Review: "Waisted" by Randy Susan Meyers

TW: Eating disorders

“You can be fat and be the best person in the world. You can be skinny and be the meanest rat around. You can be skinny and sweet as sugar. You can be fat and be rotten to the core. You don’t always get to choose skinny or fat – and most of us are somewhere in the middle. But you can always choose what kind of person you’ll be. Concentrate on that.”

“Waisted” by Randy Susan Meyers primarily follows Daphne and Alice, two overweight women desperate to lose weight. They go to a home called Privation, and sign away their rights, in order to participate in a “Biggest Loser”-style boot camp with a group of other overweight women. They eat flavorless food, work out for hours, and are subjected to humiliating weigh-ins, all of which are recorded. When their trainers start feeding them pills, the women grow suspicious of the filmmakers’ motives and a nighttime investigation leads to a revelation more compelling than anything the boot camp claimed to offer when they arrived.

“Waisted” explores Daphne and Alice’s relationships with their parents, spouses, children and each other. It also touches upon themes of racial identity and women’s roles through the lens of a woman’s weight, though it doesn’t explore them as fully as I would have liked. The book is extremely relatable in the intimate way it depicts the thoughts in Daphne and Alice’s heads, specifically when they think about food. You’ll never think about butter or M&Ms the same way again, but I will warn you that some of the thoughts about food and depictions of purging could be triggering to those who have suffered from eating disorders.

One aspect of the book that was particularly interesting was the way the author depicted men. Daphne’s husband seemed to love her no matter her size. Alice’s husband was obsessed with aesthetics and couldn’t seem to understand why Alice didn’t just see things his way. While both men seemed to love their wives, they were both obtuse in different ways.

The novel’s feminist themes aren’t new stomping ground. Society increasingly pressures women to shrink themselves so as to take up the least amount of room possible and make the least amount of noise. The book isn’t preachy all the time, but it definitely goes there. Part of me feels like this book is a little late to the party of “love yourself” rah-rah sisterhood. But it contained too much nuance not to be notable. I’m itching to tell you some of the details that make this book memorable, but I don’t want to spoil anything.

Personally, I’ve gained weight, lost it and gained it again. I’ve learned how to lift weights and trained for a marathon. I exercise regularly and eat clean, but I’m still considered obese by medical standards. As I get older, I’m stymied and frustrated by my body, but over the years I’ve come to learn that it’s not worth my time to think about it too often (I have too many other things to do,) and most of my negative thoughts stem from a patriarchal culture that dictates women must look a certain way for the express purpose of keeping a man around. I’m not entering a bikini competition anytime soon, and I’ve long stopped caring what men think. Nowadays, weight loss is framed as “wellness” and “self-care,” but is anyone really fooled by that?

“Waisted” is a character study that covers a lot of ground in fewer than 300 pages. There are a few holes in the plot that could have been filled in to make it longer, but the book says what it needs to say tidily enough.

“Waisted” will be released in June 2019. I received a copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.