Mostly good with it: "Fat Swim" by Emma Copley Eisenberg

Since this is the first fiction I've reviewed in which the theme had to do with a positive body image, I'm going to try something different. My blogging about the works of other writers has always been a strange hybrid, not quite a popular review, not quite a theory-laden academic analysis, and not quite a straightforward LIT 101 exposition, either. It takes elements from all of those things, but it isn't any of them. It occurs to me often that the genre I'm most drawing from is the one that left the most indelible mark on me when I was young: the sermon. A good sermon draws on hermeneutics, the scholarly side of Bible reading, but it also draws from life, because the point of the sermon isn't to be a better Bible scholar, it's to be a better person. I'd like to believe literature can do that for us, too, which is why I tend to jump between what I learned in grad school and what I learned in Sunday School when I'm talking about my reactions to stories.

In honor of the sermon, I'd like to borrow a page from Jesus, whose golden rule was an attempt to condense all of the law into one sentence. If I were to try to condense what having a good body image means in one sentence, it might be something like this: If you know all the facts, then it's a good thing to feel happy with and celebrate your body, no matter what it looks like or what it can do. 

Just like any good preacher, I'm now going to take that simple sentence and spend a long time expanding needlessly on it, making everyone in the pews hungry and anxious to get their uncomfortable clothes off. 

Modern psychology has long since realized that images of what a "good body" looks like for both men and women isn't realistic for most people, and that being told we ought to strive for it anyway is mentally damaging. Men are supposed to be both slim and also full of muscle, while women are supposed to be both skinny but also curvy with big breasts, girlish but also desirable. The standards are ridiculous. Those trying to meet them face two likely ends: low self-esteem for having a body that doesn't measure up, or a lifetime of obsessive attempts to get their bodies to look how they think they should. Neither one seems emotionally healthy. (Although I'd like to leave open the possibility that some people might really enjoy trying to look like a body builder as a hobby, and that, as hobbies go, it's probably a healthy one, and there's no reason to look down on people who genuinely enjoy it, just like I don't look down on people who enjoy any of the million other hobbies I'm not that into.) 

So it's important to love yourself as you are. However, I'd put a limit on self-love. Consider my son, for a moment, and his troubles with math. I've been working with him on his math for years now, and I'm pretty convinced the main source of his problems is just that he doesn't want to do it. He's convinced it doesn't have any relevance to his future, so he just isn't motivated to do the work. Should I say, "Okay, son, I don't want to mess with your math self-image, so whatever knowledge of math makes you feel good about yourself, that's what you should do"? Or am I right to keep putting a foot up his ass to get him to a reasonable level of math, then let him make his own decisions as an adult about what math is worth to him?

Obviously, I think the second is true, and I think something similar applies to our happiness with our own bodies. If someone is three hundred pounds and genuinely happy like that, because he's done the work before to be in shape, and he's decided that he's happier enjoying life and weighing three hundred pounds, then great. But it's another thing if the real reason why someone is overweight is just because it's too hard to be in better shape. Sloth and gluttony are still vices worth avoiding, and industry and temperance virtues worth following. If you could really get in shape if you wanted to and choose not to, good on you. But positive body image shouldn't be an excuse for not having self-control or not doing work. 

My ideal body is one that says, "I love life." It says, "This is the best body I could put together with all the other stuff I've got going on." It's not one that says, "I don't give a fuck." 

I'm very happy that ads have started to recognize that different bodies exist, and that people with bodies like these might get the message that their bodies are cool, too. 

And now I actually talk about the story for a little bit

"Fat Swim" by Emma Copley Eisenberg is a sweet story about an eight-year-old girl named Alice learning to love herself. Her parents are divorced. She lives most of the time with her dad, who is fat and in counseling because he doesn't love himself. On the weekends, she visits her mother, who is skinny and lives with a runner. While at her mother's, Alice is nervous and feels hungry, because her mother frets over her portion sizes. 

Through her kitchen window, Alice sees a group of overweight women at the pool every Wednesday, and she joins them eventually. She learns from them about being happy with the body you've got. She also sexually fantasizes about them, which led me down a long rabbit hole of a conversation with Mrs. Heretic about how common sexual fantasies are for eight-year-olds and how many seven-year old girls get breasts, like Alice did. Overall, it's not so unusual as to be unbelievable. The story mostly accomplishes what it wants to accomplish. Generally, I believe that Alice is going to be a happy, well-adjusted adult who loves herself in a good way. 

But there are a few passages that troubled me. First is just how negative a view the narrative takes of the mother. While talking about the various hardships her father has survived, the narrative has this to say about the mother:

"Another thing Dad survived is Mom, who is not gone, only living in the suburbs with her new husband. Alice spends every weekend there. There is little to report because everything is so little. Mom has shrunk. Mom's new husband runs marathons, leaving the house before Alice wakes up and returning halfway through the day, in small shorts and shellacked with sweat. Fifteen miles! Twenty-seven miles! Mom high-fives him and then they both want to high-five her. Alice's chest starts to feel tight hours before dinner time because there is usually not enough food and she usually goes to bed hungry. This feeling sticks around long after the meal has actually happened, the hunger has actually come, and even through the morning when she can eat again. At Mom's house, even the air feels thin."

I think it's easy to believe a mother might put unwanted and even unhealthy pressure on a daughter to be thin, like Tea Leoni in Spanglish. This passage feels almost unfair, though. Maybe I needed to see more of what the mother actually did to make Alice feel the way she does, rather than just see Alice's perceptions of the way things are. Nobody should body shame Alice, but neither should the runner couple be shamed for wanting to live the way they do. 

The only other indicator we get about the mother controlling Alice's weight is when Alice fantasizes about having the women from the pool come to her birthday party:

"She has imagined a birthday party. It is her birthday, a pool party, and the women are her guests. There is cake and ice cream. Everyone eats as much as they want and no one is there to ask them if they really want that second piece. They eat ice cream from the pint cartons because it is assumed that each will finish her own pint. No one has to share, no one has to put the ice cream back with one bite left because she is afraid her mom will notice the pint missing."

I get that it's good, sometimes, to be low key about parenting, to not overreact when a kid wants to shock you, or when the kid genuinely wants to try something you'd rather she not try. The father in the story seems to have this kind of parenting down. When Alice says she wants to get bigger around and not just up, he just says "okay," while at the same time, he's got her eating vegetables from his garden just by letting her follow her natural interests. 

But I've got to ask: how many full pints of ice cream do you let a kid eat before you suggest something else? How heavy do you let your child get before you start to think you need to intercede, knowing how hard it will be for that child to get in shape later in life, how many health risks the kid will be open to if she doesn't get it under control? 

The fact is that this low-key parenting thing doesn't work with every kid. I now wish we'd been a lot less tolerant of our son and his strong inclinations to make unhealthy choices when he was younger. We tried the "let him figure it out with guidance from us if he wants it" school. He was not the right child for that. He was a much better candidate for a no-nonsense upbringing, and I think he'll suffer for our choices as parents. 

Ultimately, I think Alice in the story is going to be okay. Maybe that's because it's a story, and the author can choose to make her kid turn out okay. I don't know that it usually turns out that way in real life, but Alice is going to feel good about herself, and if she's a little overweight and that means some people won't want to date her or be friends with her, she's not going to lose sleep about it. She'll find her people and likely live a happy life. It's a satisfying conclusion to a mostly satisfying story.

Nonetheless, I'm going to submit that it's possible to either A) convince yourself you're happy when you're really not, or B) be content with yourself when you shouldn't be. In Alice's case, she might, if she goes down road A, end up telling herself she's happy being out of shape, when her condition might make her miss out on things she'd like to do, like hike or bike or swim. Or, if she goes down path B, she might actually be happy eating far more than her share of the Earth's resources, damaging the environment, which seems to me one of the best reasons to practice at least a little moderation. I don't mean to be the environmental eating police--we all have to enjoy ourselves a little, or life will be too grim to endure. But all the ice cream you want doesn't seem like a responsible way to live your life. What you eat might seem like a private decision, but is anything really completely a private decision?  

It's not up to me to judge whether Alice should be happy about her body. If I were very overweight, I'd want to change, but I enjoy doing things that require me to be in at least reasonable shape. That doesn't mean I can't see why others would enjoy living a different way. I still enjoyed the story, and I am very happy that the world is now a place where people can enjoy having reasonable bodies instead of worrying about why they don't have unreasonably ideal ones.