There’s a picture of myself I’ve remembered wrong for years. In it, I imagined, I am standing next to someone (at a football game, I think) who was never quite more than an acquaintance and putting on an overeager smile. I have shocking streaks of dark purple and deep rich red in the hair just above my forehead and only there (needless to say, this looks stupid), my keys are around my neck on a black lanyard “decorated” with the Five Star brand logo, and I am much fatter than I am now. This last detail is the most salient, and the least obviously false. It is true that the version of my face in the picture is rounder than my face is now, in a still-cherubic adolescent sort of way, but I’m also positive that, despite first-glance appearances, I’m larger now, weigh more on a scale, buy a bigger pant size, wouldn’t fit in that shirt. Most other details crumble under even less scrutiny: no lanyard, no shocking streaks, a more measured smile than I’d thought, and while it does appear to have been taken at a football game (the bleachers and a bit of track are visible in the background), I’d somehow edited out the smears of black paint festively drawn, trying to fit in, on my cheeks and those of the not-quite friend.
This is, as it happens, my first profile picture on Facebook, dated October 11, 2008, and most of the misremembered details do belong to the same rough period (early adolescence, Freshman year of high school) and do appear in other, later pictures. My memory’s made a composite, an aggregate of these discrete captured moments, smeared them together into a singular summary whorl. It might be worth noting here that the picture itself, only slightly less than the memory of it, is out of focus.
Around this time—I’m not sure exactly when, but somewhere around the onset of puberty—I started catching my own eye in the bathroom mirror. I’d stop everything, myself in my tracks, stare my own face down, captured in the glass, and sternly utter “No.” Firmly negating—but what, exactly? Everything about me, I suppose: my face, my weight, my whole dissatisfying vibe. Around this time, I started crash dieting and lost a lot of weight very fast. An apple a day, maybe two, and so on. Restriction in the extreme. “Fat-burning” green tea pills mostly meant to deliver lots of caffeine. Fifty pounds down in a couple months, I think. At least a pound a day, for a while, which I noted with a hungry sense of triumph while standing rigorously towel-dried and naked on the scale every morning, religiously. Looking back at pictures from this time, at my fat and so much thinner selves, what startles me most is not that I misremembered some details—of course I did, memory works by not working like a machine, and I forgot them again between drafts of this essay—but how differently I feel looking at myself now, in the time-shifted mirror of old self-portraits. That first profile picture mostly makes me feel tender, gentle, sad. Why couldn’t he see that he looked just fine? And looking at my much thinner image, visage (I never thought I was thin, not really, not enough, even though my cheeks were hollow) I’m more or less unsettled, concerned, want to intervene, still saying “No” while staring myself down, but for very different reasons.
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Yesterday, by the end of class, which was good but long, all I could think was: I have got to take these pants off. They were digging into my waist in earnest by the end, leaving red oblong welts. Carhartt’s, 40-inch waist, durable and stiff. Which is why, besides the look, I wear them—a pant meant to survive the rigors of my thighs. Still, they’re not the best for sitting in for long stretches, especially recently, since I’ve gained some weight and really should go up a size. In theory I enjoy clothes, how they can play persona and its attendant moods like a synth, but shopping for them is another bag of broken glass: come on, reach a hand in, why not?
To my knowledge, “shopping while fat” is not an accepted term of art in the lexicon of marginalized complaint, but it definitely could be. Trying on new, unfamiliar, vaguely threatening articles that only barely, only grudgingly exist in one’s size, if at all? The ever-presence of one’s judgmental, put-upon, disappointed mother—spectral or actual, it hardly matters? The feeling if not the fact of an audience eyeing this performance, practically a foregone failure, of being fine, fitting in, looking good? The purest torture I know.
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I’m out of bed for a rare, unrequired moment. I could say I’ve been depressed, lethargic, a largely inert lump, but what does that tell you, exactly? How does that interpret my body, and how does my body signal and circumscribe the interpretation of my mood and behavior? I’m worrying about this all the time. I’m drinking a glass of wine, trying to pick a few not-too-long-and-not-too-challenging-but-still-kinda-challenging-and-good personal essays for my mostly white and mostly conservative and mostly functionally illiterate Idaho undergraduate students to read, not thinking about all the other work I should’ve worked on already before 9:59 pm on this, the last day of a too-short break in a too-long semester (the grading I’m impossibly behind on, the emails I’ve neglected to reply to, the assignments that are long past due, this essay, and more and more and more). And as I wrote that too-long sentence (trying to delay the inevitable) my 10pm you-really-should-go-to-bed-now-if-you’re-committed-to-this-pretending-to-be-a-functional-adult-thing alarm went off, and maybe I would’ve laughed it off if my breathing weren’t so shallow, my mind so ill-at-ease, my chest so tight and woozy.
I’m typing this in Night Mode—white type on a grey-black background—the default for the newest version of Word I downloaded a few months ago. I suppose I should be grateful: thank you, beneficent corporate overlords of word processing, for protecting me from the malign influence of excessive blue light; my bloodshot eyeballs thank you, what remains of my REM cycle thanks you. Except I find it really annoying, actually. Kind of narcotizing and drowsy-making. Which, I guess, is the point? If this seems like an absurdly minor, infantile gripe, I don’t disagree. It would hardly be worthy of notice if it didn’t seem curiously representative of something. Because, I’m sure I could change the settings if I tried (not that hard), if I made enough of an effort. Such a little bit, surely. But instead, like so much else, I let it happen and go on happening, too tired, used up, wrung out to lift a finger.
The bed issue really is important. I feel like I should underline it for you. Lately, I’ve been spending more and more time there. Day time, wide-awake time, get-a-life-and-get-shit-done time. Not really enjoying myself. Not so much making the decision to stay there, even. Not having the inclination or energy to be anywhere else, more like. And doing nothing in particular—or, more to the point, not doing anything in particular: playing a boring but addictive game on my phone, mindlessly eating something from Doordash, half listening to a podcast or half watching a show or, most often, all of the above at once. Doing anything but anything in particular, mind quit of particulars, sandblasted of particulars, particularly avoidant (but for not the first and surely not the last time) of all things of particular and pressing importance. Then not sleeping, or sleeping only fitfully.
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This essay is supposed to be about feelings. Feelings and fatness, more precisely. The feelings fat people, myself included, are supposed (imagined and, by having been imagined and therefore being imaginable, allowed) to have. I’m not off to a very good start, I don’t think. I really am so bad at sticking to parameters, a project, timelines, a point. I mean to, I really do. Promise. I try them on and everything, look expectantly into the mirror, give a little twirl. But they fit so badly, make a mockery of comfort, and my mind wanders, and I really haven’t wanted to write much at all lately (which feels, in a sense, like not wanting to be alive much at all lately), until I have to strip, in a huff, back down to the seat of the seat of my pants, slip into what feels good. Tenable. Okay. Also, well, as of this writing, I’m a little tipsy.
I suppose this could turn into a study of avoidance. All the things I do when I should be doing something else. I have ample personal experience with that particular subject, plenty of material to draw on. Classes skipped and dropped, important conversations never had, airs never cleared and bills unpaid for as long as possible. Though, the problem with the idea of studying avoidance is, besides the obvious self-indulgence masquerading as a high concept, that, in doing so, I’d have to look at the thing up close, admit to its presence and commit to pinning it down. That is, I’d have to stop avoiding avoidance, along with everything else.
I suppose I’m telling you all this up top, showing as much of my (indolent, pimpled, misshapen) ass as I can bear, as both preface and apologia, to ask for forgiveness or maybe patience before getting to the thing in earnest (as if I believe that will actually happen). I suppose I’m telling you I disgust myself, and that I’m asking, at least in part, for your pity. I’m not proud of any of it. I find this intention suspect, probably aesthetically bankrupt, and doubt I’d find it exactly satisfying in the writing of others, but what can you do (sorry, also, for that shrug: another bad habit I’ve fallen into while just barely getting through the day). What can I do? Lately, the honest answer is not very much at all.
I was trying to read a play, The Whale, by Samuel D. Hunter, while actively not reading something or other for class. I kept fidgeting, trying on position upon position, reworking my body and the pillows propping it up, which never seem to support me just right, no matter how I plump or turn, fold or twist or layer them. Besides that, there was an unusually aggressive itch running the length of my right thigh and I kept having to put the book down to scratch it, pick it up again, read for a bit, barely more than a moment, then put it down again, scratch, and so on.
I’m often inclined to find the literal, material, least intangible possible explanation for things and stick to it like superglue. This is a coping mechanism developed in childhood to diffuse intrusive, obsessive, paranoid thoughts (an imaginary monster was always lurking to grab at my ankles if I walked too leisurely up the family room stairs; stepping on a crack really would break my mother’s back), so I blamed the discomfort and itch on the unwashed sheets I was lying on and under at the time, which I’d been lying on and under for weeks already and were probably not unlikely to be causing at least some skin irritation, I supposed. And there was, of course, my errant, poorly regulated brain chemistry to consider, thrown horribly and hopelessly (even more) out of whack by the Adderall I’d recently added then subtracted from my roster of maybe-helpful medications. Even still, all things being more or less equal, and at a bit of a remove, I can’t help but wonder if my fidgeting, itchy body was trying to tell me something, save me some grief.
One time, while briefly working at the local bookstore, I recommended The Whale to its own author. He’d asked if we had a drama section, and I apologetically walked him over to the two or three plays we had on hand while saying that, No, unfortunately, we didn’t. It really isn’t a very good bookstore. All the plays were by local authors. I’ve heard this one is interesting, I said, as I handed him a book he’d written.
In retrospect, I might’ve recognized him sooner. It’s not like we’d met before, but we were both at his sister-in-law’s wedding (it’s a small-town, world). Him for obvious reasons, and me because she and I are casual friends and it was a casual wedding, so I had actually seen his face and heard his voice. And sure, he was wearing a mask when he came into the bookstore, which always makes recognition more difficult, and then, I knew he lived in New York, had him slotted in the Very Unlikely To See Around Town column in my head, so wasn’t expecting him to drop by any old day, even if this is the town where he grew up, where most of his family still lives. But none of these mitigating details did much to relieve my embarrassment. Mortification, more like. By the time he made it to the register to pay for his pile—not including, needless to say, The Whale—I’d realized my mistake, confirmed with my friend, and said, “Uh, I sure did recommend your own play to you, huh?” He was very kind and gentle about the whole thing, humored me with a nod, might have even blushed a little, and didn’t seem the least bit bothered.
I’d been eyeing the play for a while already, knew it was set in Moscow, knew its main character was queer, knew its author had won a MacArthur, plus the modest personal connection, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I bought it not long after that mortifying moment, maybe even that day, though it sat unread on a shelf at home for a while after that. Not that this is all that unusual for me. In fact, I so seldom pick up a book immediately upon purchase that it’s probably more like the norm. Still, there was an extra, notable note of hesitation in this case, as I eyed its spine warily for months.
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The titular whale could refer to Moby-Dick, referenced in scraps of a mysteriously significant, mysteriously adored-by-the-protagonist, Charlie, student essay scattered throughout the play. Or, it could refer to the biblical story of Jonah, the big fish that’s maybe a whale sent by God to swallow and save him, which becomes significant in the latter half of the play. But these literary and scriptural whales feel more or less like fig leaves barely covering up the obvious, insidious, odiously lurid fact that “the whale” refers to and literally dehumanizes Charlie himself. Here’s how he’s described in the list of characters: “Male, weighing around six hundred pounds, early to mid-forties.” That weight, “around six hundred pounds,” feels both fittingly vague as character description and worryingly specific as fat archetype. It can’t help but bring to mind My Six Hundred Pound Life, which began airing on TLC in 2012, the same year the play was first produced. I’ve never seen the show, and I doubt Hunter has either, but this chronological convergence seems spookily significant.
Judging by its Wikipedia page, the show took a far more faux-inspirational approach to similar material, with episodes structured around the subjects’ medically- and often surgically-assisted weight loss. Under the “Subject Outcomes” heading, the sole subhead reads “Eleven patients have died since appearing on the show,” though only three of these deaths were apparently featured “during the patient’s respective episode.”
Charlie isn’t trying to lose weight, much less seeking medical care (at various points in the play he forbids someone from calling an ambulance), and the final scene depicts his presumptive, telegraphed, seemingly inevitable death. The play’s setting is described as, “The main room of a small, white-walled, desolate apartment in a cheaply constructed two-story building. The room is dominated by a large couch that sags in the middle, reenforced by several cinder blocks.” Besides the cinder blocks, this could passably describe my own apartment. There’s also “a small computer desk on rollers,” “a claw for reaching,” “a walker” resting near the couch somewhere, “an aging TV sitting in a corner,” and “a whole universe of full, empty and half-empty food containers (doughnuts, candy bars, fried chicken, burgers, two-liter soda bottles, etc.).” “Little effort has been made to clean up trash or organize,” we’re told, as if anyone needed to be.
Early in the play, Charlie’s estranged daughter, Ellie, comes over, and she’s just awful. Practically deranged. I mean, think of the worst, nastiest person you knew in high school and add several uses of the word “retarded” in casual conversation, a blog solely devoted to savaging her elders and peers, seemingly inexhaustible venom. She’s cruel like it’s nothing, especially to Charlie, and he seems, at least in his dialogue, entirely unphased. Even, perplexingly, charmed. When she first comes over, she asks, “So, what? You want me to like help you clean yourself or go to the bathroom or something?” Charlie responds, “You don’t need to do anything disgusting, I promise.” To which Ellie replies, “Just being around you is disgusting .” It seems likely that she’s meant to stand in for the audience’s fatphobic id, to say the quiet part loud, and this makes her an all but intolerable character on the page. It also makes Charlie’s sentimental devotion to her practically pathological, tantamount to self-harm.
That all of this reads as misery porn goes, I think, without saying, though the misery is mawkishly, awkwardly tempered in the last scene. Turns out, the Moby-Dick essay was written by Charlie’s daughter in the eighth grade, not by a former student of his as he’s seemed to suggest, and it’s been one of his few points of access to her, a window into her voice and mind and personality, since leaving her mother and becoming the estranged, grieving shut-in he is by the start of the events of the play. In the final scene, Ellie begs and berates Charlie to go to the hospital, and Charlie pleads with Ellie to read her essay to him. “Dad, please,” she says. It’s the first time she’s called him that, a rare moment of uncharacteristic tenderness. As she reads, Charlie gets up, with effort. Takes a few labored, wheezing steps toward her. At the end of each act, the stage directions have mentioned the sound of waves, which has gradually grown louder, more insistent and intense. Here, at the very end of the play, as Ellie nears the end of her essay, the directions read: “(Charlie takes one last step toward Ellie. The waves reach their loudest level.)” She keeps reading. “(Charlie looks up. The waves cut off. A sharp intake of breath. The lights snap to black.)” END OF PLAY. I rolled my eyes.
Earlier, Charlie gets a final visit from another character, a Mormon missionary calling himself, Ishmael-like, Elder Thomas. He’s been a persistent, recurring feature of the play, first showing up at Charlie’s door in the second scene to play anxious Good Samaritan while Charlie experiences an unspecified medical crisis involving “some sharp pain in his chest.” He keeps coming back, wanting to save Charlie’s soul but being very polite about it, until, in his final visit, the pleasant veneer cracks. He’s found something out about Charlie’s late partner, who was also Mormon and left the church when he and Charlie got together. The partner had gone to one last service, at his father’s request, and shortly thereafter stopped eating altogether, wasted away, died. That this manifestation of grief is the direct, overdetermined, ironic inverse of Charlie’s own is unmissable, more than a little laughable.
Anyway, Elder Thomas finds out that “The talk that day, the talk that his father gave—it was about Jonah.” Charlie is nonplussed by the bathetic revelation, so much less fire-and-brimstone horrifying than what he’d imagined: “Is this what it fucking comes down to? I always thought, whatever they did to him that day must have been so awful, so cruel…A story? Some stupid story, that’s what killed him?” This disbelief, a refusal of the importance of belief, is what finally breaks Elder Thomas, makes him overplay his proselytizing hand:
ELDER THOMAS: No, it’s not just a story—
CHARLIE: Look, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but this doesn’t mean anything, it—. I don’t even know what I was expecting to find out, it’s not
ELDER THOMAS: Listen to me. (Short pause) Charlie, your boyfriend—he tried to escape God’s will, he chose his lifestyle with you over God. And when he heard this story, when he heard God’s word, he knew. He knew the truth. He never prayed for salvation—but it’s not too late for you.
(Pause.)
CHARLIE: You think Alan died—because he chose to be with me? You think God turned his back on him because he and I were in love?
ELDER THOMAS: Yes.
Never mind the sudden efflorescence of a cartoonish homophobia previously absent from the world of the play. Presumably it was always there, just below the surface. I’m more interested in what comes next, how this disgust is woven together with an especially pointed, especially graphic provocation of disgust for Charlie’s body. Provoked by Charlie himself, his agency intact and asserted, and used against Elder Thomas, but always also by Hunter, and used against, presumably, the audience. If pressed, I’d probably point to it as the emotional climax of the play:
(Silence. Charlie Stares at him.)
CHARLIE: You know, I wasn’t always this big.
(Short pause.)
ELDER THOMAS: Yeah, I know—
CHARLIE: I mean, I was never the best-looking guy in the room, but—Alan still loved me. He still thought I was beautiful.
ELDER THOMAS: Okay—
CHARLIE: Halfway through the semester, he started meeting me during my office hours—we were both crazy about one another, but we waited until the course was done before we…
ELDER THOMAS: This isn’t important—
CHARLIE: It was just after classes had ended for the year, it was a perfect temperature, and we went for a walk in the arboretum. And we kissed.
ELDER THOMAS: Charlie, stop.
CHARLIE: Listen to me. We used to spend entire nights lying next to one another, naked—
ELDER THOMAS: Stop.
CHARLIE: We would make love—
ELDER THOMAS: I don’t want to hear about—
CHARLIE: We would make love. Do you find that disgusting?
ELDER THOMAS: Charlie, God is ready to help you, you don’t have to—
CHARLIE: I hope there isn’t a God. (Pause) I hope there isn’t a God because I hate thinking that there’s an afterlife, that Alan can see what I’ve done to myself, that he can see my swollen feet, the sores on my skin, the patches of mold in between the flaps— [Emphasis mine.]
ELDER THOMAS: Okay, stop—
CHARLIE: —the infected ulcers on my ass, the sack of fat on my back that turned brown last year—
ELDER THOMAS: Stop
CHARLIE: This is disgusting?
ELDER THOMAS: YES
CHARLIE: I’m disgusting?
ELDER THOMAS: YES, YOU’RE DISGUSTING, YOU’RE—…
(Elder Thomas stops himself.
Long silence. Charlie stares at him.)
I don’t quite know what to make of this. I’m pretty sure it isn’t intentionally malicious, but I’m equally pretty sure it’s harmful, degrading, in poor taste. I suppose fusing homophobia, by now a politically all-but untenable bigotry, and fatphobia, which has proven remarkably, poisonously resilient in comparison, could be rhetorically useful. Yoking them together under a common rubric, of disgust, showing how these twin aversions are affectively all-but identical: it just might incite a few well-meaning, right-thinking liberals on the margins to repent their sins and seek forgiveness. I remain unsure, though, if that’s the work this scene is trying to do, much less managing to execute.
In a YouTube interview posted by his publisher, Hunter had this to say about the choice to incite disgust with Charlie’s body:
The idea for making him obese came from this idea that I wanted to put both the other characters in the play and the audience at a distance at the very beginning. So, the lights come up and you see this man, and I think a large section of the audience—not everybody—but a large section of the audience has been sort of culturally trained to put him at arm’s length, and to judge him, and to reject him to a certain degree. And the sort of experiment of the play was, over the course of an hour and forty-five minutes, can that distance be decreased…[can the audience] come to empathize with him and identify with him despite the weight.
Where this ostensibly noble goal, about as profound as any pablum, runs aground, I think, is in the extremity of disgust evinced and dramatized in this scene and others like it (only different by degree, not in kind, from other similar moments throughout the play). It’s just so overpoweringly potent, so full of shame, so othering, so acute, I imagine it must almost always short circuit the possibility of empathy or identification in an audience. Perhaps pity could survive it. And I can say with even greater certainty that, whatever else is going on here, no fat person is being helped, humanized, made whole. Still, unlike the very ending, I do at least find this scene intensely captivating, unsettling, engrossing. Maybe not “good,” exactly, but effective. It moved me. It made its way into my dreams. Though I could probably say something similar about certain episodes of My Six Hundred Pound Life, had I ever been able to bring myself to watch any.
It’s possible that something vital and vindicating is lost by reading the play on the page, instead of seeing it performed (the thought has crossed my mind), though to do that while living in the theater-poor town where the play is set, I’ll likely have to see the recent film adaptation penned by Hunter, directed by Darren Aronofsky, and starring Brendan Fraser. When I started writing this essay, the film was still forthcoming, and learning about mostly fomented dread in me. The early reviews, while praising Fraser’s performance and return to film acting (for a while there he seemed like the clear Best Actor Oscar front-runner, and what do I know, he could still win, could have won while you're reading this), were often laced with the same casual, gawking fatphobia I'd seen in old reviews of old productions of the play (see: Owen Gleiberman’s in Variety). Those and the more straightforwardly negative takes didn't seem to augur that the mise-en-scène or performances would vitiate the misery for me much if it all. And, perhaps as luck would have it, as it happened in any case, when the movie came to town at last I couldn't go. I was stuck in the appartment with pneumonia, hacking privately, in the middle of a course of antibiotics. I'll see it some day, I'm sure. When I'm ready. Maybe once I've moved away.
There’s a 2019 New York Times profile of Hunter that mentions he was a “shy, overweight” child (same), and in it he gives a very different, much more personal explanation of what informed and motivated Charlie’s creation: “That’s kind of a fun-house mirror version of me if a few key things in my life hadn’t happened.” If he hadn’t lost weight, left Idaho, gotten married, become a successful working playwright with a MacArthur? Who knows, but something like that list, I’m assuming.
I find this explanation both more damning and more true, less impersonally technical and less defensible on its face. Maybe I’m taking it too personally, sitting here in Idaho, fat as I’ve ever been, with no prestigious awards or TV writing credits or movie deals to my name. Since, if we’re to use the same metrics, a few key things in my life have gone very wrong and I’m living in the funhouse mirror or very near it. Every part of me stretched and distorted beyond ideal proportion, recognition, admiration.
I’m not as fat as Charlie. I’d like to say I don’t take any solace in that fact, but I’d be lying to you and myself. I’m gaining weight right now, quickly coming up on 300 lbs. Not moving much, not eating well. I can see it in my face. In my neck. On Zoom (the cruel mirror of the Self View), in a recent picture posted to my MFA program’s Instagram. It pulls downwards into a quavering waddle more than it ever used to. And I wish I could say this doesn’t bother me. I wish I could claim to love my body unambiguously, without fail or falter. I have worked so hard for so long to forge an uneasy détente with it, to not mind its bulk so much, to be unbothered by it at least, if, as it happens, I can’t quite manage to love it. I have aspired to and often managed to achieve neutrality. The limitations of this as a politics or ideology, its unreproducibility and inefficacy, are worth noting, pausing at and acknowledging. But it has been an effective strategy, yet another affective outfit, to get me through, most days, more or less. And I feel this tense peace breaking down just now, with The Whale’s vision of its protagonist rattling around in my head, looming. Only making things worse. I know all about the funhouse mirror: a hateful, fatalistic six hundred pound imaginary alter ego, another, lesser life & self, sitting on my shoulders, putting the slouch in my back. A horror show waiting to happen, or so the story goes. (A sharp intake of breath. The lights snap to black.) END OF PLAY.
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Reading Note:
As far as books go, I’ve been dipping into and enjoying Margo Jefferson’s Negroland, Sarah Vap’s Winter: Effulgences & Devotions, Helen Garner’s The First Stone, Sarah Minor’s Slim Confessions, Caren Beilin’s Revenge of the Scapegoat, Anelise Chen’s So Many Olympic Exertions, David Trinidad’s Dear Prudence, Denise Duhamel’s Queen for a Day, Garielle Lutz’s Worsted, etc. But I do find my attention fraying and wandering off into movies lately, especially those of Mike Leigh, especially High Hopes and Peterloo. And I don’t know when I’ll be able to watch it, but I’m very much looking forward to Laura Poitras’s documentary about Nan Goldin, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.
