One of the many things I have always loved about writing (not to be confused with publishing) is that all you need is your imagination. It doesn’t matter who you are, you can write. Your looks, especially, don’t matter. As a naturally shy person, I loved the anonymity of writing before my career took off. I loved how my stories didn’t care about my weight. When I started publishing that writing, I loved that, to my readers, what mattered were the words on the page. Through writing, I was, finally, able to gain respect for the content of my character.
That changed when I started gaining a national profile, going on book tours, doing speaking engagements and publicity and television appearances. I lost my anonymity. It’s not that my looks mattered but my looks mattered.
It’s one thing to write as if you have no skin. It’s another thing entirely when photography is involved. I have to have my photo taken often, which makes me cringe. Every part of me becomes exposed to the camera. There is no hiding the truth of me. Often, there is video and then my truth, my fatness, is amplified. As my career has taken off, my visibility has exploded. There are pictures of me, everywhere. I have been on MSNBC and CNN and PBS. When a certain kind of people see me on television, they take the time to e-mail me or tweet at me to tell me that I’m fat or ugly or fat and ugly. They make memes of me with captions like “Typical Feminist” or “The Ugliest Woman in the World.” Sometimes Google Alerts takes me to a forum of MRA acolytes or conservative assholes having a field day insulting my looks with a picture of me from an event or magazine. I’m supposed to let it go. I’m supposed to shrug it off. I’m supposed to remember that the kind of people who would do such cruel things are beneath my regard. I am supposed to remember that what they really hate is themselves.
When I was doing publicity for Bad Feminist, I was interviewed for the New York Times Magazine. They needed a picture to accompany the interview and were not at all interested in my head shot or a random snapshot from my phone. I went to New York and had a photo shoot in a fancy photographer’s studio, where the receptionist, a tall and lithe young woman clearly modeling on the side, offered me water or coffee while I waited.
In the magazine, they used a full-length picture of me, from head to toe. I am staring at the camera thinking, This is my body. This is what I look like. Stop being surprised. It’s the kind of picture I always avoid, as if somehow, I can separate myself from my body if I am only photographed from the waist or neck up. As if I can hide the truth of me. As if I should hide the truth of me.
The photographer was charming, handsome. He and his wife were remodeling a home in Hudson Valley. I learned this because he apologized for not being able to attend my event that night. I don’t even know how he knew about my event. He asked me if I wanted to freshen my makeup, but I was not wearing any, so I just smiled and said, “This is my face.” Before we got started he asked me what music I wanted to listen to and I blurted out, “Michael Jackson,” because that is all that came to mind. A few moments later, Michael Jackson began piping through speakers and I felt like I was in the middle of a movie.
Things only became more surreal. The photographer had two assistants who would hand him the camera or lens he wanted. He told me where to stand and how to pose like an action figure. He wanted me to loosen up, but I am not good at loosening up when a camera is pointed at me. Eventually I got the hang of it and cracked a smile or two. I started to feel cool, like I was having a moment. Then I remembered what would happen when these images were published. I knew I would be mocked, demeaned and degraded simply for existing. Just like that, the moment was gone.
In the early days, before there were a lot of pictures of me available online, I would show up to an event and organizers would often look right through me. At one event, a gathering of librarians, a man asked if he could help me and I said, “Well, I am the keynote speaker.” His eyes widened and his face reddened and he stammered, “Oh, okay, I’m the man you’re looking for.” He was neither the first person nor will he be the last to have such a reaction. People don’t expect the writer who will be speaking at their event to look like me. They don’t know how to hide their shock when they realize that a reasonably successful writer is this overweight. These reactions hurt, for so many reasons. They illustrate how little people think of fat people, how they assume we are neither smart nor capable if we have such unruly bodies.
Before events I get incredibly stressed. I worry that I will humiliate myself in some way—perhaps there won’t be chairs I can fit in, or perhaps I won’t be able to stand for an hour, and on and on my mind goes.
And then, sometimes, my worst fears do come true. When I was on book tour for Bad Feminist, I did an event in New York City at the Housing Works Bookstore to celebrate Harper Perennial’s fiftieth anniversary.
There was a stage, two or three feet off the ground, and no staircase leading to it. The moment I saw it, I knew there was going to be trouble. When it came time for the event to begin, the authors with whom I was participating easily climbed onto the stage. And then there were five excruciating minutes of me trying to get onto it too while hundreds of people in the audience stared awkwardly. Someone tried to help. Eventually a kind writer onstage, Ben Greenman, pulled me up as I used all the muscles I had in my thighs. Sometimes, my body is a cage in the most glaring ways. I was filled with self-loathing of an intense degree for the next several days. Sometimes, I have a flashback to the humiliation of that evening and I shudder.
After hauling myself up onstage, I sat down on a tiny wooden chair and the tiny wooden chair cracked and I realized, I am going to vomit and I am going to fall on my ass in front of all these people. After the humiliation I had just endured, I realized I was going to have to stay silent on both counts. I threw up in my mouth, swallowed it, and then did a squat for the next two hours. I am not sure how I did not burst into tears. I wanted to disappear from that stage, from that moment. The thing about shame is that there are depths. I have no idea where the bottom of my shame resides.
By the time I got back to my hotel room, my thigh muscles were shredded, but I was also impressed with how strong those muscles are. My body is a cage, but this is my cage and there are moments where I take pride in it. Still, alone in that hotel room, I sobbed and sobbed. I felt so worthless and so embarrassed. Words cannot convey. I sobbed because I was angry at myself, at the event organizers and their lack of forethought. I sobbed because the world cannot accommodate a body like mine and because I hate being confronted by my limitations and because I felt so utterly alone and because I no longer need the layers of protection I built around myself but pulling those layers back is harder than I could have ever imagined.