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231 26 Fat Girls Need Fiction Susan Stinson Here we see all the abilities of fancy, deftly woven together: its ability to endow a perceived form with rich and complex significance; its generous construction of the seen; its preference for wonder over pat solutions; its playful and surprising movements, delightful for their own sake; its tenderness; its eroticism; its awe before the fact of human mortality. —Martha Nussbaum, “The Literary Imagination in Public Life” (1991, p. 901) Fat girls need fiction. For this to be true does not require that fat girls need fiction more than anyone else, or that we need it because we are fat. Human beings are complex, and there is unlikely to be only one simple story about why we need anything. I am a novelist, frankly biased, but I find it utterly compelling to think of bringing the qualities that Nussbaum attributes to fancy—a generous construction of the seen; preference for wonder over pat solutions; tenderness; eroticism; and awe before the fact of human mortality—to the contemplation of my fat body. The idea of the architects and disseminators of public health policy (or even, say, a nurse rolling up my sleeve to measure my blood pressure) considering fatness using such habits of mind represents the possibility of a very different world than the one where I live now. “Playful and surprising movements, delightful for their own sake” could be an appreciation not just of the workings of the imagination but also of fat in motion. I consider it a gift of many long, ardent, malleable hours of reading fiction that my mind makes that leap. I originally read Fat Girl Dances with Rocks secretly over a period of weeks—the old Tower Records on Newbury Street in Boston had a copy, and I went back again and again and read it a few pages at a time, as this was pre-size-acceptance for me, and owing to my seemingly bottomless reserves of internalized fat hatred, I couldn’t bring myself to take it to the counter and buy it. Like, in front of someone. WHOA. Never. I read it like really gruesome, really forbidden porn—it was simultaneously horrifying and exhilarating. I was disgusted with myself for wanting to read it but I couldn’t stop. 232 Susan Stinson I don’t mean for this analogy to come across as disrespectful, but that’s honestly how I was absorbing it. One day I went in and the copy was gone. Someone must have bought it. I was devastated . That was telling. When I did begin my own process of coming to love my body, I thought about that secret-reading experience a lot. I still do. (Lesley Kinzel, comment in the author’s online journal, 2006) Art critic Dave Hickey (1997) draws a distinction among those interested in any given art form between participants, who know that they need the art and actively engage in encouraging the conditions necessary for its creation in any way they can, and spectators, who simply pay the price of admission (or buy a book or whatever) and show up to passively consume a product. Participants bring life and fullness to art; spectators empty and kill it. When, nineteen years after I began writing my first novel, I read in my LiveJournal the description above of Lesley Kinzel’s intense response to it, I was moved by her extremely high level of participation in the world of the book, despite her very mixed feelings and the fact that she never bought it. I knew Lesley as a very fat-positive online presence, and had met her briefly at community-related events, such as the huge Fat Girl Flea Market in New York City in 2005, and the Fat and the Academy conference at Smith College in 2006. She is clearly a participant in fat art and politics, which, along with lesbian writers groups and the once vibrant network of feminist presses, periodicals, and bookstores, are literally what brought my books into existence. The edgy, risk-taking sensibilities of radical fat activists have permeated my work so that it can both lure and frighten a reader such as Lesley, who innocently happens upon it. Of my novels, Fat Girl Dances with Rocks (1994) is a coming-of-age story; Martha Moody (1995) is a magic realist historical romance (and meditation on writing using images of fat and butter as a metaphor for the creative process); and Venus of...

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