Tidbits #3
A new essay, a national shutdown, randomness, and a year in theatre
I have an essay in this amazing anthology about menopause, called The Big M, edited by the one and only and luminous Lidia Yuknavitch. It’s called, “Late, Blooming,” and here’s a brief excerpt:
When you are fat in a fatphobic world, you tend to live in a peculiar state of longing, a state of perpetual anticipation, making yourself promises about all the things you will do when.
You plan your life around the bounty that awaits when you lose enough weight to find a loving partner, to get a good job, to travel abroad, to visit parents without intense anxiety, to make everyone happy, to make yourself happy. This fraught limbo is how I lived through my teens, my twenties, my thirties. Decades of waiting go by until you reach middle age and are forced to ask yourself, “When will I really start living?” Even once I started to embrace body neutrality in my forties, I nurtured this stasis, as if life would only truly begin when I was the right size and what a short life it would be. I wasted so much time I will never get back. There was never going to be a right size so long as I believed I was the problem. And oh, how I believed that, into the marrow of my bones. I couldn’t believe otherwise no matter how hard I tried.
As women, we are told relentlessly, in so many different ways, that youth and beauty and thinness are currency. It is how we communicate our value to the world. As we age, that currency becomes less powerful and then, we simply fade from relevance, left, hopefully, in peace to enjoy our dotage. If you don’t meet the standards of conventional attraction, your currency is less powerful. And when you are fat, when you inhabit an unruly body, you have no currency at all. I didn’t always know this but once I learned, I was a perfect student.
The full essay is at Electric Literature.
Tomorrow, January 30th, is a national day of protest against ICE and the way they are terrorizing communities across the country. At The Rumpus, we are not publishing, in solidarity. We won’t be publishing anything here in the newsletter. We won’t be working. I hope you can join a local action, or call your elected officials to implore them to abolish ICE and put an end to this horror show or do whatever you can in whatever way you can to let the current administration know we don’t stand for any of this.
I am reading Lauren Hough’s forthcoming new book Monster of a Land, and it is even better than her debut. She offers so a keen understanding of this country, the complexity of its people, and does so with real empathy. It’s truly one of the best books I’ve ever read, and I read a lot of great books. I haven’t been able to put it down since I dove in a couple days ago.
What’s going on with the new season of Hi/jack? It just feels so slow and kind of dry and maybe a little to vague about what’s going on. I love a season-long mystery but you have to give the audience enough to make them care about the mystery. Idris is still fine AF, though, so at least there’s that. Also, the wonderful actor who plays his ex-wife.. Also fine AF. Thespians!
Season 2 of The Pitt, however, does not disappoint. Dr. Carter would absolutely get it, morning noon and night. If I wasn’t happily married.
Greenland 2 is terrible. Watch it if you want, because it’s a fun, schlocky post-apocalypse thriller, but they should have let this one cook a little longer.
Behind the paywall, my year in theater.
