Skinny (28 page)
Authors: Diana Spechler
Dear Fat People,
I’d like to call a truce. If I forgive you, can I exorcise you? I thought I had bested you. I thought that for the rest of my life, I would just become thinner and thinner.
No. Wait. I’m holding back. I’ve promised not to hold back anymore.
I hoped that for the rest of my life, I would just become thinner and thinner.
One problem is that no one knows what hunger is. How can we defeat what we can’t define? Try it: Define hunger. No, desire is different. Wanting is not the same as being hungry. Filling a hole inside you is not the same as filling your stomach. How will we ever learn this? How will we ever make peace?
You wonder why we hate you? You are the visible manifestation of the parts of ourselves we hide.
But before all that. Before I found out that Eden was fine. Before I stopped returning Bennett’s calls. Before Bennett stopped calling. Before I closed my eyes and hovered over a map. Before I opened my eyes and found my finger on Colorado. Before I bought a used car and—why not?—moved to Colorado. Before I drove to Mikey’s show at the University of Denver. Before I watched his set comprised of jokes I’d never heard. Before I waited for him outside. Before he walked out with his new girlfriend. Before his eyes settled on me. Registered me. Before I thought,
I am looking at a version of Mikey that doesn’t love me
. Before he hugged me stiffly. Spoke politely. Walked away. Before I met someone else. And someone else. And someone else. Before I learned that no relationship would have quite the same gravity. Before I spent three months posing nude for an artist in Breckenridge. Before I once and for all lost my beloved fat camp body. And quit nude modeling. And realized how tightly we hold on to things we lose—until sufficient time passes and we can’t hold on anymore. Before I applied to medical school. Before my hair stopped shedding (long before baldness, but not before irreversible loss). Before my grief finally broke like a fever. Before I made peace with some things. Before I made peace with the realization that I’d never make peace with some things. Before I began the rest of my life, I had to go back to camp.
I had just been released from the hospital. Bennett drove me, his hand on my knee, my eye in a patch. I had to collect my things, box them up, and mail them to my mother’s house.
“It’s empty,” I said when we drove in. “It’s so weird to see it empty.”
“What did you expect?”
“It’s a shell. It’s a body with no life inside it. It’s like the summer never happened.”
On my floor of the dorm, the doors were flung open. The beds were stripped. The air was silent. Only my room was full.
“Can you believe this?” Bennett said, smiling. “I could take your clothes off right now.” He filled his arms with some of my things and walked out to his car. “With the door open,” he called over his shoulder. “Right in your dorm room!”
He didn’t understand. I’d already left him behind. I sat on my mattress, my limbs weighted with painkillers, and saw all the life through the window. The green that had been there all summer. The trees and the grass. The intimation of mountains beyond. And for just a second, I forgot where I was. I forgot the things I always wished to forget. And I felt a remarkable lightness.
While I was writing
Skinny
, I was asked from time to time if the story was “true.” Because I, like Gray, worked at a weight-loss camp for kids in North Carolina, taught water aerobics, and spent a summer in unforgettable company, the answer to that question is complicated. My knee-jerk response used to be, “It’s fiction.” However, “fiction” and “untrue” certainly aren’t synonymous.
I didn’t feel right including, in the pages of this book, the standard “This is a work of fiction” disclaimer, which states that any similarities between the characters and real people are coincidental. Some similarities might be coincidental, but others are not.
With that said, although many of the characters in
Skinny
were inspired by real people, they are, like most fictional characters, composites—combinations of more than one person, some invented elements, and pieces of the author. It’s also worth noting that the plot, including references to dramatic deceptions, illegal activity, abuse, and violence, came entirely from my imagination.
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.
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
D
IANA
S
PECHLER
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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Ten of My Favorite Not-Entirely-Likable Protagonists
by Diana Spechler
I
T 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 why 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.