Shocking Revelations

If you haven’t read Lindsay’s post of shocking revelations about the Fatosphere over at babble, you should go read it.

More Fat Characters

After making this post, I thought it would be a good idea to start a community for discussing fat characters in fiction, so I made one on LiveJournal. Check it out.

“A Story of My Mother”

A friend posted this story in LiveJournal’s Health At Every Size community. I like statistics so I wish I knew some more about the connection between weight loss and dementia; I’ll post more if I find out something. But stories like this always break my heart.

Last week, I had to go see my dad and together, we had to put my mother into a nursing home because of her dementia. It was a heart-wrenching occasion for many reasons. My mother has been declining for many years, precipitated or at least exacerbated, I believe, by an extreme weight loss. She had had pain in her knees for some time, but the doctor refused to operate until my mom lost weight. She’s always been a big woman. At 5′ 10″ she usually weighed about 300 lbs. They told her she had to lose more than 100 to do the surgery, which is difficult if you can’t walk. She basically starved herself for a couple years and they finally did the surgery. When she awoke from the surgery, she was delusional. They had to put her in a home at that point until she recovered enough to be sent home. She still couldn’t walk without a walker and was in constant pain from that and arthritis. After that, she had trouble finding words. Her weight continued to plummet, which she was quite proud of.

You see, my mom has always been large, like her parents, but she has never accepted it. When I was four, she had a nervous breakdown because of diet pills. As I and my sister grew larger, she always told us that no man would love us unless we were thin. She was never happy with my father and always on the verge of some kind of breakdown. She could never be happy with herself or her life. She could never stand up for what she wanted, because she never felt she deserved it because she was fat.

Fat Characters in Literature

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books had a wonderful post recently about plus-sized heroines in romance novels.

Yesterday I requested Such a Pretty Face, a sci-fi/fantasy anthology about plus-sized women, from my public library. I look forward to reading it.

A few weeks ago I read Too Big to Miss and I honestly did not enjoy it that much. I felt preached to, which I think is a risk any author takes when she creates a character who has to justify something about herself to other characters or to readers. I also didn’t think the characters were developed as much as I’d like, but it’s a series so I might read the second one and see if I like it any better.

The only book with a fat heroine I recall reading before that was Pigs Don’t Fly, which I found in the library all the way back in middle school. The narrator is the daughter of the village prostitute, but can’t follow in her mother’s footsteps because she is fat (“I was a huge lump of grease, wobbling from foot to foot like ill-set aspic”) and therefore so ugly that no one would ever pay to sleep with her. Part of the plot is her losing weight and becoming more attractive, naturally. Even years before getting involved in fat acceptance, I found it ridiculous.

As for fat male characters, the only one I can think of off the top of my head is the title character of the Thraxas series, which I enjoy greatly despite its flaws. But I don’t know how fat positive that really is; although Thraxas is generally unashamed of his size, he is also portrayed as eating about six times as much as a normal human and is mostly asexual.

This has all got me thinking about my own stories–should I ever have time to work on them again–and how I could include more variation in body type without making fat the central aspect of a character’s personality. I have some ideas so far; hopefully they’ll work out. One is for a chubby, ass-kicking female vampire and her male sidekick/narrator, who has alternately been, in the story’s planning stages, a private investigator, a romance novelist, and an elementary school teacher. I’m still not sure where I’m going with that one.