooklyn,” I said pointedly. “It’s like this different world.”

It feels like a different world to me. When you see Manhattan from a distance, it’s this dense, pricky, gorgeous anemone, erupting skyward in glinting spines and glittering slabs of glass. Brooklyn, from a distance, is spread out. You can’t see where it ends. You can’t see all of its beginnings. There’s a certain potential in it that Manhattan doesn’t have but substitutes with intensity.

(looking towards Manhattan)

(looking towards Brooklyn)

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Sometimes you just have to feel bad.

Something Diana said in our interview the other day made me think about how important that is.

Being body positive all the time is hard work. I wish it wasn’t. I wish it came naturally and easily. That would make more sense, since it seems like a waste of time to feel bad about the way you look. And yet people are all about wasting time.

Most of the time, I feel like I’m fine. I think my self-esteem is in decent shape. I grew up thinking I was gorgeous, which was lucky and, I think, pretty unusual. I started comparing myself to other women and to unrealistic beauty standards when I was 18 or so. I got a nose job (as a reader called me out on the other day, when I talked about not hating myself enough to change myself).

Last night, I wrapped a filmy scarf around myself, put on two gold bangle bracelets and my big, gold, lace-patterned earrings, and stood in front of the mirror, looking so sensually lovely and striking that it seemed a cruel twist of fate I wasn’t born in a magical ancient land where I could become an oracle who wore nothing but filmy scarves all day and spoke in a dark, ringing voice. I’m not sure how much of this image comes from the 300 trailer, but I love it anyway.

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And I am really, really excited about it.

Skinny is Diana Spechler’s second book, published by HarperCollins (how amazing is that? AMAZING). She is a big deal. And in Skinny, she writes about body image issues in such a complex, jarring, and deft way that I kept getting surprised, every time I turned a page.

Skinny is the story of a young woman named Gray who struggles with guilt after her obese father’s dramatic death. She begins to compulsively overeat, driven by an enormous hunger she can’t sate. She follows a clue from her father’s past to a weight-loss camp for kids, down south. At the camp, she tries, and fails, and tries some more to understand what it means to carry weight and love. There’s sex and difficult relationships and sweetness and triumph and somehow through all that there is nothing clichéd or easy about Gray’s relationship with her body or the bodies of the people around her. In fact, Spechler makes this story important by refusing to allow it to slip into a familiar niche. And she writes like it’s exactly what she’s supposed to be doing. Which it clearly is. And she clearly is. (For Diana’s site, click here.)

It is so cool that she is here on ETDC, talking with me about her book, which you guys should read. (You can look at it and then decide to buy it here.) Here is our conversation:

You know, that question I absolutely have to ask: What inspired this book?

It’s always a little embarrassing to admit that the answer to this question is “me.” I inspire myself so deeply, Kate. But seriously, I’ve struggled with body image and eating issues since I was thirteen. At some point in early adulthood, I realized that just about everyone else does, too. We all think we’re too fat or our breasts are too small or our thighs are too big or our feet are ugly. In my case, I have objectively ugly feet–really long toes and a bunion. I get pedicures, but I’m fooling myself; painting my toenails is like adorning a leper with precious gems. Anyway. I wanted to explore body image and eating disorders. So off I went to a weight-loss camp for a summer to do research.

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In this city, people are always talking about two things: money and love. The majority of the conversations I overhear are on one of these topics. I swear.

Not sex, by the way. I feel like someone might guess sex. But it’s not. It’s relationships.

It’s a really educated city, I think. We’re super stylish and cultured in general. We’re quick-thinking and cynical. We are at the center of a lot of worlds, and we’re good at being the center of attention. We know what’s what. We have a lot going on. We are highly motivated, intensely ambitious people at the top of our game. But this is what I keep hearing:

“Man, I don’t need no high maintenance chick,” a guy is saying to his friend.

“No, he was always a little bit off. You can’t blame yourself,” a woman is saying into her phone.

“I fucking loved him!” a girl in tight everything exclaims to another girl in a practically identical outfit.

“Wait– WHO is getting married?!”

(really, New York? That’s it? What about international politics? What about multicultural discourse on organic farming?)

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I met Bear at his office after work. I was coming from a meeting at the Century Club, where I had actually been sipping tea with a prominent social critic whose work I love, and I was wearing my most appropriate outfit and feeling pretty great about myself and my future. A black pencil skirt, a tan shirt with a neat little belt, and my new peach/tan heels (on sale, DSW, of course).

“You look cute,” said Bear. “Why did you wear high heels?”

“Um,” I said, “It’s an outfit.”

Bear does not like high heels.

“Why don’t you like high heels?” I asked him.

“They look like they hurt,” he said. “They look old-fashioned, like from the fifties. Why would you want to wear something from the fifties?”

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