I wrote down everything I read and began writing my own first novel...

This blog aimed to contrast what I was reading in in 1975-79 with the same month, week and day, 30 years later in 2005-2009. I'm leaving the blog up in archive mode, blogging in real time on Live Journal--and still writing novels.

Lynne Murray's Live Journal and Bride of the Dead Blog

Sunday, September 25, 2005

Colette in occupied Paris, Jennifer Weiner in Shoes and taboos

From September 22 to 25, 1975, I read:

Looking Backward, Colette

I remember reading many of Colette’s books, and even where I was living and where I sat or lay when I read them--many of my small apartments had no chairs, so I frequently read in bed. But specifics on this book eluded me. So I looked it up on the net and found a 1975 New York Times review by Anatole Broyard. Vaguely, I remember that this was about her life in Paris during the Nazi occupation, but I hadn’t remembered that she purposely went there when she could have stayed in a small village. God, I love the Internet (also Colette)!

Who could describe better than Colette, I thought, the almost dreamlike character of life in Paris during the Occupation? Safely lodged in a small village in central France, she had returned to Paris impulsively, unwilling to miss the tragicomedy, the cramped heroism, of keeping body and soul together under such conditions. A connoisseur of gestures, she was ideally equipped to appreciate the strategies of improvisation, the stubborn Gallic shrugs of perseverance. Already quite old and partly lamed by arthritis, she sat in her window, one of France's greatest voyeurs, and reviewed the long-running drama of survival.

How to keep warm? she asks in "Looking Backwards." "An old armchair is sure to burn slowly and steadily. I used to know a Breton set of shelves which would go up very well in smoke ... the skeletons of crates, the handles of broken brooms, the empty case that once held a dozen bottles of champagne ... let's screw up rolls of newspaper with an iron wire, which will burn almost without flaring up." A friend is traveling to Boulogne to buy animal sculptures to burn, "a stag and a Newfoundland dog, both in wood, life-size. A Newfoundland had a hare in his mouth and a thick tree trunk beside him -- even a branch of flowing hawthorn ...
from Anatole Broyard’s 1975 NYT review of Colette’s Looking Backwards.


From September 22 to 25, 2005, I read:

In Her Shoes, Jennifer Weiner

I contemplated reviewing this for my web page where I consider books that touch on size acceptance, but I decided not to. The interview with Jennifer Weiner that was included at the back of the paperback has a section that illuminates why I didn’t want to review the book. Actually I agree with Weiner on most points, but I put in bold the section that pointed to why I didn’t want to write an entire essay on her book, and explained below:

Q: In both of your novels [Good in Bed and In Her Shoes], the idea of body image is a central theme. Do you think this concept is a constraint that we place on ourselves, a restraint that society places on women, or a combination of the two?

A: Um, all of the above? I think it starts out as being a societal mandate—a kind of signpost outside of life’s roller coaster, reading “You Must Be Less Than This Fat Or Nobody Will Ever Love You”—and it’s something that women internalize, and carry with them in different ways. One of the things I was trying to do with this book was to show both sides of the coin, and the different ways that buying the beauty myth can harm you. Rose, for example, who’s a normal size and healthy, gets the message that her body is something to be ignored and concealed, swathed in sweatpants and unfashionable-length skirts, until she learns that however it appears, her body is first and foremost, something to use—to get her around, to ride a bike, to walk a dog, to hold the people she loves. And then there’s Maggie, who’s got this ready-for-its-closeup body (which, as we see, requires a tremendous investment in terms of effort and time), but it doesn’t bring her all the happiness that the plastic surgeons and diet merchants promise. It gets her scads of attention—good and bad—and it gets her judged, the same way Rose’s body earns her judgments. I hope someday the idea of “you are how you look” will change. . . But I worry that there’s so much money to be made off of convincing women that they’re inadequate, too big, too little, or otherwise completely unacceptable that change is going to be painfully slow.
From A Conversation with Jennifer Weiner, p. 534-35, Pocket Book paperback edition of In Her Shoes.

As I said, I totally agree with that last bit, and I realize that every woman in America today has to live with constant pressure to feel bad about herself—and then go buy something to make her feel better.

But Weiner has chosen to tell the story of a “normal size” sister, whom our twisted culture beats up on as “fat,” with her body-obsessed, yet dyslexic sister, who manipulates others with her body and is trashed by those around her as “stupid.” She's spanned the whole gamut of body oppression from A to B (to paraphrase Dorothy Parker's review of Katherine Hepburn).

I think Weiner’s work is size positive, but intentionally avoids scaring people away by using a character who actually is fat--as opposed to one who is merely healthy but considered as fat in our twisted view. I am guessing that this was a conscious decision on Weiner's part and it can be defended from the point of view of reaching a larger audience (um, larger in the sense of more readers, not larger readers). It certainly has worked, in that the paperback I bought was a mass market edition accompanying a motion picture release.

A positive fat character, a meditation instructor, appears in Weiner’s Good in Bed. The heroine, Canny, calls her a good “role model” but almost immediately upon sitting down to meditate, she has an insight that causes her to run away. One could argue that it's only coincidence that she talks to a fat lady and leaves town immediately. But from where I sit, it looked as if she needed to distance herself from the very idea of this woman’s fatness—be she positive or negative.

As a novelist, I know it’s damn hard to bring the reader into the head of a humanized fat character—as opposed to a stereotype of one sort or another.

Worse yet, and it is worse, I truly believe that an actual fat character used in a positive way is a taboo in fiction nowadays. And it’s not one of those fun-to-break taboos like cannibalism and necrophilia that bring in the big bucks.

My writer’s brain is already meditating on that State of the “F” Word essay. . . I’ll take my keyboard and soap box in the other room and let you know when it’s done and up on the web page. . .

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's a sad commentary that every time Hollywood adapts a book about a mildly plus sized character like Rose Feller or Bridget Jones, some size 2 Hollywood actress makes a big deal about "bulking up" to a size 6. My impression from reading "In Her Shoes" (admittedly, it was a while ago) was that Rose is at least 50 lbs. heavier than the pictures I've seen of Toni Collette in the role. It's ironic that my husband (and many other men, I'm sure) thought the, ahem, "fat" Renee Zellweger in "Bridget" was far sexier than the stick-like Renee of "Chicago"!
--Sue T.

Lynne Murray said...

Truly ironic indeed! The sizes you quote are interesting. In the interview mentioned above Weiner says, "I guess in an ideal world they would have cast an unknown plus-sized actress who's been told all her career that she's too big for this and too big for that, but having an actress as amazing as Toni Collette agree to gain weight for the part ws a pretty decent compromise." Hmmm. If the average American woman is size 14, and Collette gained up to size 6 so she could look "fat"... Those numbers give us some index of how our perceptions are being twisted into a painful pretzel of unreality. Lynne

Anonymous said...

The sizes were just guesses on my part. I'm a 12, and Toni as Rose looks at least a couple sizes skinnier than me (even if the camera really does add 10 pounds)!
--Sue

Lynne Murray said...

You're probably closer to the ballpark in estimating sizes than I. Women's clothing sizes are a minefield of emotion. Now that they have a size zero(!), I'm expecting to hear minus sizes any day now.
Lynne