Jennifer Crusie | Argh Ink | Blog

I may have to give up blogging because I will never be as cool as Helen (and Margaret, of course):

Margaret and Helen

And a big thank you to Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Dish, who also brought you the Escaping Beagle.

Which stands for Be Right Back because I am slammed with work right now.

In the meantime, here’s your moment of Yin, courtesy of Andrew Sullivan.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/10/why-i-love-beag.html

Or you can just watch it here:

I like to think that dog is female. Escaping the bounds of patriarchal confinement.
Also, the whole thing just makes me happy.

First, let’s have a round of applause for Val Frankel who wrote an amazing book and then did a great post here, and then let’s follow it up for all the commenters who, in the great tradition of Argh People, took it and ran with it. I swear, putting an idea up here is like throwing chum in the water. I just stand back and watch the action.

You may have noticed I was watching more than usual this time. As in, I was not there. I have reasons. First, my laptop turned into a doorstop. I’m sure it can be fixed as soon as I find what I did with the AppleCare I never registered, but in the meantime I have a new MacBook which I evidently bought seconds before the newest new MacBook is about to be launched, and it will be fabulous and have a weight loss attachment and house train dogs because I already bought the old version. Oh, well. Mostly I miss the big screen on my MacPro. But this is a sturdy little thing, and it has an N key that isn’t worn to a nub, so there’s an upside, too. Also, it works like a dream. My theory is that the Pro is probably full of Diet Coke and dog hair. I’m hard on my computers.

I’ve also been distracted by the house. The contractor is finishing up this phase (since my money market account that was funding the remodel seems to have gone somewhere else, we’re stopping for awhile, which means my garage is full of windows) and I now have french doors out onto my admittedly ancient deck. I will never understand why somebody would build a house on a river and then put tiny little windows on the river wall. Of course, these are the same people who put NO windows on the front of the house, so small windows were probably a step up. Anyway, now there are french doors and a dining room table and I’m actually spending time in that room, eating at a table like a real person instead of holding a plate in my lap while I type. What I’ve discovered about remodeling is that if you do it right, it looks like its always been there and you start hanging out where you never went before. The french doors look like they’ve always been there and I keep ending up in there just because it’s so warm. Some other stuff I’ve done to the house, not so much.

Also, Bob and I have been pedal to the metal on Wild Ride. Well, Bob has. I’ve been panicking because I cannot get my character, poor Mary Imogen. Then last night I sat down with the music on my iPod and started on the collage and bingo, we got ourselves a ballgame, or at least a story about demons set in an amusement park. I don’t know why I have to re-invent the wheel every damn time I write a book, but at least I’ve relearned Lesson Eight: Begin With Collage.

On top of that, I have a house guest coming tomorrow. Bob arrives in the evening, a couple of hours after my mammogram (get one every year, please; it’s a pain in the boob but it saves lives) and I will have to amuse him (Ironman DVD and KitKats) before we hit the road for research. This should be interesting: Bob and I in an amusement park. We are so not amusement park people. {Ed. note: That should be “Bob and I” not “Bob and me”, right? Because it acts as a predicate nominative? I’m too lazy to go look it up.)

And tonight I have to watch the debate with Krissie and Lani, via Campfire. We’d live blog it in public, but then we’d have to mind our reputations. I’m pretty sure I offered to have Joe Biden’s baby during the VP debate. That’s the kind of stuff that can haunt a person. We’ve done all of the debates, so tonight is our last hurrah before the election. We do MSNBC because Lani likes the way Olbermann articulates her anger and I have a girl crush on Rachel Maddow. And because I like the way Olbermann articulates my anger and Lani has a girl crush on Rachel Maddow. Krissie just goes where we go.

Speaking of Krissie, she’s feeling poorly, so it would be great if you’d go to her Drama Queen blog and tell you love her and her books are fab. Her last entry from Sept. 16 has a list of her Facebook postings that’s a fun outline of how she puts a book together.

And now I must go clean the guest room. You may remember the coronary Bob had over the wastebasket on a previous visit. But in the meantime, a nice thing happened on my way to learning this new computer: Wordpress will let me post pictures with it. YAY! So here’s my almost-finished dining room:

And my not even close to finished collage:

Oh, and Veronica would like you to know that despite the title, she is completely and totally innocent:

Coming soon: Another great gift of a book from Meg. Remember the parrots? She’s done it again.

First of all, it’s wonderful to read such supportive discussion about the multitude of issues around weight! We can thank Jenny for that. So many topics have come up, and I want to put in my two cents on the ones that resonated for me.

1. Re: the lasting negative residue of comments about fat from mothers. It took me thirty years to extricate from my mind my mother’s obsession with my weight. She learned to shut up about it when I became an independent adult, but I can tell she still watches my intake at holiday dinners, for example, even though I am 43 and a mother of two. It’s a habit that she is unable and unwilling to break. I had to forcibly break her fixation’s hold on me by confronting her about it, which I did as part of the process of dealing with my body image issues for Thin Is the New Happy. In confronting Mom, I realized a few important things.

(1) I couldn’t have done it until I’d reached my current level of maturity. Her obsession with my weight started when I was eleven. When my older daughter reached that age, I realized how young and vulnerable I was when the harassment began. I was simply unable to defend myself emotionally until I’d been tested and humbled by life. I gained perspective, and strength, and I could face her only now. You have to be ready to do it.

(2) Mom made her obsession my problem, which was unfair and wrong. I couldn’t change her attitude (nor is she inclined to do it herself). Nor could I completely forgive her. But I could pity her for her limitations. That sounds harsh, but it worked. By seeing her as pathetic (in her fatphobia), I regained a lot of my own power.

(3) At the end of the day, my body image is my responsibility. Mom got her claws in pretty deep, but it was up to me to pry them out. If I didn’t, no one else would. The way to do that, unfortunately, was to replay the ugly memories, write them down, purge them from the mind, and to tell others about them. My husband, even after four years of marriage, didn’t know what my mother had done. I was ashamed to tell him. Until I did, and then I felt better.

2. Re: being upset about the number on the scale. One woman commented that she felt fine about her body, until she weighed herself. As part of my body image project, I got rid of my scale. Scales are hateful and destructive. The number means nothing. We all have different bodies. Two women of the same height and weight could look completely different depending on their frame, muscle mass, genetic body shape. I have size ten feet, man hands and very thick wrists. I am, yes, BIG BONED. A small framed woman would look HUGE at my weight, whatever it is, I have no bloody idea. The numbers on dresses and pants also messes with the head. As my friend Stacy London of What Not to Wear told me when she cleaned out my closet, “forget about size.” Use it only as a baseline for shopping. A size 10 dress at one place is a 6 at another. The number is meaningless—unless you use it to define your self-worth. The only number worth paying attention to is the total of negative body image thoughts we have each day. I recommend buying a clicker at a sports supply store, and counting each time you have a self-critical thought about your weight, size, shape in a day. When I did this, I have over 200! A negative through every 3.5 minutes! Once I had a tally, I worked to redirect my thoughts, and lower my number. The affect on my mindset was pretty dramatic. After a few weeks, my outlook got brighter, lighter-yet-deeper. I became less obsessive and self-absorbed, and therefore a nicer person, better mother, wife and friend.

3. Re: not complaining about your weight in front of your daughters. This was my motivation for writing Thin Is the New Happy. I wanted to be a better role model about comfort in my skin for my two daughters. Study after study proves that mothers who diet teach their kids that self-loathing is an acceptable way of life. Some of you said you were careful around your kids, but the girls still thought of themselves as fat. Well, it takes a lot of hammering to drive home the point. I tell my daughters EVERY DAY, several times a day, that they are beautiful and that fitness is next to happiness. We take long walks every weekend, often over the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan to have adventures at the South Street Seaport or Chinatown. They understand that dim sum means a walk over the bridge first. Culture, peer pressure and the media will try, but they won’t undo the repeated messages parents give their kids. As we all know, our mothers voices are deep inside our heads. We can install positive attitudes in our kids’ heads, too, through repetition and consistent role modeling over the course of years.

4. Re: the negative voice that says “you’re fat,” even when you’re not. One woman talked about how she saw photos of herself during a time she thought she was fat, but now realizes she was thin then. I am often shocked when looking at old pictures, especially of my teen years when I was harassed by my mom, and then tormented by sadistic boys in junior high about being fat, only to see that I just wasn’t that heavy. It’s heartbreaking, how much time I wasted believing I was fat, when I wasn’t. To address this problem, I recommend doing what I did in Thin Is the New Happy—posing nude for a professional photographer. Seeing my body through the artist’s eye helped me expand my definition of beauty. After all, so many artists see beauty in voluptuous women. Why shouldn’t I see that beauty in myself, as an object of art? Well, I did. And now I have gorgeous photos of myself—nekkid—to use as rebuttal evidence whenever my mind slips and I think “you’re fat.”

5. Re: weight is a convenient distraction from life’s real problems. This revelation was a real eye-opener for me. To the woman who said her life was stable, but she still obsessed about weight, you might not be using weight as a distraction from problems. But, as another woman commented, you are thinking about weight instead of writing a novel or running a marathon, or whatever. A weight obsession, if it’s not a distraction, is a way to fill a void. I’d say, fill it with something else, something positive. “Your life’s work” was the wonderful phrase someone used. I totally agree.

6. Re: how to get rid of the “mother message.” See above. I think you have to have a confrontation with mommy dearest, honestly. Even if your mother is dead (sorry to be blunt), you can still have the confrontation as you imagine it would have been. The resolution is irrelevant. It’s important to state your case, to express yourself, even if you’re talking to a brick wall (which is my mother’s middle name).

7. Re: appearance-related first impressions and society’s unfair judgment over overweight people. My book is about the biased impressions we have of ourselves, the internal judgments we make of ourselves. We are our own unfair discriminators, our own critical observers. It’s entirely possible to be an average weight, and just as hard on yourself about your size as cruel people are to the obese. Body image is a personal problem, spurred on by societal standards, true. But at the end of the day, it’s all about you and how you feel about yourself, not what strangers might think.

8. Re: magazines. Since I earn a healthy percentage of my income writing for magazines, I have to defend them. Or, at least one. Self magazine, every month, serves up a positive, healthy and inspiring editorial message. Self published my nude photos, BTW, and that goes a long way to proving it is not presenting only super slim women on their pages. I’ve written at least a dozen articles for Self in the last few years, and all of them were about taking charge of one’s emotional life, sex life and body image. The models in Self are young, but not skinny. The how-to’s are about fitness, wellness and happiness. Okay, plug for Self over.

Whew, that’s a long blog post. I’d be happy to discuss further. Thanks again, Jenny, for giving me/my book so much love! Right back at you.

First of all, thank you for standing by while I couldn’t get into the blog. It was much like locking my car keys in the car. With several hundred people standing behind me, waiting for me to get something out for them.

Second, Mollie had to disable all the plug-ins to get us back into the blog. Among those plug-ins was Akismet, our magnificent spam filter. This means that spam now goes directly to the moderated comments file, so if for some reason you ended up moderated, you may get deleted since we’re averaging about fifty spam messages an hour. ARGH. (UPDATE: Akismet is back, and I’m still wading through the moderated trying to find any of you.)

Third, here is what I really wanted to tell you: Valerie Frankel’s Thin Is the New Happy is a terrific book. It’s a comedy and a tragedy, a memoir and a self-help book, a confession and an indictment. Mostly it’s just great reading, especially if you’ve ever had weight issues. The two of you who haven’t can skip the rest of this post.

I’m dealing with this right now because for my birthday, my metabolism decided to ratchet down another notch and I’ve gained ten pounds without changing my eating habits. I am now officially fatter than the Venus of Willendorf. And I’m remembering thirty pounds ago when I thought I was disgustingly fat. And the fifteen pounds before that when I thought I was disgustingly fat. And the twenty-five pounds before that when some idiot doctor told me I should lose weight. I’m fairly sure I was about fifteen pounds underweight at that point, but it’s moot because I will never get back there again. Where was I? Oh, right, obsessing about my weight.

Val Frankel knows all about fat obsession. It began early for her, thanks to a perfectly good mother with one glaring flaw: she was fat obsessed and put Val under pressure and on a diet at age 11. Or as Val put it, “The two sources of happiness in my childhood were at odds. I could have food, or I could have approval. I couldn’t have both” (4). Her struggle continued through two marriages and two careers including one in the fashion magazine industry (what was she thinking?) and finally ended thirty years after that first diet when she looked at her daughters and decided weight obsession was not a trait she wanted to pass down. As she put it, “The struggle started with my mother. It would end with my daughters.”

One of the many things I loved about this book is that it’s never preachy and it’s always entertaining: Val Frankel is just a damn good storyteller. (As most of you probably know, her second career is as a mystery novelist, a profession which requires no dieting; see http://www.valeriefrankel.com for more info.) But beyond that, she is searingly honest, which is why I cried in places in this book, not just because the book is truly moving, but because I saw myself in there so many times. Her weight became a defining factor in her life, the way it is for so many of us. The size of her body became her cross to bear and a goal to achieve, not a source of pleasure and energy. No matter what was happening–dating, work, marriage, pregnancy–the issue of her weight was always there.

The most telling and I think the bravest of the moments in the book is when she talks about her weight loss during the five months her first husband was dying of lung cancer:

“Watching the ravages of his disease was soul- and appetite-killing for me. I lost interest in food. I dropped twenty-five pounds and two dress sizes, seemingly overnight, effortlessly.

And I was thrilled about it

Yes, my husband was dying. I was on the verge of widowhood at thirty-five. My daughters were losing their father. I was lonely, frustrated, heartbroken, horrified by the toll illness took on Glenn and everyone else who had a front row seat. Still despite the sorrow, I took increasing joy in my increasingly roomy clothing.”

She goes on to talk about an iconic pair of red jeans from her honeymoon, how she used the jeans to track her weight loss and her triumph when she could zip them all the way up. The greatest tragedy of her life had finally lifted the shadow over her and she could no more control her pleasure in her weight loss than she could control her disgust at her previous weight gain.

I read that and thought, “I know this.” In 1983, as a single parent with an eight-year-old daughter, I was diagnosed with late stage colon cancer and given roughly six months to live. Through the surgeries and stress, I dropped down to pre-college levels, ten pounds below my recommended weight, and I was thrilled. I was dying, I was leaving a child behind, I was terrified and angry and exhausted and in pain, but by God I was THIN. I wore a bikini in September. Just my luck that my last six months were going to be fabulously thin and they were all in WINTER. I know exactly how Val felt. My world was being ripped out from underneath me, but I was dying svelte.

Then I recovered with the help of a chemotherapy that promoted rapid weight gain, and by spring I was fat again. And I didn’t die so that’s good. But the shadow is still with me, not the shadow of death, which since the cancer had reached my lymph nodes should be what I’m sitting under, but the shadow of my body, now officially sixty pounds over my ideal weight. I don’t look in mirrors, my fat jeans are the only ones in my closet, and I try not to look down during baths. I need Val Frankel’s book, needed it when I read it and was energized all over again rereading it for this post.

So the question Val’s book raises, the one that resonates with me the most, is “How does our weight become who we are?” It’s too easy to blame the thin-is-good social message although I do think that has a huge impact. In the end, we choose the messages we want to internalize, and so many of us almost embrace the idea that a flat stomach equals health and beauty, no matter what your age or body type. “Well, you’re big-boned,” people used to tell me and I’d think, “How the hell do you make bones smaller?” I realize that I must lose weight because I’m heavy enough to be unhealthy, my heart and my knees are being strained with every step i take. But a forty pound weight loss will do that, hell, a thirty pound weight loss will do it, and when I was those weights, I agonized over how fat I was, knowing that my thick waistline made me a lesser person. I mean, how the hell could I have been that blind?

So I want to know, how do we let our weight come to define who we are?

(For a much more entertaining, much more insightful exploration of all of this, read Val’s book. She’s promised to come in and answer any questions you post here–you’re going to love her, she’s great–so have at it in the comments and then Val will chime in next week.)