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Sometimes a near miss can be more annoying than an egregious, uncaring off-target shot. I mean...I was supposed to like this book. Good in Bed, by first-time novelist Jennifer Weiner, a bestseller in hardback and in its recent paperback release, was recommended to me by folks in the size acceptance community, accompanied by reviews that called it "a tool in the journey toward our own self-acceptance" (BBW) and "a must-read for any woman who struggles with body image" (Publisher's Weekly). But the book instead irritated me in the particular way that a book for which you are theoretically the dead-on demo can. I'm less personally pissed off about Good in Bed than when I first read it--now it seems more like a bellwether of cultural attitudes and less like an affront to my own feelings--but it's still annoying, especially because its primary attention-getting hook (which has naught to do with the wasted title) is one I felt was embraced because of our country's very imperfect understanding of issues of size. According to reviewers, Good in Bed is about a woman "who learns how to love her plus-size self" (People)--her journey on the "road to self-confidence" (Lifetime). Candace "Cannie" Shapiro is a wisecracking Gen-X entertainment reporter for a Philadelphia newspaper with divorced parents--a disappearing emotional monster of a father and a late-in-life lesbian mother, a Princeton education, burning ambition, a driving sense of outsiderness and a former boyfriend who dumps her after she suggests they take a break. She finds this out at the beginning of the book when he starts writing about their relationship in "Moxie" magazine, his columns throughout Good in Bed providing a Greek chorus for her feelings of obsession and anger about him as well as the seeming impetus for her journey of size-acceptance after years as a fat girl--his first column is titled "Loving a Larger Woman." By the middle of the book she has an unwanted pregnancy by her ex and a fruitful friendship with a Hollywood movie star. By the end, after a confrontation with her father and her daughter's (seriously soap opera-style) premature birth, she has true love with the doctor who runs the diet program at the University of Pennsylvania (more on that absurdity later) and a new sense of body acceptance, which she broadcasts in her own column in Moxie. Sounds like a pretty size-positive story on the surface. After all, a fluffy summer book with a fat girl protagonist and a no-diet ending is still fairly revolutionary in some ways, maybe more significant in its context than in a zine-y, indie place. It has been a hard thing to get a handle on, the compromised, irritating attitude towards size I find in Good in Bed. ("It's Uncle Tom's Cabin!" a friend of mine yelled when I was trying to explain for the 20th time what it was that pissed me off about this extremely well-intentioned book.) In the end the truth is that Cannie isn't actually what I'd call big, and the road she travels doesn't look much like the world fat people actually live in, despite a lot of self pity driving the story. Cannie, more or less lumped in her 2001 arrival into the chorus line of first-person single girls who occupied publishing lists in their genre in search of catchphrase--'Dump Lit,' 'Bridget Clones,' 'Brit Chick Lit,' Neurotic Female Fiction' (that would be USA Today)--differs from Bridget and whatstheirfaces from "Sex and the City" not so much in her body issues, which are as raging as those characters' for most of the book, but in her actual described size. She is big. 'Big.' She is, in fact, at 5'10", a size 16--what they'd call in the porn biz a 'plumper.' Let me just say now, and loudly, and sincerely, that I understand all pain, including the pain of body issues, to be relative. I do not assume from looking at anybody, fat or thin, that I can know what kinds of struggles they carry; as far as I'm concerned to a certain extent that operates independently of body size, hence the meaninglessness of the term "weight problem." But I am going to note, since I don't remember Weiner doing this, that size 16 is a somewhat average size for an American woman (the average American woman is around 145 pounds and a size 12, according to current statistics). I don't mean size 16 is tiny, but it's barely Lane Bryant territory. Cannie can buckle airplane seatbelts, albeit tightly, even when pregnant. Once she mentions "inadequate armchairs," but she slides into booths without having to first gauge whether she'd fit. She is able to squeeze into the shirt of her tiny movie star friend (an oversized shirt, but still). She's big, but she ain't that big. It's part of the nearsightedness of this book that she never sees this for herself, nor Weiner for her readers. Which means that the media, ready as ever to call anything over size 12/14/whatever as "fat," don't get their thinking on that front challenged either: "A single woman with a vulnerable heart, a biting sense of humor and a pair of ever-widening thighs" ha-ha-ed Barnes & Noble; "Seriously overweight" (KUOW-FM); "She is big. Very big." (USA Today). It's unclear throughout the book whether Cannie has any better understanding of her size than her critics. Quite often she seems to have all the stunning self-awareness and attitude of a Cathy cartoon, due to the "bitterly, mordantly funny" wisecracking things she says about her body. I think this is what's supposed to make us like her ("one of the funniest full-figured heroines to come along in years" [Mode]), what we're supposed to identify with, what maybe gives the book some tacit approval from reviewers. Here are some of Cannie's responses to conversational gambits:
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I really think we're supposed to find that stuff funny ("self-deprecating, but not self-loathing" says the Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service). Or maybe it's not supposed to register or mean much--just more of the white noise soundtrack of body hatred women have. Since these comments shone glaringly to me, I found it confusing that Cannie didn't start out saying these things, then stop as she became more accepting. She basically chants them most of the way to the novel's rousing I Love My Body ending. They are interspersed with moments of status quo-challenging dialogue--you can see where Weiner is going--but Cannie's actions and thinking flip-flop strangely, and not merely in a way that would seem to demonstrate the ambivalence most women feel about their bodies. Good in Bed is badly enough written at times that it's just not clear what Cannie feels--it's full of false endings, contradictory, tidily-won revelations that are doubled-back upon, and easy talk of change when it's not at all clear that change has happened. This happens even the beginning. Cannie reads the column in which her ex-boyfriend discusses why he dumped her -- "She took no pleasure from the very things I loved, from her size, her amplitude, her luscious, zaftig heft" --and her immediate reaction to the news that he loved her body as it was is to go and enroll in a diet program. It feels confusing. I guess critics were confused about this too. The Daily Camera: "Cannie... doesn't obsess much about her weight until she picks up a copy of...Moxie"; Publisher's Weekly: "Cannie... is preoccupied with her weight." Cannie's moments of self-accepting epiphany did not feel as if they hung together in a convincing portrait of one person's development, even at the end of the book. Full of fury at the circumstances of her daughter's birth, filled with bitterness about her father, Cannie loses a lot of weight. Then she discovers that she doesn't care, and reverts to her old size, and publishes a broadside about accepting her body that is sincere, albeit a little...roundabout at times: "I will love myself because I am sturdy," "I may never be thin, but I will be happy," "There are more terrifying things than trying on bathing suits in front of three-way department-store mirrors." Accepting her body, for Cannie, also seems to involve packing her sexuality away -- although it's partly attributed to the pregnancy and heartbreak her character inhabits for the last half of this book. (One more reason the title doesn't fit...) I just wasn't convinced by this book, not by Cannie, and not by the rah-rah ending. Clearly I was supposed to have been. Perhaps part of the reason is the lazy and exasperating conceit that as Cannie dithers, the burden of enlightened body attitudes is often unconvincingly placed on the shoulders of everyone around her. Body acceptance comes from her mother, her friends, the columns her ex-boyfriend writes, her movie star friend, and, most often, her diet doctor, for Christ's sake. Weiner is trying to illustrate Cannie's journey towards acceptance in a Wizard of Oz fashion ("I was all right, all along."..."'You have everything you need,' my mother had told me'"), and in doing so she upholsters her life with wonderful things--good health, an active, gorgeous body (Cannie's descriptions of her own body, outside of the wisecracking, are often coyly luscious), professional and financial success (including selling a screenplay in Hollywood that features a fat heroine), a full romantic/sexual history, and despite her father, an astonishingly generous support system of friends and family. Cannie mopes myopically through this richness, cracking self-deprecating jokes and reacting negatively, even dismissively, to the positive talk and support around her. ("You're stuck with a body that you think men don't want..." [says the movie star] "It's a little more than a theory at this point," Cannie answers.) All of this is part of why I found Cannie a hard character to sympathize with, even as bad things happened to her: her horrible father, getting knocked up, having the knocker-up ignore her pregnancy, the public discussion of her private life. There is a certain flavor to this book--perhaps this sounds cold-blooded--of an unaware, victimized sort of entitlement. I think I'm supposed to be down with this, since so much of the pain is about being fat (and "fat" is not really an okay word in this book, by the way), but I didn't like it. When the book is convincingly enough written that you are buying a world populated with hunky size-accepting diet doctors (not often), you are just exasperated with the coyness that has Cannie not seeing it. It makes the journey she's on an unconvincing one. All she does is flip around and note the luxury around her. And yeah, okay: hunky, single, big girl-liking diet doctors. This little bit of Irvingesque wish-fulfillment annoyed me most of all. Dr. K., whom we are to believe Cannie is not noticing as a romantic prospect, is a very nice, albeit flat, reflective character. We find out little about him, except for an odd Freudian explanation for his specialization in weight-loss, and he does little plot-wise but woo and rescue Cannie over and over, including the one final time leading to the body-accepting denouement. He tells her she looks fine as she is, tells her diets don't work, tells her that given her heredity she might not have been meant to be thin. It's a lovely idea, a diet doctor who says all this in addition to -- I'm not kidding -- bringing her food, sending her food, taking her out to eat, making her dinner (lovely and a little weird--on one occasion he uses her list of "trigger" foods to figure out what to make) but it's symptomatic of how this book doesn't seem to deal with the external realities of living as a fat person. |
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I agree with the premise that we are all all right, all along, regardless of our size. But the happiest size 34 is still going to have a harder time finding housing, jobs, partners, decent health care, educational opportunities and clothing than the unhappiest size 8, and diet doctors are in there keeping that system working. (Reviewers, whom I find have to be prodded to think about fat prejudice, seemed to protest much more loudly at the idea of a nice movie star than a size-accepting diet doctor: "This is such a sunny book that it regards film stars as sweet," marveled The New York Times.) In fact, despite the ringing ending, Good in Bed takes a fairly traditional view of issues of size. It's not particularly sympathetic to other fat characters. There is a brief appearance by an inspiringly self-confident fat yoga teacher (she has more than a bit of an impersonal Glenda the Good Witch aura about her--Wizard of Oz indeed), but Cannie's nemesis, her "super-size" co-worker Gabby, about whom she even says "you'd think we would enjoy some solidarity because of our shared oppression, our common struggle to survive in a world that deems any woman above a size twelve grotesque and laughable," is written about in unnecessarily mean ways: she "waddles," has "thick fingers." Gabby is mean just because she's mean, but the reason they don't find any solidarity about size is Cannie's attitude. The other women in Cannie's diet class are written about as smart enough to rebel against yet more portion-control talk, but they aren't given much of a voice other than to ask for drugs and get nostalgic for donuts in a scene that reminded me of the movie Fatso. Weiner also consistently describes and writes about thin characters in a bitter, she's-so-perfect way--"the only problem her face and figure had ever caused her was too much male attention," Cannie thinks about her skinny best friend. Nor does Good in Bed take a particularly challenging view of why people are the size they are. Dr. K tells us not everyone is meant to be thin, but Weiner makes it clear in her story-telling, with Cannie's interest in food compared to thin characters', that thin people don't eat much and fat people do and that's how it happens. "Given a choice of any food in the world, she'd probably pick a perfect fresh peach and Ray crispbreads. If she wasn't my best friend, I'd hate her, and even though she is my best friend, it's sometimes hard not to be envious of someone who can take food or leave it, whereas I mostly take it, and then take hers, too, when she doesn't want anymore." In a weird way, few of the specifics of fat prejudice really seem to be the province of Good in Bed. Cannie's struggle with body issues, as written, is internal, and mostly originating in the past ("the lifetime's accretion of unkindnesses"), especially her father. Internally is, yes, where that stuff lives, but she doesn't actually experience much prejudice during the course of the book--rather the opposite. She talks about men looking at her "with disinterest and/or scorn because [she is] a Larger Woman," although this never actually happens (one guy asks her out as a friend, not a date, but the book even acknowledges it might have nothing to do with her size, that these feelings are coming from the "shrill, hysterical" part of herself). In one scene she confronts a proto-Courtney-Love character who calls her a "fat girl." And there is an anecdotal confrontation with a Hollywood agent's belief that there is one bankable fat actress. But that's it. Most of what actually happens in this book ignores the fierce realities of fat prejudice. This book is clearly fueled by the pain of being fat in a thin world--it's saturated with it--but it doesn't actually describe the mechanisms of that world much. It shadowboxes them. Leaves them at the door. If Good in Bed were a flat-out bubbly fantasy of fat girl entitlement, I'd be all over it. But it's not. Cannie finds validation as a big girl in a world which is neither particularly revolutionary nor particularly realistic. Although I certainly have wondered whether I'm being too snarky in my criticisms of it, clinging to a paralyzing ideological purity (no doubt Weiner would say so). Books like Good in Bed, while illustrating as well-funded pieces of mainstream media current accepted American attitudes towards fat folk, do provide toeholds, Joan Riversesque quips and all. Maybe I should be rooting for it more. I've thought about how I'd react to this book as a teenager if the idea of size acceptance was new to me -- which I was, and it was, at one point. Probably it would have been more helpful to read than the quality time I spent reading Scruples and being jealous of Billy Ikehorn, glamorously forced to lose weight in her skimpily lardered Parisian home-stay. And yet...I don't know. The body-hating, body-starving world is everywhere in a thousand tricky permutations (and yo, hello--size 16 is only the beginning of the fat girl rainbow) and it is precisely the strongest, most unapologetic, real words and characters which pulled me through it. I am not a grim humorless size-acceptance crank who accepts nothing less than perfect body politics. But social barometer or not, I do find Good in Bed lacking. Even if I thought it was more successful or plausible in its efforts I'm not sure I'd think it was the novel I've been waiting for. The book made me think of things Susie Bright has said about lesbian erotica and how she (to paraphrase) doesn't want to read one more coming out story. I'm not sure I do either; I'm getting tired of stories of Fat Girls Finding Themselves. I guess that's the phase we are in now--how we manage as some generalized awareness of how Dieting Doesn't Work seeps into our talk of eating and size and the plots of our popular novels--but I sure am tired of never seeing a fat girl's life in media res, without her first having to demonstrate a vindicating (and usually weirdly compromised) journey to self-acceptance. I know we all gotta do it (on a daily basis, even), but I'd really like to read more books where the big leap's already made. Apart from the fact that I'm not sure I want Weiner speaking for me as a fat girl, there are lots of reasons to dislike Good in Bed. The topicality of a "Saturday Night Live" episode, a brand name usage to rival Terry McMillan ("the diamonds were each about the size of a SunMaid raisin"), its overwritten First Novel qualities (did I mention Weiner is a Princeton-graduated, Philadelphia Inquirer entertainment reporter?), its breeziness and confessional yet brittle prose, the most tiresomely unkind stereotype I've seen walk onto the pages of a book in a long time--Cannie's mother's 12-stepping partner with her two-ton loom and rainbow stickers--or the off-putting sight of a favorite poet of mine quoted in this context (Philip Larkin; nothing quite as disturbing as seeing an author you love quoted by an author you don't). All that--well, other than wincing at the Larkin-quoting--that's my problem--is certainly the responsibility of poor writing, and better editing would have affected all the other stuff too. But as it is, even with its stirring message of size acceptance designed to twang my strings, I still would pass over the near miss of Good in Bed for dieting, smoking, better-written Bridget Jones any day. This worries me, but it's true. Sometimes a miss, to quote Philip Larkin, is "as bad as a mile." |
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12.07.06: Scarlet Letters -- in case it isn't glaringly obvious -- is currently
on an extended hiatus. The web has changed, we've changed, and
we're trying to figure out how we both fit together now, which isn't a process we want to rush. If you're looking for more current SL-related content, you can
have check out upcoming books from editor Heather Corinna and previous co-editor Hanne Blank, check out Heather's current sexuality sites, or explore sites through the femmerotic network. We hope to be back with you soon, as fresh, challenging and
unexpected as ever.
In the meantime, by all means, enjoy our years of past content,
all of which still remain in the public and subscription areas.
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