Fatphobia is the literary world's final frontier

It's still chill, in every corner of the book landscape, to hate fat people.

This title and subtitle is a fairly big claim. Is it really that bad out there, in books, for fat people? you ask. Hasn’t representation and treatment of fat people in literature and in the literary ecosystem gotten better in the last few years? Plus, maybe you’re not fat, so why should you care?

My short answers are these: yes, it really is that bad, even among acclaimed literary authors who tend, as a group, to be lefty in their politics and I’ll show you how bad it is in this post. No, it hasn’t substantially improved, even as movements such as Health at Every Size have grown in popular awareness and nearly half of Americans are now fat people. Studies show that every form of bias and discrimination in American life has either gotten better or stayed the same over the past ten years, except for anti-fat bias which has gotten worse. If you’re not a fat person you should care because: 1) Body size fluctuates over your life; if you are thin now, you might be fat later. 2) Hopefully you don’t want to be an asshole; you care about all human beings being represented in works of art with nuance and dignity. And 3) Fatness is racialized, gendered, queered, and classed. Black and brown people are more likely to be fat than white people. Four out of five Black women are fat. Women are fatter than men. Queer and trans people are fatter than straight, cis people (except for gay men). And poor people are fatter than rich people.

A note on language: I’m going to use the term “fat” in this post as an umbrella term for what doctors and journalists might consider both “overweight” or “obese.” As a fat person, I like “fat” better than either of those two terms because to me, fat is a neutral term. It’s a descriptor, like “short” or “curly” and it’s accurate to my body size. “Overweight” implies there is a right weight to be and some people are “over” it, in a bad way. “Obese” is a term that comes out of the medical industrial complex and has been used to shame and stigmatize people in bigger bodies. I personally find “curvy” and “full figured” to be euphemistic and weird, plus these are terms that are almost always applied to femme fat bodies and could feel gender-problematic for fat people who are masculine, men, or nonbinary. But everyone feels different about language—feel free to ask the fat people in your life what they prefer; and if you’re a thin author trying to figure out how to write about a fat character in a non shitty way, read on!

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Let me tell you about a thing that happens to me all the time when I’m reading. I’m reading a book that’s been recommended to me or that I’m excited about. These days, because I’ve been writing a novel, I’ve been reading mostly fiction by Americans published in the last twenty-years; often I’m reading fiction that has been published in the last two years or that isn’t even out yet. I’m loving the book, I’m appreciating its rich characters, its humor, the snappiness of its prose. And then the book says something about fat people or fatness that is hateful or reductive and it’s like—record scratch. It totally takes me out of the book and I have to decide whether or not to keep going. Will whatever insight this book might offer me about a character or a place or an idea be worth wading through the author’s baggage about fatness? Unclear.

Virgie Tovar has a great Substack and wrote recently about her experience of reading a book by Eileen Myles. (She doesn’t name Myles, but I will, because the lines Tovar quotes are easily Google-able and I like the truth).

Here is some of the Myles material that Tovar is reacting to:

The waiting was excruciating. You never saw a good looking person in Dr. Title’s office. Or even cute. Big thighs in jeans. Just big immense thighs. Since this was all going on in Queens everthing was synthetic. Blouses, purses, shoes, paintings on the wall, vinyl chairs, my name—I couldn’t believe these people were real. “Sargent,” the nurse behind the desk would call. A fat lady would get up. Sargent, the nurse would repeat, handing “Sargent” her card. Eileen Collins. I was called next. Hi, I said dryly. I felt tiny. What’s that little bitch doing up there I felt the collective angry fat in the room aiming at me.

“I have had to accept that fatphobia is a common occurrence in books, and I’ve had to learn to desensitize as a reader,” Tovar writes. “Generally, when I’m reading a book, I can deal with some fatphobia - especially if it’s brief and it’s sparse - and it doesn’t especially affect my experience of the work. Then there are books like this one, where early on the author has made clear that they hate fat people so much that they are willing to sacrifice the basic rules of storytelling (like, ‘don’t be redundant’) in order to make room for their bigotry.”

That’s kind of how I think of it too. Like—a fatphobic observation or two is bad but it’s so pervasive in our culture that I can continue reading the book. Plus, it might be the character rather than the author, and the book is putting in fatphobia on purpose for some reason that’s integral to the story. But when fatphobia pops up over and over again, in multiple POVs in the same book, or in multiple books written by the same author, it’s another story. Life is short, YOLO, etc., and I don’t want to spend my one precious life stewing in the soup of someone else’s unresolved fatness issues.

So, below, I’m going to break down a few of the common ways that I see fatphobia popping up over and over again in contemporary fiction. Some of these examples are taken from books I read recently, and others are crowd sourced from Frump Feelings subscribers and friends who responded to a call I made on Instagram and Twitter (I mean X…). Thank you so much to all who sent in screenshots. I chose these examples to show the diversity in the kinds of books in which fatphobia appears, from prestige award-winning literary fiction by established names, to debut novels, to popular commercial general fiction, crime fiction, and more. It’s part of my argument that fatphobia in contemporary fiction is not limited to any one corner of the literary landscape and its inclusion is almost never remarked upon in reviews. Writers do not suffer consequences or much backlash for including fatphobia in their texts. It is possible to reach the highest echelons of literary acclaim and financial success while being actively fatphobic. You can win the National Book Award and be fatphobic. You can win the Pulitzer Prize and be fatphobic. You can be a New York Times Bestseller and be fatphobic. AND I want to be clear that I’m not pointing the finger at any particular author here and saying “you’re bad.” It’s an industry wide issue. Many of the writers whose work I will use as examples below are people I respect. There’s no call for cancellation going on here; I just feel, as Tovar writes, that “I’m tired of having to wade through fatphobia to get at a book’s merit.”

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OK! Let’s get into it. The first way that I see fatphobia popping up in contemporary fiction is through the equation of thinness as good and fatness as bad. Here’s a few examples.

This is from Louise Penny’s crime novel A Fatal Grace (2011):

And this is from Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012):

The second way that I see fatphobia popping up in contemporary fiction is when authors simply make a character fat—or use the word “overweight” or another word that communicates fatness as a pejorative — as a shorthand to tell the reader that a character is gross, weak, evil, cruel, stupid, unimportant, or mentally ill.

These are from Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch (2022), which just won the National Book Award for fiction. These two moments are from the POVs of two different characters:

Here’s another example from an acclaimed debut novel that just came out this year, The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff:

And another, from 2022 mega bestseller Bonnie Garmus’ Lessons in Chemistry, which adds in another thing I hate, when authors tell us how much someone weighs for seemingly no reason except to communicate that they are bad, gross, or violent.

Here’s another example of an author using fatness as a shorthand to make a character an antogonist. This is from, sigh, the brand new, not even published yet, Zadie Smith novel, The Fraud.

Regarding this kind of lazy characterization, this fun book blogger had this to say: “Vanishingly infrequently is any character neutrally fat or incidentally fat, let alone positively fat; fatness is nearly always cast as a marker of mental/emotional weakness, pettiness, self-centeredness, social isolation, lack of discipline, etc…It would strike modern readers as laughable to write a novel in which, say, a character’s lumpy skull indicated their murderous tendencies, but that is literally the level on which we’re still operating with regard to fatness like 95% of the time.” Correct!

Then there are just the moments of downright, naked horror and disgust at the fat body (like the Myles passage above). Ottessa Moshfegh has so many moments like this that I won’t even bother to break them down, especially since Andrea Long Chu did that already so well over at Vulture, but here’s an excerpt from Chu’s piece:

In terms of the moments of pure disgust and pity at fatness, Lauren Groff’s novel Fates and Furies (2015) really takes the cake. Here are just a few examples, but there are honestly so many more that I struggled to decide which ones to include. These are examples of a mind that does NOT see the word “fat” as a neutral descriptor, but as a diminished and less-than state of being.

But isn’t it the character’s POV you ask, not the author? Maybe, possibly, but the above Fates and Furies quotes are from several different characters’ POVs. As Long Chu points out in their Moshfegh piece, “In literary criticism, we call this a pattern.” Further, not Fates and Furies nor any of the books I’ve excerpted so far are substantively about body shame, weight stigma, or eating disorders. If anti-fat remarks were a necessary part of the character’s journey throughout the novel in order to reveal substantial insights into these issues, that would be one thing. But they’re not. These are just tossed in asides and comments that serve no essential narrative purpose.

Two things come to my mind when I look at these screenshots taken in totality: 1) It’s thin straight white (and Asian—but that’s a whole other post) women and assigned-female-at-birth authors who seem to be writing the worst fatphobic lines. 2) Did no one notice? Where were their editors?

Ah yes, most of their editors were probably thin, straight white women too. “The publishing industry is overwhelmingly dominated by white, heterosexual, able-bodied women,” wrote Daniel Lavery in 2016 in response to a truly jaw-droppingly fatphobic remark that the Knopf editor Claudia Herr made about which debut authors are able to land big advances.

“It’s easy, I think (and entirely appropriate!) to be angry with Claudia Herr as an individual for saying this,” writes Lavery. “but this is less a case of one bad apple spoiling publishing for everyone than one person perhaps-unconsciously echoing a common, often unspoken, sentiment. Most likely Herr and others would not say to an interviewer, ‘I doubt fat people could write a book worth two million dollars,’ and would in fact think of themselves as open-minded when it comes to size, but in an unguarded, unreflective moment, would throw out the idea of a 500-pound writer as an absurdity, as a mental exercise, rather than a plausible occurrence.”

This seems true, and we know that literary editors’ failure to see their own biases plays out on the page and influences what ends up in the hands of readers. We saw this with the literary Titanic that was American Dirt, a blockbuster novel about migrants fleeing from Mexico. The author was not Mexican, but perhaps equally importantly, it turned out that not one Latinx person—from editorial to production to publicity—had touched this book. Had there been Latinx folks in the room, there might have been opportunities to point out some of the problematic Latinx representation that the book ended up including.

But perhaps the deepest part of the problem is that fat readers and fat people who are part of the literary landscape don’t feel as empowered to critique books for their fat representation as they do when it comes to other kinds of oppression. Back to Virgie Tovar reading Eileen Myles:

“[When I read the fatphobic content] I didn’t have the instantaneous self-protective reaction I would if an author took every opportunity to insult people who shared my racial identity (I’m Mexican). If a writer was relishing in their hatred of Mexicans, I wouldn’t think twice of divesting from whatever else they had to say. But a book by someone who openly and proudly hates Mexicans wouldn’t even be at any bookstore I shop at…And, also, if I’m being completely honest, because it’s still hard to hold it down for myself as a fat person - to truly lend credence to how much this form of bigotry has truly and deeply harmed me. This is shame.”

I feel this hard. Why have I been sitting with this ick feeling and saying nothing when I’ve definitely shouted loud about transphobic and racist lines in books, in student writing, and in other spaces I’m a part of. No more.

This post is already so long so I’m going to pause here. I’ll have to do a part 2 that breaks down some of the ways I’m seeing authors of all sizes grapple with size and weight and eating disorders on the page in exciting, vital and nuanced ways. In other words, this was the what NOT to do post, and I’ll get to work on the what TO do post. And if you want more of me on literary trends that I think are problematic, check out my recent article in Lux Magazine (now unpaywalled!) on “The Unhinged Bisexual Novel” in which I talk through my complicated feelings about two novels — Jen Beagin’s Big Swiss and Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed.

xoxo, go eat some ice cream!

Emma