Dietland: a wickedly funny, feminist revenge fantasy novel of one fat woman's fight against sexism and the beauty industry

by Sarai Walker

In my real life I would have more friends, and dinner parties and overnight guests, but my life wasn’t real yet.

When I was around women who had grown-up lives, the kind of life I thought I should have, I felt suspended in time, like an animal floating in a jar of formaldehyde.

My first year of high school, after an older classmate was raped in the vacant lot behind Von’s, the school offered self-defense classes for girls. When I showed up, two girls snickered and said, loudly enough for everyone else to hear, “Who’d want to rape her?”

“I can’t, Daddy. You’ll be proud of me when this is finished, I promise.” I was his only child. He had married again, but his new wife couldn’t have children, so I was his only hope for grandkids. If I was fat, no one would want to marry me. I wanted to tell him this, to explain that this wasn’t just a diet, that everything in my future and his depended on it, but I couldn’t say the words.

I paced in front of the plates, looking around to see if anyone was watching me. With my fingers I scooped up some of the pasta tubes and placed them on my tongue. It was the first real food I’d had in more than a month. The texture was different, like cashmere instead of a scratchy polyester.

At work I continued to pick scraps off plates, delighting in the taste and then spitting the food out in the toilet or into a paper towel. Sometimes, though, when Luis was in the alley, I’d eat a few french fries off dirty plates, chewing and then swallowing. Just a few in my belly eased the pain in my head.

One macaroon slipped into my mouth, and then two, and then as many as would fit. I consumed them so hurriedly that at first I didn’t enjoy the shock of creamy coconut against my tongue. I stuffed three macaroons into my mouth before stopping to catch my breath, and then I made room for two more. My face flushed and burned and I began to cry. I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I couldn’t eat the macaroons fast enough. A ball of coconut formed in my throat. I paused to swallow, then continued working through my stash, wiping my nose with my sleeve as I chewed. I was still wearing plastic gloves. I felt like a criminal. As I swallowed the last cookie, my face stained with tears and mascara, I saw Luis and Eduardo nearby in the alley, smoking. I didn’t know how long they had been there. They were looking at me—they had seen.

“I don’t want to look like this, you know. I hate looking this way. I don’t need to be reminded of what everyone else thinks of me.” “They’re the ones that have the problem, not you. There’s nothing wrong with you.”

“It’s easy for you to say that being big isn’t a bad thing. You don’t have to live this way.”

Here we go, I thought. Another thin woman, like my mother, trying to dissuade me

“If Kitty or any of the women on her staff were given the choice between looking like me and losing an arm or a kidney or even dying, they’d probably choose death or dismemberment,” I said. “There. Are you satisfied?”

“I’d rather not think about it. It’s easier to just ignore her.” If I ignore it then it isn’t real.

“Alicia will be loved,” I said, at last. I hadn’t wanted to say it, but she’d pushed me. She knew what she was digging for and I had said it and now it floated in the room between us like a big black cloud of shame. It was so thick, I couldn’t see through it. “Isn’t Plum loved?” she asked. I told her that my parents loved me, but I wanted more than that.

“But what if you are? What if this is your real life and you’re fat and that’s that?” “Then I wouldn’t want to live anymore.”

“Why not just find another boy, one who wasn’t an asshole?” “There were no other boys for me.” “There are plenty of boys.” “Maybe for someone like you, but not for me. There wasn’t the possibility of another boy.”

Your dream, as it were, is to look different. To be smaller.” “I want to look normal.”

Sometimes they would pose the question to me, not seeing or caring that when they said “Do I look fat?” they were really saying “Do I look like you?” It was assumed that no one wanted to look like me, not even me.

I was already fat. I was the worst that could happen.

“A fuckable woman doesn’t take up space. Fuckable women are controlled.”

“Fat women are not controlled. They are defiant, so they are unfuckable.”

Fat is like a natural collagen, so without it you’ll wrinkle more.”

Maybe Y —— was the glue holding my life together—not a life so much as pieces of cracked china that had been fit together haphazardly.

No matter how much I ate, I didn’t feel full. In the past, after I binged, I’d rein myself in. I’d been doing that for years—diet-binge, diet-binge, the old two-step—but this was different. I never felt full, no matter how much I ate. It was as if the hunger from a decade of dieting was stored up inside me and the chains that had been wrapped around it were beginning to break.

women don’t want to be me, men don’t want to fuck me. I finally understood what it meant.

From the time we’re little girls, we’re taught to fear the bad man who might get us. We’re terrified of being raped, abused, even killed by the bad man, but the problem is, you can’t tell the good ones from the bad ones, so you have to be wary of them all. We’re told not to go out by ourselves late at night, not to dress a certain way, not to talk to male strangers, not to lead men on. We take self-defense classes, keep our doors locked, carry pepper spray and rape whistles. The fear of men is ingrained in us from girlhood. Isn’t that a form of terrorism?”

As far as he was concerned, if I didn’t make his man parts happy, I had no reason to exist.

I had left home that night in my brown and violet dress feeling confident and happy in my appearance, but Mason and his friends seemed to think I was a joke. This is how it’s going to be, I thought. I had changed so much in the past few months, but the world hadn’t changed along with me. Plum would always be a target. Giving up the hope of Alicia meant giving up the hope of ever blending in.

Mason was waiting for an answer, and I wondered how hard he would work to win me over. He didn’t expect me to be hard work. I was supposed to be grateful for his attention—that’s what he was expecting: a round-faced girl desperate for male attention, brightening under the beam of his unexpected lust. Such a girl would do anything he wanted.

Several people turned to look, more than usual. Were they all in on the joke? A feeling I used to know well but hadn’t experienced for a while crept up on me: humiliation.

Telling her she’s pretty was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the winning lottery number, the healing hand of Christ on top of her head. He had been made to believe he had such power. It had been given to him by women like her.

The years of Waist Watchers, Baptist Weight Loss and plans for surgery, the hours and hours that added up to years of my life spent sitting at home afraid to go outside, afraid to be laughed at and shunned and rejected and stared at by faces like the one looking up at me now, one of the generic, mass-produced, ordinary, follow-the-crowd, hateful faces.

“Virginia Woolf once wrote that it’s more difficult to kill a phantom than a reality,” she said. And so it was, but at last my phantom was gone. I knew my life would never be easy, but this must be what Sana had meant. I had crossed over and would never go back.

With unexpected power in my legs, I kept going, racing ahead with the wind and the sun on my face, taking a leap into the wide world, which now seemed too small to contain me. Burst!