Lipo-literacy

I am an early reader. 18 months old. Before I am four I have written my first poem. I am voracious: my mother buys books for me to read, scribblers for me to fill. My parents shake their heads at the words coming out of my mouth, the things I say with my childish lisp. ‘Imagine that’: the highest praise my grandmother can offer. Motor-mouth. Chatter-box. I am sent to nursery school, according to my mother, so that I stop following her, talking, questioning, interrupting her housework. Other appetites are forming, too. They loom.

An open book: mum points to the section she wants me to learn. She has learned so well too. So I learn it by heart. What is a calorie? I am five. It will be years before I understand this pedagogy in class, the intransitive obstacle fat poses to social mobility, how it threatens the ‘health’ of Canadian society. But these are the things I learn right away: how many calories I will be allowed to eat, from now on. The loathing my mother holds for her difference, and for me. The ugliness of being a big girl. The rewards for being small. The ways deficit will shape my body. The discipline that will secure my good life. The incompatibilities of fat and self-realisation. Fat is a threat: my primal scene in becoming.

At night I dream of food. During the day I dream of food. At night I have nightmares. During the day I have nightmares. At night I write in my secret journal. During the day I write down my food for my mother, my first reader. At night I dream of being a writer. Both day and night I dream, counting: days, calories, how long. The only time I forget is when I read. I am obsessed with stories of run-aways. I keep a bag packed in case I need to leave: my journal, a cardigan and snacks. I tell this to a teacher and they laugh at first, then look at me for a long time. My chipmunk cheeks, my second-grade breasts. The things I write at school. Such an active imagination.

Mouth events. Don’t be saucy. Eat with your mouth closed. Stop talking. Breathe with your mouth closed. Don’t talk back. Fat lips. Do you want a smack? Shut your mouth. I’ll shut it for you. So mouthy. End of discussion. I would never’ve gotten away with that kind of lip. Fat lip. Stop your back-talk. Eat with your mouth closed. Breathe with your mouth closed. Shut it now. Shut your mouth. Close it. Eat. Breathe. Mouth. Close your mouth. Closed.

Now I am a writer. My notebook has columns: calories in, out, calories I didn’t eat, calories I dreamed about. Sometimes at home I steal food to eat in secret. I read Nancy Drew with white bread in the back of my bedroom closet. I write stories crouched in the bathroom, sustained by soft supermarket bagels. I panic at the sound of footsteps and tear the bread to pieces. I am caught: ugly and fat and crying over a flooding toilet, wads of dough clogging the bowl. My shame is so deep my mother can’t tell even my sisters why I’m being punished.

I skip a grade. Then another. Education becomes a thing I can accelerate: at last my capacity for excess is a boon. I overload — where other kids study five subjects, I study ten. I take classes at night on top of regular school. I write extra credit projects. I outperform on all my assessments. Soon my Sweet 16: a membership to Weight Watcher’s. You don’t want to start university fat. I excel at this too. Not for the first time I discover the thrill of losing, the rewards wanting gets me. By May I am small enough my mother says she will make me a dress for commencement. After the ceremony we go to the Chinese buffet where I eat for the first time in two days: three broccoli florets and a sliver of beef like a tongue on my plate. I dig my elbow into my hunger pains, read the promise of my hip bones with my fingertips. Dessert: I chew my cheeks between my teeth, picture how by autumn my face will be razor sharp and framed by my hair. I’ll look hungry. My mother leans close: I don’t want to know, but whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.

For a few months I am like a girl going to university in a movie. My mother buys me new clothes. I go to student union events. I watch ‘Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’ at the literature society social. I wear a floppy hat that looks oversized against my sharp face. I go on dates. Professors take notice of me. I go to class hungry. I go to bed hungry. I leave the table hungry. I write hungry. I read hungry. Proof of my discipline.

Writing is a mouth-event. Reading is a mouth-event. With essays I expand. I avoid scales after I reach 235 pounds. I become best friends with the sort of girl I had been on the verge of becoming. I take her for coffee while she tells me about the profs she’s flirting with, the annoyance of their interest. I am grateful my marks have no correlation to the possibility of sex. But I also envy the attention her ideas get in class, the way her body frames everything as sharp, and serious. I feel the clumsy realisation that fatness discredits me, of knowing that here, where bodies aren’t supposed to matter, they do. In my final year I start wearing my mother’s old leather belt, wide and thick and pulled three inches too tight. It is painful to eat, to breathe. I drink water when I read and write so that I feel full. When I am at risk of eating I remind myself: hunger and discipline are entwined. I tighten the belt. I go to class hungry. I go to bed hungry. I leave the table hungry. I write hungry. I read hungry. By the time I graduate, at 20, I am an expert.

These scenes repeat, teaching me my lipo-literacy, how we can read fat, but fat cannot read or write back. Fat is excessive and inert, overly material. Fat bodies are no longer sites of contestation. Fatness is passive, over-available to diagnosis. Fatness has no epistemic status, no agency. It is a life’s work, learning and re-learning and re-learning this. Fatness has only one story: not becoming. And I am determined to arrive. It is a constant care, this body that takes tremendous labour to read, make legible, as disciplined. The cost if I do not. So I enter an apprenticeship to disappearing women: I can be either a body whose hunger frames your work as intelligent, or a body that loses credibility, too close to all the things thinking is not. Consider the urgency of choosing, the complex entanglements of care and diminishment when a senior colleague tells me she has lost half a person in weight, then laments having donated her old suits: they’d fit you perfectly, she said. Which is the person she saw in me, when she said this — do I resemble the woman she’s lost, or the one she thinks I can become? I hunger to know. My mother’s voice: we will keep reading this together, until we’ve learned it by heart.