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.
