Emma Copley Eisenberg calls out the publishing industry for weight prejudice in this fascinating essay. Reading the piece makes you will realize how few times you have experienced an overweight main character while reading fiction. And that will make you think.
Thinness is routinely associated with morality and fatness with immorality. Characters are often made fat as a shorthand to tell the reader that they are gross, weak, evil, cruel, stupid, unimportant, or mentally ill (as I’ve previously noted over on Substack). “My body was a beautiful, perfect economy, every feature calibrated, everything in balance,” writes Gillian Flynn in Gone Girl (2012) of the character’s form before she gains weight. On the first page of The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff (2023), a character is described as “a woman whose capacity for food was exceeded only by her capacity for venom.” And in Bonnie Garmus’s Lessons in Chemistry (2022), the main character is sexually assaulted by a professor named Meyers who is described as “a big man—nearly 250 pounds—his strength a product of density, not fitness.” With few exceptions, such remarks serve no narrative purpose.
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