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A Text

HE WAS THE most obese man in eighteenth-century England and I fell in love with him in 2014. ‘Obesity’ wasn’t my term. It belonged to Dr Cheyne’s biographer, and other more established historians, who used it easily, and for whom it was merely descriptive with no contemporary ripple. I tried to be careful about these types of words. I focused on words, ideas, rather than ‘facts’. I asked myself daily if words were political, dated or postmodern; if they were feminist enough or if they were not. I asked myself at night, too, when I lay awake second-guessing myself.

My job was to undo concepts as if I were breaking apart a machine – to find truth in ambiguity. Too often, though, I took words apart without knowing how to replace them, leaving me with nothing to fill their absence. I spent my time sitting at a desk, lingering in libraries in Cambridge where I worked as a researcher and, before that, in Montreal. I often rambled around while I wondered, just wondered, about so many different things. Sometimes I wrote them down. Sometimes I told people. Sometimes I just muttered them quietly to myself. Most often, I wondered about being a woman.

I was at that time engaged in a historical and literary study of women’s appetite control and the body. It suited me to traffic in ideas professionally. This was a habit I’d had since I was a child. When I was eleven, I’d read a picture book about eating disorders – the sort of large cardboard how-to discovery book you could hold tightly against your chest and cover your torso with completely as you walked down the hallway, both hiding the front cover of your book and your budding awareness of the pains of being in a female body. When the elastic waistband of my cheap clothes cut into my expanding hips, I could not have yet known if I was growing in a way I should or shouldn’t be. It all seemed so uncomfortable and public.

It was 1997, the height of a late twentieth-century epidemic that feared for the well-being of young girls like me. News reports and TV specials flashed out warnings and, like them, the glossy pages of my little encyclopaedic book sought to teach me of the wrong way to not eat. An authorless, didactic voice. An earworm:This is what anorexia is; this is what bulimia is; this is the type of girl who is prone to anorexia; this is the type of girl who, slightly less admirable than her counterpart, is usually bulimic. This is the sadness of their families and the conflicts of their friendships.

Their words encapsulated me before I had the chance to find out who I might be in another way. They made it seem so straightforward, so firm, these lessons of who not to be and what not eating had to do with it. Yet, I admired these girls; well, the anorexic girls more than the bulimic ones. I wanted to be more type A, and not B. There was nothing unique about it. I believed in the sincerity of the fictional experience of the disordered, but well-intended, young female characters who were so often presented to me on TV and in books. With thoughts then fractionally absorbed by an adolescent’s mind, it seemed what was necessary to learn was to control the body through appetite. And that appetite was a text through which the body spoke. That there was a whole history contained within this windswept idea was still much beyond my scope of understanding. That would come later. For the time being, I simply stood with increasing regularity in the blue midnight glow of the fridge and ate in obscurity as I saw my mother frequently do, never knowing what compelled me – if it was the books, mimicry or an innate frustrated hunger. Today, this distinction remains difficult to make. I’ve always lacked a taste for intellectual minimalism.

From a young age, I knew I wanted to beserious. I thought I needed to be in control of whatever fell under my realm of action. The margins of error felt small from early on and the world around me seemed unforgiving of girlish mistakes and indul