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Sarai Walker on writing characters who tackle queerness and body image issues in “Dietland”

I remember the first time I realized I was fat. It was in third grade, and I was running up the stairs to my classroom, and I felt my belly jiggle. That was it. One small jiggle. Nobody said anything to me, at least not for a few years, but something was changing in the way I thought about myself. I’d watch my thighs squish out when I sat down; I’d compare my waist diameter to the other girls’ in my class. It was around this same time that I realized I liked girls. This, too, I buried deep within me, to be known but not acknowledged, for years. Somehow I knew that these things were undesirable, that there was something ugly about me. As a teenager I drowned in oversized clothes, trying desperately to hide the body I thought was so hideous. No one must be allowed to see all the terrible things I’d hidden.

So many of us have been there. Everyone, especially women, struggles with body image, and so many queer women feel compelled to hide their truths for fear of rejection. We see so many images of stick-thin or impossibly voluptuous people and can’t imagine how our flawed selves could compare. We poke and pinch, suck it in, starve it out, try to shame ourselves skinny, because society tells us that fat is the worst thing we could possibly be.

It’s into this space that Sarai Walker directs her novel Dietland. The novel’s protagonist, Plum Kettle, is a fat woman who has spent her whole life waiting to be thin. She spends her days answering angst-ridden mail from teen girls writing in to their favorite fashion magazines; she’s unhappy, and she’s alone. Suddenly she notices she’s being followed by a young woman in colorful tights and combat boots, and a confrontation and a mysterious book later, Plum finds herself enmeshed in the world of Verena Baptist and her house of feminists, artists and activists. At the same time, a guerrilla group calling itself Jennifer begins a string of violent acts in the name of women everywhere. As Plum struggles to love herself and to understand what happened to her, the violence escalates until Plum’s individual journey and the guerrilla group’s actions become more and more entwined.

For me, reading Dietland was powerfully cathartic. I’ve felt so much shame about my body, and shame about my unhealthy relationship to food and exercise, and reading Plum’s thoughts showed me that I’m not alone. Dietland spoke to me in allegory too: a queer reading of the text reminds us that our own interior dialogue can be so damaging, whether it’s about weight, sexuality, gender expression, race, class or ability. As a feminist, I’ve long believed that every body is a good body, but those beliefs never seemed to carry over to how I saw myself. Until, that is, I read this book.

With Plum, I let go of my self-hatred, and with Plum I got angry. Angry at fashion magazines for setting impossible standards, angry with men for objectifying me on so many street corners, angry with women for the harmful rhetoric we share with one another about our own struggles. Dietland isn’t an explicitly lesbian book (although there is some girl-on-girl smooching!) but it speaks so clearly to the experience of outsiderness that goes along with being gay.

I was lucky enough to interview Sarai Walker, author of Dietland, about the book.

AfterEllen: We so often see self-love as this fluffy pink aesthetic, but you chose to portray self-love as violent and aggressive. Why did you make that choice?

Sarai Walker: Plum’s story is rooted in Fat Activism, and that’s a very radical movement. Sometimes in the Body Positivity community, they don’t have the radicalness that Fat Activism has. I think that when celebrities who very much conform to our ideals of what women should look like, that’s body positivity for most people. And that’s not very threatening. But if you have a 300-pound woman like Plum learning to love her body and accept her body, that’s much different. The whole concept of a woman like that saying there’s nothing wrong with my body, that in itself is very radical in a way that a lot of body positivity stuff we see just isn’t.

AE: Speaking as someone who’s struggled with these same issues, I know how hard it is to get out of toxic thought patterns. In your writing process, you must have had to completely embody those thoughts. I can’t imagine how challenging that must have been.

SW: Yeah, it was a very difficult book to write. People look at the more wild aspects of it and think, oh, it must have been so fun to write about Jennifer and all that, but the whole novel was very emotionally difficult to write. Every day there was some moment of exhilaration, it wasn’t all misery, but it was hard! As a first-person narrator, I’m in Plum’s mind, which especially in the first half of the book is not as easy place to be. It was hard to inhabit her headspace, but it wasn’t hard to summon up because I’ve been through it all myself. I’ve had those feelings myself. So I was writing what I knew.

AE: It’s pretty brave actually, to write that experience.

SW: Yeah, it’s hard, especially because people assume it’s me. Women’s writing is so often interpreted as autobiographical, and aspects of Dietland are, but it’s hard when people don’t separate me from Plum.

photos by Theresa Lee III

AE: Of course, but that said, people who inhabit fat bodies, as well as people who have other non-normative identities, have a different perspective on society. The women of Calliope House are outsiders in a lot of different ways, because of their bodies or their sexuality or any number of other things, and there’s power in that, right?

SW: bell hooks has written that being on the margins can be a place of power. But being on the margins is also hard. That’s a perspective I embrace now, but it’s hard: some people are more equipped than others to embrace the power of a marginal identity.

AE: Society deems the women in the book as unacceptable, which means they’re unfuckable. You write about using unfuckability as a site of power. Could you talk about that?

SW: Well, first of all, the idea of who is fuckable is a construct we have in our society that needs to be tossed out. There’s nothing natural about these categories. It’s a very toxic idea, treating women based on how desireable they are to men. In a way, this book is saying I reject these categories. The point is to break down the categories, rather than affirm which category you’re in. Because the thing is, nobody stays in the fuckable category forever, right? You get older, you know? You see these models who are ideal women, well what happens when they get older? They leave this fuckability category, and it causes a lot of pain. It happens with actresses as well. Nobody stays in this category forever.

AE: This fuckability model is really a wonderful perspective on feminism, isn’t it?

SW: It’s just a way of talking about the way that men as a group let women as a group down. Women are so focused on how we look. It affects everyone. We all live in this culture where these values are everywhere, and I think it’s very much a tool to oppress women. Focus on how you look, try to adhere to these narrow ideals… it keeps women in this powerless position.

AE: Absolutely. In the book, through Calliope House and through Jennifer, the women in the story are reclaiming themselves through female friendships. Was part of your intention with Dietland to call on women to be more radically affirming in your friendships?

SW: If you look back at 70s feminism, there was this idea of sisterhood. I don’t want to romanticize it, there was always conflict, but the idea of sisterhood is really important for feminism. There was always conflict, I don’t want to pretend there used to be this whole happy group who was getting along, but sisterhood is certainly part of what I wanted to write about in Dietland. In the beginning, Plum is very alone. I don’t think she would have been able to change if she hadn’t found those other women. I was trying to push back against our focus on individuality. Sure, part of Plum’s struggle is with herself, and she has to work that out on her own. But part of it is how she connects with other women, and in this case finding women who are supportive, rather than the women she was surrounded with at the magazine, who were toxic to her. Finding community was essential to her change.

AE: In the book, Plum’s attempts at intimacy with men don’t go very well, but she does share a kiss with her friend Julia. Do you consider Plum to be a queer woman, or was that intimacy a function of something else?

SW: Julia is clearly attracted to Plum, and flirts with her, and she’s the only person in the novel who shows any outright sexual interest in Plum. Since Plum normally only experiences rejection from other people, specifically men, this is certainly a new situation for her, which I think she finds both intimidating and maybe a bit alluring. I think that Julia confuses and frustrates Plum because Julia is so secretive and involved in mysterious things, so Plum certainly resists Julia for those reasons, but maybe also because she doesn’t know how to respond to Julia’s flirtations.

I hate to give any spoilers, but I’m not sure I can avoid them entirely here. It was important to me that Dietland subvert the “romance” expectation that exists for stories about women, that women will end their story as part of a couple. Of course, the expectation has traditionally been that the female protagonist will end up with a man, and I was definitely trying to avoid that, but I really didn’t want her to end up with anyone at all. Plum worked so hard to finally see herself as a whole person (in many different ways), and I didn’t want her to end her story as half of a couple, regardless of who the other person was. I didn’t want to write that type of story, and I feel that there is a lot of pressure for women writers to do that. So I see my refusal to do that as part of the subversive nature of the novel. At the same time, Plum began the novel alone but develops deep friendships with other women during the novel that are essential to her transformation. So relationships with women are an important part of the story. They’re the most important relationships that we see in the novel.

The end of Dietland is really a beginning for Plum. She stops putting her life on hold, and decides to live in the body that she has, a body that she has felt very alienated from for most of her life. She definitely sees herself as heterosexual for most of the novel, as she says outright to Verena during their therapy scene, but there are some interactions with women later in the novel that might make the reader question whether Plum is opening herself up to new possibilities. Plum’s life is very much still in progress at the end of the novel, so it isn’t an end in the traditional sense. I would prefer that the reader think about what might come next for Plum and fill in those gaps however they wish.

AE: Is Dietland a manifesto?

SW: I get asked that a lot, and it’s tricky to answer because Dietland is a novel rather than nonfiction. I don’t mind if people read it as a feminist manifesto, but a novel is about characters first and foremost. Characters are people, and they do things that are messy and that you might not agree with. A novel has to have tension and conflicts and drama. So a novel functions in a very different way than a manifesto, but I don’t mind if people read it that way. I can get uncomfortable, though, because I get asked to justify things a character has done, and it just doesn’t work that way.

AE: So the paperback is coming out soon, and there is a TV show in the works; you’ve got a lot going on! But do you have another project in the works? What are you focused on next?

SW: Yeah, so the paperback is coming out May 24th, and I’m going to be a consultant on the show, but it’s very much Marti Noxon’s baby. I want to be involved, but it’s their interpretation of it all. It’s hard, but I have to step back. I’m actually working on another novel, though, I’m getting deeper into it. It’s very different from Dietland even though it still has feminist issues in it. I know Dietland is new for everyone else, but it’s been in my life so long, it’s kind of fun to have a new challenge.

Dietland comes out in paperback on May 24. You can find it on Amazon.com and visit the author at Saraiwalker.com.

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