Eat the Damn Cake

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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I was having this debate with a friend about self-discipline and food and dieting and what really matters in life. He thought that self-discipline matters a lot and is reflected in what you choose to eat and how able you are to not eat the things you shouldn’t eat. If you are strong enough, you can lose as much weight as you want. If you’re the kind of person who successfully loses weight, you’re the kind of person who succeeds at everything else too. It’s all about the attitude.

I thought that people should like themselves.

Really, there’s probably a compromise here. If someone is trying to lose weight, I’m not standing next to them at the gym with a bag of Doritos, going, “You’re wasting your time! Want some pizza? I could really go for a pizza…” I think losing weight is a completely legitimate goal in plenty of cases. I don’t think it has to be a symptom of superficiality or self-hatred. It can be really, really healthy.

But I also think that it’s important to think about why you have the goals you have. It’s really easy to want something without thinking about why you want it. Or, when you’re asked why, to cough up the response you heard someone give on TV.  It’s really easy to cough that response up when you ask yourself.

There are a lot of things I’m not supposed to eat.

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People are confusing. Bear’s brother is into personality tests, and when we saw him over the weekend, we took some, too. Bear was grumbling a lot about how ridiculous the whole thing was, but his results really sounded like him. They had positive titles like “The Investigator.”

Mine were just wrong. No, really. Not like, I’d hoped it would say “The Coolest Person in the World” and instead it said, “Average.” My particular combination of categories was dubbed “The Servant.” It read, “You are incredibly concerned with other people’s wellbeing, to the point of not taking care of yourself. You have a hard time expressing your opinions, and aren’t very goal-oriented. You hover at the back of rooms, with your hands clasped behind you, waiting for orders and pretending to be invisible. You overhear things you shouldn’t, but only repeat them to other servants. But this is damaging enough, because even the gossip of servants can upset a household.” Or something like that. OK, a lot of that was from a BBC movie based on a Jane Austen book, but it was pretty bad.

I mean, give me a break.

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