I know we’re not supposed to react to these things, but…

Posted on February 17, 2013 by Anne

…let’s be honest: I’m not the cool-as-a-cucumber, detached professional I probably should be.  And really, if I were, would you want to read my memoir?  Thought not.

Navel Gazing was released a couple of months ago, and after a very good initial reception, it received its first bad review – in fact, the review was more nasty than bad, and very personal.  It felt less like a review of my book than an assessment of my assumed character (I say assumed because I disagree strongly with the assessments and consider the quote at the end of the article to be way out of context, to the point where I’m not convinced the writer actually read my book).  Well, I crumbled.  I was prepared for critical reviews of the book, and I also fully expected to read nasty personal attacks online (although I had promised myself I wouldn’t go looking for them), but I didn’t expect to read a professional review that mostly ignored the book and went instead for the personal jugular.

The point of this post, though, isn’t to air my grievances about a bad review – as much as I’d love to defend myself against every single perceived slight, that’s not an author’s place and anyway I don’t have time to respond to everything said about the book – but rather to explain something about publishing a book, something I wasn’t prepared for at all: the publicity part is emotionally exhausting, almost more so than the writing part.  I find myself constantly repeating the same parts of the story (ironically, repetition is one of the more common complaints about the book itself, and yet when it comes to journalism everybody seems to want the same things); I’m often assumed to be available during normal working hours, which I’m not, unless I beg my boss for a long lunch hour or a day off; and, most difficult for me, I’m always balanced on the tightrope between losing my sense of myself and my message and making sure I do what’s required to give the book its best chance in the world.

It was pretty hairy for a while; I spent the majority of my free time (and too much of my work time!) doing publicity duties, and with every new request I lost a little bit more of my mind.  BUT – and this is important – I also met some very interesting new people, and the book got more attention as a result of their efforts, so I felt I couldn’t complain.  In fact, I still shouldn’t be.

And really (really), I’m not trying to complain.  I just wanted to talk about it, because it seems like nobody ever does.  Even my good friend Kristina, who has worked in publishing for years, was surprised by some of the stories I told her and by how much the book promotion stressed me out.  It’s really strange to me that writers, who are so often painfully shy creatures by nature, are expected to launch their books – and, more difficult still, themselves – out into the world with the utmost enthusiasm and confidence and strength.  And we do, usually, because we’re made to understand that this seemingly impossible effort will help our babies survive.  And I can only assume it does help.

At least, I hope it does.  Otherwise, all those hours of being squeezed into tight skirts and high-slitted dresses and told to ‘smile, Beautiful!’ (mildly ironic, given that my book is pretty much all about my discomfort with my body) were for naught, right?  Or maybe not – maybe this process has toughened me up a bit, and maybe that’s worth something on its own.  After all, I did just come across a blog review that was ‘disappointed’ in the book (always so much worse than angry, just like a mother’s face), and even as I cringed I also understood that the reader wanted something from my book that I could never have given her: a different ending.

So many people have wanted something different, something I couldn’t give: an ‘emotional overeating’ explanation for why I got fat (I’m not convinced I really ‘overate’ at all, much less emotionally, but I think that’s hard for naturally thin people to believe); a deeper exploration of my issues with food through therapy (after a wasted year of therapy when I was a teenager, too sullen to talk, I could never afford it again and have never been back); a ‘happy ending’, where I have an epiphany and decide to love myself (sorry, but the process is what it is, and honesty was more important to me than a Disneylike storyline).

I think the hardest and yet most rewarding thing about this whole experience – the reviews, the photo shoots, the interviews – has been figuring out my boundaries.  I went in thinking (and promising my publicist) that besides bikini pics, I was game for anything, and boy did she take me at face value!  To her credit, she always insisted that I could decline any offer, but I was stubborn and determined to stick to my word, so I went ahead with every single opportunity that came my way.  And some of those opportunities tested me: they made me cry, or break out in stress hives, or rant against a literary world that requires so much from authors.  But I came through it, and I really do believe I’m stronger as a result, and have more conviction.

And thank goodness for that, because now I have a wedding to plan in eight months, from 5000 miles away, and so far the hives and crying have shown up much earlier!  Maybe by the end of this year I’ll be impenetrable scar tissue from top to toe…

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‘Pregnancy Brain’

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Anne

One of the side-effects of this whole book writing/editing/publishing/publicizing process has been the effect on my brain: I feel like I’m always forgetting things.  The paralysis and perceived uselessness of my mind, especially considering how hard it feels like it’s working, has been shocking, to the point where I’ve been casting about for months, trying to find an analogy for what’s happening inside my head.  And, in true testament to my mental uselessness, I’ve only just come up with one now: pregnancy brain.

According to my sources (including the brilliant television show Modern Family), when a woman is pregnant, especially in the third trimester, she begins to lose her grip a bit, forgetting important details and losing track of small items and generally blanking on how to perform simple everyday tasks.  When I first hear that, I thought it was a little ridiculous to have a name for the syndrome, but that it was fair enough to be a bit dotty when you’re growing another person inside you (shudder).

But now I live in fear of pregnancy (even more than I did before), because I’ve discovered just how susceptible my brain is to being overwhelmed.  I’ve been referring to my book as a sort of progeny for a while now – calling the pub date my ‘book birthday’ and talking about how this is the first thing I’ve ever really given birth to – but it wasn’t until recently that I began to refer to my ‘book-pregnancy brain’ (much to my young boyfriend’s and best guy friend’s mutual chagrin).

I have three calendars: phone, computer, and an online ‘Teuxdeux‘ list.  I check and double-check social engagements and writing deadlines and work commitments against all three of these calendars, and yet I still miss things.  I also check info a hundred times against emails and text messages and any other written correspondence that might confirm or deny – and yet I still missed one of my classmates in my list of awesome writing supporters on the acknowledgments page of my book (and I fear I’ll discover more unintentional absences in the coming months).  Livia Gainham has very graciously forgiven this idiotic moment, but I am less inclined to brush it off so easily; of all the ‘whoopsie’ situations I could have caused, unintentionally hurting a good friend’s feelings was pretty much my worst nightmare, and today it came true.

Still, despite my best efforts (and despite having ‘given birth’ already!), the book-pregnancy brain persists.  So it seems all I can do is try to ride it out, write everything down three or four times, and beg patience and forgiveness from friends and family.

Luckily, I’m surrounded by people whose capacity for patience and forgiveness well exceed my own.

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The Sweet Spot

Posted on November 7, 2012 by Anne

As I’ve already mentioned, I’m a little obsessed with Pinterest lately – as in, I get cranky when people pin boatloads of things in a day, because then it takes me forever to catch up with it all, and I’m a little OCD about catching up (I seem to be terrified of missing something, even though 80% of the pins seem to recirculate every few days).  Anyway, I recently repinned a list of ‘First World Problems‘ that was not only hilarious (‘I forgot to bring my phone in with me when I went to poop and I was bored the entire time’ – said EVERY GUY EVER) but also contained some hard truths, namely this one:

I didn’t have a crappy childhood, so I can’t turn my pain into art.

Now that is truly one of those ugly thoughts we’ve all had but probably shouldn’t admit to.  Of course nobody really wants to have had a shitty life, but I doubt many aspiring writers/filmmakers/artists have never had a variation of this thought: that lucky git, getting abused by his parents at a young age so he could grow up and go to Harvard and become an example of the American Dream, then write a best-selling book about it.

When my book is published, I suspect some people will think that about me: lucky bitch, having weight loss surgery and then writing about it just when it’s becoming well-known in the UK.*  And I would agree that there’s something lucky about the book that burned to get out of me being born into a willing market, but I would also retort that it was extremely unlucky that I needed to have the surgery in the first place (okay, it’s not all about being unlucky, but that’s a very nuanced topic and if you want my full opinion on culpability you’ll have to read the book).

I would also argue that the success of a book is not all that dependent on what you write about – I suspect everyone has a story inside him/herself that would be interesting enough to write a book about, if s/he can only find a captivating way of telling it. Take Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl, or Intern, or even Call the Midwife (which made such a great miniseries) – none of these books is about a unique experience.  How many people across the world are allergic to a boatload of foods?  Tons, but Sandra Beasley took her own personal stories of life as a severely allergic person and made them funny, affecting, and relate-able.  Sandeep Jauhar did the same thing with his experiences as a junior doctor in the US medical system, something thousands of young people are dealing with right now.  And Jennifer Worth wasn’t the only midwife working in the East End in the 50s; she was just the only one who wrote down what she experienced in a way that captured people’s attention and made them care about her characters.

And that brings us to something I was trying to explain to a group of students at Roehampton last week, and which I’m hoping I can articulate better here: the sweet spot.

If you have a story you want to write, and you want people to want to read it, you need to find the sweet spot between interest and relate-ability.  Your story has to be unusual (or just un-mundane) enough for people to want to read it – this doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be unique, as we’ve seen with the examples above, but you do need to put a unique spin on it or show it from a new light, or just write it extremely well.  Secondly, your story has to be relate-able on some level – if you write a fascinating tale of a dangerous journey but your main character (usually you if you’re writing memoir) isn’t someone readers can relate to, then you’re likely to lose their interest.  The story alone shouldn’t be entirely relate-able (ie just telling the reader about doing something everyone does, like commute to work, for 300 pages) because why would we want to read about something we experience every day?  But it needn’t be something nobody has been through before; there’s something comforting and fascinating about seeing something you’ve experienced from a different perspective.  Most importantly, the characters should be people we see reflections of ourselves in, even in teeny fragments, just enough to keep us either on their side or interested enough to wish them harm.

I really believe that any story can be interesting and affecting if it’s well enough told, but of course it helps to have something to say that will resonate with readers.  My advice to the students I spoke to was to think back to times that they’ve told personal stories to friends or groups of new people: what got the most interest?  Was there one subject to which people most often responded with their own similar tales?  If so, that right there is your relate-ability.  If they were truly interested in your story but equally eager to answer with theirs, then you’ve got yourself an interactive audience right there.

And that’s the best kind of sweet spot, as far as I’m concerned.

 

*the flipside is that it’s kind of old news in the US now and it’s difficult to find a publisher who’s willing to take the chance on marketing it.

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A picture is worth… how many words can I fit on my wrist?

Posted on September 18, 2012 by Anne

I’ve been wanting to get a new tattoo for a while now, and given that one of London’s coolest tattoo parlors is just down the road from me, I figure I’ll get it here, before I move back to the States.  It can be a reminder of the part of my life that contained the most change – good, bad, ugly, exciting, and stressful – thus far.

Only one problem: what to get?  I know where I want it (the inside of my left wrist), and I know I want it to be small, but I haven’t decided exactly what I want yet.  For a long time, I thought I wanted a simple shape, like an outline of a heart or something else elegant but slightly cheesy, to represent my relationship and everything it (and he) has meant to me without branding me with someone’s name for the rest of my life.

But then, before I could really settle, I started pinning.  Have you all heard of Pinterest?  Does it sound mildly interesting but you don’t understand the hype?  If you’re in this detached stage, I implore you: don’t sign up!  Pinterest will steal your life and torture your soul and make you question all your decisions and bemoan your lack of funds for the perfect house/outfit/vacation/kitchen.  Before I started a tattoo board on Pinterest, I had two main ideas, and now I’m lost in a flurry of amazing, bold, beautiful, meaningful inspirational images, all of which are already branded on someone else (by necessity, as these are photos of existing tattoos), which kind of ruins my desire for something unique.

But the other thing that cruising Pinterest has shown me is that tons of people have literary tattoos, that is, images or text from favorite books inked on their bodies forevermore.  Which is awesome and some of them are beautiful and most of them are meaningful, but it’s also eye-opening to see the words with which people choose to mark themselves.  For example, an extremely popular quote is this one, from the Harry Potter books:

It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.

Now that is a stunning quote.  I mean, I was (and am) a Harry Potter fan, and I’ve always said that J.K. Rowling is a better writer than I think she gets credit for in literary circles (same goes for Suzanne Collins), but that quote really sums up how thoughtful some writers can be, even those whose books are intended mostly as escapism and fun.  And it also makes me wonder whether the writers whose work is inked all over people’s bodies the world over (there are a few that come up a lot) even paused over those lines, whether they thought they might be quotable or if they maybe focused more on other lines, which later went largely unnoticed?

So in addition to putting pressure on my tattoo choice, this recent literary tattoo obsession also makes me feel terrified about my upcoming book.  Every time I see another fabulous quote from mainstream popular literature, I run through my favorite lines from my own book in my head, trying to find one that might be tattoo-worthy, and I always come up short.  Of course, I suspect I always will, because how pompous would I have to be to think my own writing was permanently quotable?  But still, I can’t help but wonder whether my book will stand up to the indelible-ink challenge.

There’s no way to predict how people will receive my book at all – sales, reviews, word-of-mouth popularity – so of course wondering about whether or not something I’ve written will ever be tattooed on someone’s skin is completely fruitless.  But I can’t help it; somehow I suppose I just needed to add that extra layer of pressure to the publication process!

I’ll know soon enough whether people like my book, though.  For now, I need to focus on my own tattoo, and settle my mind on what exactly it is I want, and for that, I should probably step away from the Pinterest…

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Health vs Weight on the New York Times

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Anne

I’ve long maintained that weight and health, while obviously linked, aren’t as closely tied as the medical community would have us believe.  In my experience, they simply can’t be, since I’ve always weighed more than average (even as a slim/normal-sized toddler) and have had none of the health problems promised to a person with my shocking BMI.

I face the discrepancy between what I feel (and how well I know my body) and what doctors are taught every time I go in for a checkup.  There’s even a chapter in my book about it – a very cranky, sometimes furious chapter.  But I rarely see anyone else saying what I think (and often say, less and less in the right company!): that although there is a correlation between being overweight and being unhealthy, a causation has yet to be proven.  Fat itself has been proven to cause problems (for example, too much body fat can mess with hormones and leave overweight women infertile), but the number on the scale has been scapegoated for decades without a scrap of basis as far as I can tell, besides the simple fact that it’s easier to weight people and make assumptions about their health than it is to actually investigate their health.

Anyway, before I get up on my soapbox and start ranting, the reason for this post is actually positive.  The NYTimes ran an op-ed a couple of days ago about Black women and obesity; the writer held the opinion that Black women’s healthy self-image was causing them to allow their bodies to get too fat and therefore far too unhealthy.  Now, I can’t speak to the racial or social issues here (although I will tell you that when I was heavy, and even now to this day, I often wished/wish I were Black, to gt a taste of what it must be like to grow up thinking skinny was a bad thing and curves were to be desired).  That said, I did find her cut-off weight – she claimed to be concerned about her health at over 200 pounds, but was afraid her husband wouldn’t be attracted to her at anything below that point – arbitrary and weird.  For one thing, 200 pounds looks VERY different on a 5’2″ woman than it does on a 5’7″ woman, not to mention how it looks on a man.

But, again, this isn’t meant to be a post about that op-ed.  It’s about the reactions.  See, NYT does this interesting thing called Room For Debate, where they invite writers to weigh in briefly on one or the other side of a contentious issue from a recent op-ed.  And this week, obviously, it’s about weight and health.  And it’s really interesting – normally the balance is pretty even between the two sides, but this time pretty much everyone comes out against the idea that a standard weight is more important than a healthy lifestyle.

Of course, they also talk about the social and racial implications of the op-ed, but what interested me the most was (obviously) the treatment of body image, health, and women.  I urge you to head over there and read the different opinions for yourself.  Then come back and tell me what you think, if you like.

Now I’m going to go finish my 8th glass of water for the day and do a few jumping jacks.  It might make the floor shake a bit, but it’ll also be good for my heart.

Posted in Fattism, Healing, In the News | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

The BBC’s ‘The Truth About Fat’

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Anne

Hello hello!  I know I’ve been neglecting this blog and I am, as always, extremely sorry about that.  I’m currently waist-deep in the second round of edits for my book, as well as trying to keep up my poor, neglected baking and body-image blogs.  I promise I will start blogging about writing again, just as soon as I’m not so busy dealing with the dirty business itself!

In the meantime, you might be interested in this recent post on my body-image blog, a reaction to the BBC2 show ‘The Truth About Fat’.  Here’s the beginning to help you decide whether you want to read the whole thing:

A friend of mine emailed me last night, suggesting I watch the latest episode of BBC 2′s ‘Horizon’, because it dealt with the issue of Gastric Bypass.  But when I started watching it this evening, I realized that really, it deals mostly with obesity – how and why it exists, and what we should do about it – and Gastric Bypass plays a large part in the last third of the program.

In all honesty, as I started watching, my immediate reaction was rage and righteous indignation.  Gabriel Weston, the thin, blond, female surgeon who hosts the show announces at the very beginning that for her entire life (including the ten years in which she’s been practicing medicine) she has operated under the ‘assumption [...] that I am the size I am because of my character’.  Now, not only is that a particularly smug way of putting it, there is a serious problem with the underlying message: that fat people are fat simply because they are lazy and eat too much.  They don’t have the strength of character to change their bodies.

Of course, the program isn’t just about this one extremely irritating person spewing her views about fat slobs – it’s also about finding out why fat people are fat, and investigating the causes of and possible solutions to this ‘epidemic’ that’s sweeping the western world.  And on that front, the show (and maybe Wilson, if she wasn’t just there as a figure-bobblehead) does a very good job…

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Seriously?

Posted on February 19, 2012 by Anne

Really, NYTimes?  You’re going to do a piece about a journalist who was brutally sexually attacked in the field, and you’re putting her in designer clothes and Louboutin heels on the front page, with a caption telling us how much the clothes cost and where to find them?  Aren’t we supposed to see her as a person and a journalist, not a model and an object? This seems so inappropriate to me.  I haven’t even read the article because the photo pulled me up so short.

I’m so grossed out.  I hope I’m just overreacting, but I doubt it.

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What a difference a year makes

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Anne

New Years has never really meant much to me, besides the shock and disbelief every time I write the date, which always continues well into spring.  But in terms of resolutions and reflections and all that clean-slate, look-at-everything-that’s-happened stuff, I’ve never really subscribed to it.  I seem to spend my days shocked at how fast time blows by me, and feeling nostalgic for the past while simultaneously freaking out about things I have to get done before the future hits me in the face.  Maybe that’s why it’s so easy for me to forget that, actually, a year is a long time, and often brings massive changes that I just don’t notice because I’m too busy wallowing in the past and stressing about the present/future.

In May 2010, my boyfriend bought me a five-year diary; every page is dated with month and day and has five lined paragraph sections with a space in front of each one in which to write the year.  The idea is, you write down something, anything, about your day – you do that for 365 days, and then you do it again the next year, and the next.  And then, one day, you can look up at the days above, and see what you were up to / feeling / pissed off about on that day exactly one year ago.

When my boyfriend bought this little book for me, in a shop near my parents’ house in San Francisco, I’d been flipping through it nonchalantly, thinking about what a cool idea it was and how I’d never actually follow through with it.  But then he bought it, so I had to at least try or else I’d look like a miserable ingrate.  And amazingly, with the exception of long holidays when I didn’t bring the book (I never do – I’m a practical packer these days) and couldn’t remember what to fill it in with, I’ve done pretty well keeping it up (never underestimate the motivational power of guilt).  And now that I’ve looped around a full year and started a second, I’m beginning to reap the rewards of all my tedious-at-the-time notemaking.

Not only do I get a direct visual on just how much can happen in a year – good friends’ weddings, family pregnancies, and the many ups and downs of my own relationship/job/self esteem (god, I spend a lot of time thinking about my feelings) – but I also get a really interesting contrast when it comes to the book I’ve spent the past two years imagining, crafting, whittling, and reworking.

For example, on November 9th, 2010, I wrote 1000 words for my dissertation (a full-length nonfiction book), which merited a “woohoo!” because I’d been struggling quite a lot with organizing my thoughts and getting them down on paper/Word.  Exactly one year later, I signed my contract with Faber&Faber to have the resulting book published in 2013.  And now that I’m revamping my MS for my editor, I’m having regular freak-outs (not her fault – she’s lovely, I just absolutely loathe editing and I’m terrified of letting her down) and writing them down in the diary.  But all it takes is a glance up, or over a page or two, to remind myself that this time a year ago I was convinced that I’d never even finish the damn book, let alone get any sort of validating feedback on it from agents/editors!

So let that be a lesson to me, and to all y’all writers who have far too many days in a row of wondering whether kicking yourself to get a measly 1000 words on the page will be worth the effort and tears and frustrations when nobody wants to read or rep or publish the damn thing in the end.  To y’all, I say only this: you won’t believe me when I tell you it’s possible, even probable if you work hard enough and write well enough, that someone will love your book and want to help sell it, and someone else will love it just as much and want to print it.  You won’t believe me, because I never believed anyone who told me those things (yes, older and wiser classmates, okay!), but you will probably keep going anyway.  Why?  Because you have to.

There were so many days when I broke down into tears and screamed at myself (or, more likely, my poor boyfriend) that I was an idiot to keep going.  I wasn’t writing this book because I thought it would sell, nor was I writing it because I loved the process (I’m not a masochist) – I was writing it because I had to.  If I didn’t finish this book and get it all down on paper in a legible style, those words were going to eat me alive from the inside out.  I knew that, somehow, in the pit of my altered stomach, and so I kept plodding on.  And I kept crying, and tearing my hair, and telling myself I was worthless, too.  But luckily, it didn’t stop me writing.

Now I just have to get through the editing process intact.  And then there’s the publicity, and writing short-form pieces, and trying to find a job that allows me the time to work on my writing but still pays enough for me to live in an expensive-ass city…

But the good news is, I have my little diary, and it’s got plenty of space to help me find perspective.  And I thank god (and my boyfriend) for that!

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Yes yes yes THIS.

Posted on December 5, 2011 by Anne

Uh oh… I’m kind of obsessed with this website, which allows people to cycle through photos of real women’s bodies, with size/shape/weight/height stats at the bottom.  I’ve been clicking through it for so long I forgot to make dinner (and for once, because of this awesome project, I’m not patting myself on the back for forgetting to eat!).  I feel a body blog post coming on, just as soon as I have the clarity of mind to write one (and I’m currently drowning in Xmas prep, MS edits, and end-of-year admin so…February?).

But then again, who needs my opinion when you can just read hers?

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This is seriously awful

Posted on November 7, 2011 by Anne

I think if this happened to me, I would never recover.  I would just have to go live on a boat in the middle of nowhere and never read the internet or a newspaper or communicate with society in any way ever again.

How very impressive that, instead of hiding and cringing and crying for the rest of her life, this woman composed an articulate response, highlighting not just the pain it caused her personally but also the harm it does to women of all sizes.  Good for her.

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