What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

This is a galvanizing, paradigm-shifting book. In 8 chapters that also function as stand-alone essays, Gordon clearly and doggedly documents the oppression, stigma, judgment, and violence faced by fat people, especially very fat people, for this aspect of their identities alone, much less in combination with other elements of identity.

Gordon covers the ineffective, unregulated scam that is the diet/weight loss industry. She busts the myth that being fat inevitably means one is unhealthy. She documents the harassment faced by fat people both by aggression from strangers on the street (fatcalling), as well as from organized entities like employers, rental companies, and doctors/insurers—none of whom have any legal obligation to provide equal services to a fat person that they would to a thinner person. She critiques how fat people are portrayed in media. She strengthens and reinforces her deeply researched essays with anecdotes—often harrowing—from her own life, and concludes the book with an illuminating and bracing articulation of the Body justice movement (as opposed to the Body Positivity movement) as Gordon envisions it, and the world that could be possible if the aims of a Body Justice movement were truly met.

Gordon works hard to interpret and filter everything she writes about the fat experience through an intersectional lens. This is as it should be. But as a White, queer, cis-gender very fat person, Gordon cannot as vividly portray the experiences of fat Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latine, Multiracial, trans and GNC, and disabled people (or the myriad possible combinations of these identities) as could people within these identities. The inclusion of passages, extensive quotes, or stories by fat non-white, non-cis, and disabled people would strengthen this book by fully including these identities and honoring them as equally central to the story of fatness. Similarly, a list of recommended reading/viewing as an appendix would have been a welcome addition and another way to bring attention to writers, thinkers, activists, artists, etc., more marginalized than Gordon herself.

Moving and transformative, I will be thinking about this book for a long time to come and the final, visionary chapter in particular will guide my actions and thinking as I do what I can to make the world a more Body-Just world.

Memorial

Memorial by Bryan Washington

If I were to compare Bryan Washington’s debut novel to parts of speech, it would be to nouns and verbs rather than adjectives or adverbs. This is a novel of saying, doing, happening, driven more by plot than emotion, even though emotion (and adjectives and adverbs too, of course) all have their place as well.

Mike and Benson have been dating and living together for four years. Always stymied in the face of expressing their emotions to one another, always disempowered around the idea that they could bring change and healing to their respective, strained families rather than wait for someone else to do it, a fracture in the stasis occurs when Mike’s mother arrives from Japan to visit him—and he promptly leaves her with Benson to fly to Osaka himself, having learned that his long-estranged father is dying. Benson, who is Black and poz, ends up connecting with Mitsuko, Mike’s mother, a process which indirectly but surely contributes to him pursuing with his own family: his alcoholic father, the parents who kicked him out when they learned he was poz.

All of this—estrangement, infection, addiction, being kicked out—is heavy and emotional, but Memorial is something like a set of jet skis, bouncing and gliding over the surface even as huge, undeniable plumes of the Below fly up in wild spray all around. Change and growth occur for both main characters, but the reader never quite sees what’s going on beneath the characters’ surfaces, only the foamy trail of motion and direction through the water. And while both Mike and Benson reach some peace with their parents and families, there’s also the matter of conflict between them as a couple: are they only together out of inertia? Are they loving each other? How do they really communicate? While this novel certainly shouldn’t be taken as a referendum on all gay men’s communication patterns, I read it while also reading Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The Freezer Door, and was struck by how well Memorial captured in fiction the fear of expressing emotion and feeling and softness that Sycamore describes in her essays about (among other things) gay male culture—as well as the use of sex, alcohol, and other diversions as a substitute for words. Mike and Benson are given no conclusion within the novel, or at least not as a couple. They’ve each reconnected with their families, however, and in a country so devastatingly committed to destroying the connections and well-being of Black and immigrant lives and communities, this is a feat in and of itself; a happy ending in a novel that is light or even bubbly without being fluff, a romance that is about family, self, and the question of being together rather than the certainty.

If I Had Two Wings

If I Had Two Wings by Randall Kenan

Sometimes short stories can feel like painful exercises to me. Their brevity can feel like roots being ripped up before the plant has blossomed and fruited. Or their experimentation peacocky: beautiful, transfixing, but a little unsure of its purpose. If I Had Two Wings took pain, brevity, beauty, a little flashiness, and alchemized them together with a sure purpose full of roots, blossoms, and fruits.

Set primarily, but not entirely, in Black communities in the fictional Tims Creek, North Carolina, these stories felt like honorific lines to Kenan’s communities and ancestors both near and distant. They were spiritual in this way, but with a spirituality that didn’t exclude humor and irreverence. Kenan’s stories include a disgraced White man’s haunting by a troublemaking hog; a series of miracles worked by Velmajean Swearington Hoyt, a humble mega church member; and the ghosts or spirits of enslaved people weaving in and out of daily life in a man’s new house when his lover is away. These stories are full of worship, queerness, spirits, food, the South, communities in all their smallness and expanse. Though they often end in a way open for further dreaming, this open-endedness doesn’t result in a sense of unfinishedness. Instead, it feels like an invitation, a window cracked open and inviting the spirit to come through—the other side is just that close.

Randall Kenan died this year on August 28. Rest in power.