“Fat Swim” and Literature’s Fatphobia Problem

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1:40Jennifer Wilson:This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Jennifer Wilson writes about culture for The New Yorker. Culture in many forms. Everything from the latest in literary fiction to the boom in prenup agreements. Jen sat down the other day for a conversation with the author of a new book called Fat Swim. I first met Emma Copley Eisenberg around seven years ago in Philadelphia, where we both lived at the time. She had created a literary organization called Blue Stoop to help connect the city's community of writers. Now she's out with Fat Swim, a short story collection set in Philadelphia The characters are vibrant and many identify as fat And are resentful that they live in a world that wants to, you know, limit their cravings for food, for one another, and for life Emma is one of the foremost thinkers about fatphobia in literature, but also in American culture more broadly.

2:48Jennifer Wilson:And it was one of the reasons why I was just very excited to have the opportunity to talk to her. Here's Jennifer Wilson talking with Emma Copley Eisenberg. So the book is called Fat Swim. It's a collection of short stories. And the first story is also called Fat Swim. and it begins with an eight-year-old girl named Alice looking out her window.

3:11Emma Copley Eisenberg:Yeah, that story was sort of the first time I was like, okay, I think I'm writing a collection of stories that has like a real coherent, I would call it a plot through line through the stories and she sees this group of fat women who live in her neighborhood. She lives in West Philly and has some sort of complicated feelings where she's sort of identifying with them and sort of aroused by them and sort of wants to be a part of their group, but also feels foreign because she's a kid and they're adults. So yeah, there's this moment I think where Alice sees just like some long leg hair on one of the women at the pool and the wind is blowing it and they see her looking and they're like, do you want to touch it?

3:49Emma Copley Eisenberg:And she's like, yeah. And I think it's an interesting moment because like leg hair is not, it's not like forbidden. It's not like one is like, I cannot have long leg hair, you know. It's certainly part of like feminist reclamation movements of like I can have whatever body hair I want, etc. But it is still this very intimate thing where we don't usually touch each other's leg hair, I guess, or body hair at all. And so I thought there's something interesting to me about like what it just it just happened as I was writing the story because I was just like Alice wants to be close to them. She wants to be close to their bodies.

4:22Emma Copley Eisenberg:And I think also we underestimate, like, how much kids are always looking at the bodies of adults being like, am I like that or am I different from that? So I think that the whole story is in many ways Alice asking, like, who am I? What does my body mean? And do I get to say what it means? Or are other people going to tell me? And so that she's kind of looking at these adult women who are sort of like her, but also really far away.

4:45Jennifer Wilson:And then you have another story called Beauty, which to me is about the real material economic consequences of that phobia. Can you set up that story for our listeners?

5:00Emma Copley Eisenberg:Yeah. Essentially, it's a story about a woman who works at a beauty startup with these friends and then is essentially cast out. It's a beauty brand for athletes. Yeah, like athletics.

5:14Jennifer Wilson:It's called Lavender. But once the company starts to get some interest from investors, they start to have opinions about what these three women look like. Exactly.

5:26Emma Copley Eisenberg:It's like the people that are associated with a beauty brand become not just like spokespeople, but like physical manifestations of what the brand means. And this character does not fit what they want the brand to mean as her body changes. And I think there's a lot in here, too, of, like, people's bodies change over their lifetime. Like, I feel like that's something that I've thought a lot about. And, like, I keep hearing about this book and readers, you know, reacting to it of, like, people are, like, we think there's this category called fat people. And then there's other categories called thin people.

6:01Emma Copley Eisenberg:And there's all these, like, ways that people are, like, oh, you're a former fat person or something. But it's also, like, you don't know what your body will become in 10 years or 20 years. Like the way of talking about people's bodies may become surprisingly relevant to you, reader, who is not yet ready for that. So this person's body changes a lot. And she's living in this really isolated part of Pennsylvania that barely has Internet access. And I think the story for me is also a lot about the Internet and a lot about what it feels like to kind of try to drop out of the Internet and how impossible that is.

6:35Emma Copley Eisenberg:And the sort of like ways that being perceived and being reflected back on the Internet can become this like place where without that we hardly know ourselves anymore.

6:47Jennifer Wilson:So I wanted to ask you about Ozempic because, you know, related to the story Beauty, there's been some reporting on people who take Ozempic and other, you know, other brands of GLPs because they say that they feel like they need to to get ahead at work. I saw that article, I know.

7:07Emma Copley Eisenberg:Yeah.

7:08Jennifer Wilson:A lot of people are saying that they're using Ozempic and other GLPs, not because they necessarily have a problem with the way that they look, but because they feel the outside world does. You know, there was an article in The Cut about, you know, ordinary people, real estate agents saying, you know, they felt they needed to, you know, to lose weight to keep their job, that our images are everywhere now and we were supposed to all be brands. And so I just was wondering, I mean, you know, what what has Ozempic meant for the fat liberation movement?

7:42Emma Copley Eisenberg:I feel it would be impossible to summarize like all of the discourse around that because it's so variant and multilayered. But I think there are a few different sort of views on that. One is indeed that like taking Ozempic or any other GLP-1 and becoming smaller to conform to a societal norm is counter to the fat liberation movement. I think there's certainly people who believe that. I think there's also a lot of folks who want to acknowledge like medically there's like many reasons why people take GLP-1s that are productive and important. And actually GLP-1s have been around since 2006 or so and been prescribed like relatively safely.

8:24Emma Copley Eisenberg:I think it has certainly challenged the fat liberation movement to clarify, like, is the fat liberation movement fundamentally fat positive or is it more about body autonomy, which again is self -determination? And I think there has not been a real answer to that. And I don't know that we'll see one for quite some time, but it's prompted that conversation.

8:49Jennifer Wilson:You know, it's incredible because the CDC, I think, most recently reported that, you know, around 75 percent of Americans are overweight. And we can talk a bit about that term. But it's just sort of unbelievable because when you look at popular culture, I mean, I don't know if there have been studies, but I'm just going to spitball here. I think it's less than 75 percent of characters and movies and TV shows are fat. or, you know, overweight, as the government says.

9:22Emma Copley Eisenberg:Totally. I mean, it's so interesting to me that, like, so, quote-unquote, overweight and also, like, obese, those are words that, yeah, they come from medical community, like you're saying. And I think, like, for me, they're such bummer words because, one, it kind of, like, implies, like, there is a correct weight or correct size to be, which, like, has been debunked so many times by scientists and medical folk. And also, like, I think even taking the health issue out of it, I don't want to be described in a medical context when I'm writing art or when I'm reading art. It's very strange. And I think also, like, for me, it's just really lazy craft.

10:02Emma Copley Eisenberg:Like, on a craft level, I see so much use of those words in contemporary fiction, literary fiction. And I'm like, that doesn't tell me anything. Like, to say the character is overweight, I have no further visual information. I have no further insight into, like, their presence or the way they would be in a room, which is, like, what I care about as a reader. I'm like, I want to know how they are in the scene and what's happening and how to visualize them.

10:27Jennifer Wilson:Emma Copley Eisenberg, speaking with Jennifer Wilson of The New Yorker. More in a moment.

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13:40Jennifer Wilson:You're also a literary critic. Occasionally, I do Moonlight. Moonlight. You have a newsletter called From Feelings, and you wrote this entry that was titled Fatphobia is the Literary World's Final Frontier. And in that post, you talked about fatphobia in contemporary fiction and the work of, you know writers like Zadie Smith uh Jillian Flynn Lauren Groff yes John Franzen yes I'm thinking of you know when you write about um Gone Girl you talk in particular about a scene where Amy is telling you know the the reader that she's gained weight and uh you know that she wants the public to remember her as sort of pale thin Amy I mean you kind of point out that moment as an example of fatphobia in the text.

14:38Jennifer Wilson:And I'm wondering, how do you decide when a text is fatphobic versus representing fatphobia, including a character's internalized fatphobia?

14:47Emma Copley Eisenberg:For sure. I mean, I think how I personally think of it is the body's changes, the body's desires, the body's size, all these things, are those elements crucial to the text, crucial to the plot, or not? And I think in the case of Gone Girl, they're not. Like, there's nothing in that book that really explores Amy's experience of or ambivalence about being embodied, except for perhaps her ambivalence about having a child. That is explored a bit. But if the book had really delved into like the experience of Amy sort of trying to maintain this small body and, you know, and we learned about her food intake or we learned about the way that she moves through the world.

15:38Emma Copley Eisenberg:We saw her sort of obsessing over that or going to the gym or having friends for which that was really an important element of her story. I would be like that comment makes complete sense, you know. But it just was completely ancillary to the plot or to the, which again, by plot, I mean sort of the main thread or the logic of the book. And I also look at point of view a lot. So like, for example, in Crossroads, a Jonathan Franzen novel. I should say you dedicate one of your stories, Beauty, to Jonathan Franzen. I did. And it's like the youth are like dedicate parentheses pejorative or dedicate parentheses complimentary.

16:14Emma Copley Eisenberg:And this is definitely dedicate parentheses pejorative. So, yeah. So in Crossroads, which is a multi-POV novel, and the introduction of one of the main characters is the overweight person who was Marion. And then a few sentences on, I'm paraphrasing, but it's like there was no relief from her body and there was no angle that you could see her on the street that would make you want to see more of her. And I thought, I felt sort of slapped, I think, when I read that sentence in the book, because to me it was so dehumanizing. And that kind of idea that Marion is disgusting and also pathetic and also aesthetically intolerable is present in many POVs throughout the novel.

17:10Emma Copley Eisenberg:so I think it's a POV thing to me as well or in the case of like Otessa Moshfay like over a body of work you can sort of see the same themes emerging which critic Andrea Longchue wrote about at length so yeah I think about it like over the course of a book in many different characters points of view or over a body of work but it's impossible to know for sure and the thing is like all of us have internalized VEV like we live in America like every single one of us me all the people I know have internalized this idea that to be fat is to be disgusting, is to be less human. And so it's impossible to not have that.

17:47And I'm not really interested in, and I don't do this in Fat Swim,

17:51Emma Copley Eisenberg:like I don't create a world that's a utopia, where like these sites of oppression, not just fatphobia, but also racism, also prejudice against folks with disabilities, like that all exists in the book because it exists in the world. I feel like my sort of main promise to the reader as a fiction writer is to represent the world as it is, which includes all of those things. And the story Beauty includes a lot of internal, what we might call internalized fatphobia, even though it's dedicated to Jonathan Franzen, because I was like, I want to write a Marion. So the main character of Beauty is named Marion.

18:25Emma Copley Eisenberg:I want to write a Marion who is, who the reader is begging to see from every angle, you know, who has a kind of self-possessed sexuality that is really unapologetic and also quite strange. And so in that way, I'm very grateful because writing out of spite can be extremely motivating as well.

18:47Jennifer Wilson:So all of these stories are either set in Philadelphia or what I think of as like the Philadelphia diaspora, which includes the Jersey Shore, the Poconos. New York City. New York City. um so what does it mean to you to be a philadelphia writer yeah i mean i think i did not set out to write another philly book like my your your last uh book was a novel um housemates which was set in a kind of communal living situation in west philly yes i was like i've written my philly

19:20Emma Copley Eisenberg:group house novel but I think Philly just kind of has its hooks in me and I can't seem to to get away which I think is an experience for a lot of people for one but yeah I think I've always been really excited and like nerding out about books that have a geographical center and the characters kind of orbit about that geography so like Brian Washington's lot I love what he does with Houston and the way all the characters kind of orbit around these different neighborhoods of Houston and connect and date each other and hurt each other and go back into their apartments, which are in different parts of town.

19:57Emma Copley Eisenberg:So even though I wasn't conscious, I think I have always kind of had a soft spot for those kinds of books. But I think Philly is—I've been there like 15 years now, and Philly is an extremely—I think we're an extremely sensory city. Like, everyone's always yelling at each other. people are sitting outside in the stoop talking constantly throwing stuff, chatting sweating, cursing, whatever it's glorious I know, there's a sense of just like they grease the poles so that people won't climb them I think there's just like there's a real sense of the public street as a place where stuff happens I think in Philly which I'm really interested in and I think there's also just like a there's an interconnectedness that you've probably experienced being a native Philadelphian where it's like anywhere you go, you're like, oh, that person knows my cousin.