Shame

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  46My disdain for sports and, now, exercise remains pure and constant. It feels like a waste of my time, moving around, sweating and hoping that something good will rise from that effort. Certainly, there are moments after a workout when I feel refreshed and powerful and healthy, but it is very easy to forget those moments when I need to change into workout clothes and go to the gym or go for a walk, or do whatever it takes to move my body. I generally dread exercise, all of it, and then I feel terrible about myself for being lazy, unmotivated, utterly lacking in discipline or self-regard, because intellectually, I know exercise is good for me. My hatred of exercise is unfortunate because exercise is necessary for the human body. It is a key component of losing weight and good health. I know the math. In order to maintain your body weight, you need to eat 11 calories for every pound you weigh. In order to lose a pound of fat, you must burn 3,500 calories. If you’re a 150-pound woman, thirty minutes of aerobic exercise burns about 220 calories. Thirty minutes of elliptical training burns about 280 calories. Running at a brisk pace will burn 120 calories for each mile. A brisk walk will burn 100 calories for each mile. I should take some consolation in knowing that at my size, I burn way more calories than the 150-pound woman, but alas, I do not. In the corner of my bedroom sits my recumbent exercise bike. When I am feeling particularly motivated about losing weight, I will ride the bike for up to an hour a day. It’s a good time to sweat and catch up on reading. I own a few hand weights that I’ll flex and curl when I remember to. I have a large inflatable ball upon which I sit to do abdominal exercises and squats and the like. I do not suffer from ignorance where exercise is related. I suffer from inertia. Over the years, I have joined countless gyms. I have worked with personal trainers, though grudgingly, given that I hate being told what to do and that hatred multiplies when I am told what to do by someone who is thin and impossibly fit and usually gorgeous and charging me a significant amount of money on an hourly basis. I have a membership to Planet Fitness, though I have never visited the local facility. Basically, I donate $19.99 a month to their corporate existence and the idea that I can walk into a Planet Fitness, anywhere in the country, should I feel like working out.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  I was broken, and then I broke my ankle and was forced to face a lot of things I had long ignored. I was forced to face my body and its frailty. I was forced to stop and take a breath and give a damn about myself. I have always worried that I am not strong. Strong people don’t find themselves in the vulnerable situations I have found myself in. Strong people don’t make the mistakes I make. This is some nonsense I have cooked up over the years, notions I would disabuse anyone else of but somehow still carry myself. When I worry I’m not strong, I become very invested in appearing invulnerable, unbreakable, stone-cold, a fortress, self-sustaining. I worry that I need to keep up this appearance even when I cannot. Before October 10, 2014, I was running myself into the ground. I have always run myself into the ground, been relentless, pushed and pushed, thought myself superhuman. You can do that when you’re twenty, but when you’re forty, the body basically says, “Get a grip. Have a seat. Eat some vegetables and take your vitamins.” I came to many realizations in the aftermath of breaking my ankle. The most profound of those realizations was that part of healing is taking care of your body and learning how to have a humane relationship with your body. I was broken and then I broke some more, and I am not yet healed but I have started believing I will be. 83I sort of knew, when I published my novel, that things would change, but I was pretty passive about it, partly because I was a little resentful that when a woman writes, her personal story becomes part of the story, even though the novel is fiction. My parents have always known I was a writer. As a young girl they encouraged my creativity, got me my first typewriter, read the little stories I wrote, and praised them as loving parents do. But my writing was also something vague to them, particularly when I was an unknown writer without a book in, say, Barnes & Noble. They weren’t familiar with the online magazines where most of my work was published, and I didn’t go out of my way to share my work with them. When my story “North Country” was included in The Best American Short Stories, I told my mother and she asked, “What’s that?”

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  I was not fat and then I made myself fat. I needed my body to be a hulking, impermeable mass. I wasn’t like other girls, I told myself. I got to eat everything I wanted and everything they wanted too. I was so free. I was free, in a prison of my own making. I got older and I kept eating mostly just to keep the prison walls up. It was more work than you might imagine. Then I was in a great relationship with a great man and I was finishing my PhD and my life was coming together and I thought I could see a way out of the prison I had made. We suffered a loss and it undid me. I needed to blame something or someone, so I blamed myself. I blamed my body for being broken. My doctor did not dissuade me from doing this, which was its own kind of hell—to have your worst fear about yourself affirmed by a medical professional who is credentialed to make such judgments. My body was to blame. I was to blame. I needed to change my body but I also wanted to eat because eating was a comfort and I needed comfort but refused to ask the one person who could comfort me for such sanctuary. This was something I had long known so well. Before that point, I had often joked that I wasn’t bulimic because I couldn’t make myself throw up, but when I really want to do something, I get it done. I learned how to make myself throw up and then I got very good at it. I am fat, so I hid in plain sight, eating, throwing up, eating. I am perfectly normal and fine, I told myself. One day, my boyfriend found me in the bathroom, hunched over the toilet, my eyes red and watering. It was a nasty scene. “Get the fuck out,” I said quietly. I hadn’t said more than a few words to him, to anyone, in months. He grabbed me and pulled me to my feet. He shook me and said, “This is what you’re doing? This?” I just stared at him because I knew that would make him angrier. I wanted to make him angrier so that he could punish me and I could stop punishing myself. He deserved to punish me and I wanted to give that to him as penance. He was, is, a good man, so he wouldn’t give me what I wanted. He uncurled his fingers and let go of me and backed out of the bathroom. He put his fist through a wall, which only infuriated me because I wanted him to put his fist through me.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  When I go to the gym on my own, I always feel like all eyes are on me. I try to pick times when there won’t be many people around, partly to protect myself, partly out of self-loathing. My self-consciousness magnifies at the gym. There is something about actively using my body that makes me feel even more vulnerable. And there is, of course, the self-doubt, the nagging sense that I shouldn’t even bother, that I don’t belong in the gym, that any attempt toward fitness is pathetic and delusional. I know how to use most of the equipment, but I always get nervous when I am mounting the treadmill or an exercise bike because I feel like that equipment isn’t meant for people like me. I hate how other people will see me, this fat person working out, and offer unsolicited encouragement like, “Good for you,” or “Keep it up,” or “You go, girl.” I don’t want encouragement. I am not interested in anyone’s opinions about my presence in the gym. I do not require the affirmation of strangers. Those affirmations are rarely about genuine encouragement or kindness. They are an expression of the fear of unruly bodies. They are a misguided attempt to reward the behavior of a “good fat person,” who is, in their minds, trying to lose weight rather than simply engaging in healthful behavior. When I am at the gym, I want to be left alone in my sweaty misery. I want to disappear until my body is no longer a spectacle. I can’t disappear, though, so either I have to be graceful in the face of this unsolicited conversation or I have to ignore it because, if I allowed myself to lose control, I would let loose so much rage. 47This one time, many years ago, I went to the gym and five of the six recumbent bikes, my equipment of choice, were occupied by gorgeous, extraordinarily thin women, predominantly of the blond persuasion, who arrived and staked their claim just before I did. I looked around, wondering if a movie was being filmed or if it was Sorority Workout Hour. I was unable to deduce the exact reason why these young women were in the gym at the very time I chose to exercise, but it was clear they were working out together. I became irritated and downright angry as I always do when I see exceedingly thin people at the gym. It doesn’t matter that they are most likely thin for this very reason. I feel like they are mocking me with their perfect, toned bodies. They are flaunting their physical blessings and discipline.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Lecture 2—Creation and Chaos in Genesis 13 ‹ As we know, God told the man and woman that they could eat the fruit of every tree in the garden, except one: the tree that would give them knowledge of good and evil. God warned that by eating from that tree, they would die. And that is where disruption will start, at the point where God sets a limit for human beings. ‹ Why would God would create such a tree, only to tell people not to touch it? Instead of answering this question, the story deals with the human desire to move beyond the limitation. ‹ The serpent asks if God really told them not to eat from any tree in the garden. The woman dutifully repeats God’s warning—that they will die if they eat from the tree of knowledge. The serpent then creates the pivotal moment in the plot with some dangerous half-truths. ● He says that if they eat the fruit they won’t die, which is true; they won’t die immediately after eating the fruit, although they will die eventually. ● And the serpent says that they’ll become like God, knowing good and evil. That’s also true; they will come to know good and evil, although they will not be fully like God. ‹ Will the woman’s action be shaped by what God said or what the serpent said? Will she respect the limitation or reach beyond it? The narrator heightens the tension by noting that the woman can already see that the fruit is “good.” If she can already see what is good, then what more could she want—except to learn what is evil? ‹ When the woman and the man eat the fruit, their newfound knowledge brings them shame at their nakedness. The positive relationship is disrupted. When God asks what happened, the man blames the woman, while she blames the serpent. ‹ This disruption is reflected in the negative judgment of God. He says that the mutuality of women and men will give way to male domination, and humanity’s relationship to the earth will be affected. Work will become hard labor, until people die and return to the dust from which they were taken. ‹ The story ends when people know the difference between good and evil. Yet God recognizes that knowing what is good does not mean doing what is good. He

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  My parents eventually found me with the help, I assume, of a private investigator. I have never asked. They had my brother Michael Jr. call me, somehow knowing I would not hang up on him, the baby of the family. We reconnected, tentatively. I learned that my father had gone to New Haven and packed up my apartment, made what amends he could with the roommate I had left in the lurch so irresponsibly. Once we reconnected, my dad shipped me some of my stuff. He paid my outstanding bills. He fathered me despite everything I was doing to be unparented. And then it all ended. I came home to an eviction notice on my apartment door. The couple I was living with was frantically packing all their belongings as if everything were just fine. I panicked because I had, in my still relatively sheltered and privileged life, never known such a thing. As I cried and freaked out, I packed my stuff into a trunk and left it with a friend. I considered my options but didn’t want to go home. I wasn’t ready. With what money I had, I bought a plane ticket to Minneapolis. I went to Minnesota, in the dead of winter, to stay with a girl I met on the Internet. This would become a pattern—meeting lovers online. At first, I did it because it felt safer and I could be sexual without having to actually be sexual. Then, as I got fatter, it was a way to meet people and hopefully charm them with personality before having to show them the truth of my big body. I thought the girl in Minnesota was the love of my life. This would also become a pattern. Two weeks later, I realized she wasn’t the love of my life. She was a stranger and I had nothing, no money, nowhere to live, no job. I broke down and called my parents. My father told me to go to the Minneapolis airport and I did and there was a plane ticket waiting for me. Again, he fathered me. Though they did not have to, though they were frantic with worry, my parents welcomed me home. They had questions and anger and hurt and I couldn’t do much about any of that. I could not tell them the truth. I could not explain why I continued to gain so much weight. I could not figure out how to be less of a disappointment. And still, I knew I had a home to return to, a home where I would be welcomed and loved.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  44I start each day with the best of intentions for living a better, healthier life. Every morning, I wake up and have a few minutes where I am free from my body and my failings. During these moments, I think, Today, I will make good choices. I will work out. I will eat small portions. I will take the stairs when possible. Before the day starts, I am fully prepared to tackle the problem of my body, to be better than I have been. But then I get out of bed. Often, I rush to get ready and begin my day because I am not a morning person and I hit snooze on my alarm several times. I don’t eat breakfast because I’m not hungry or I don’t have time or there is no food in the house, which are all excuses for not being willing to take proper care of myself. Sometimes, I eat lunch—a sandwich from Subway or Jimmy John’s. Or two sandwiches. And chips. And a cookie or three. And it’s fine, I tell myself, because I haven’t eaten all day. Or I wait until dinner and then the day is nearly done and I can eat whatever I want, I tell myself, because I have not eaten all day. At night, I have to face myself and all the ways I have failed. Most days, I haven’t exercised. I haven’t made any of the good choices I intended to make when the day began. Whatever happens next doesn’t matter, so I binge and eat even more of whatever I want. As I fall asleep, my stomach churning, the acids making my heartburn flare, I think about the next day. I think, Tomorrow, I will make good choices. I am always holding on to the hope of tomorrow. 45I often try to create goals for myself that go beyond what I hope to accomplish for my body in a given day. I will lose x number of pounds by the time I go home for Thanksgiving or Christmas or before I go to Australia or before I next see my loved one. I will lose x number of pounds before I go on book tour. I will lose x number of pounds before the new semester starts. I will lose x number of pounds before I go to the Beyoncé concert. I create these goals and make half-hearted attempts to meet these goals, but I never do, and then I enter a spiral of feeling like a failure for not ever being able to be better, to get smaller. I reserve my most elaborate delusions and disappointments for myself.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  During a tattoo, pain is constant and sometimes it lasts hours, but it doesn’t necessarily register the same way pain normally does. I am not to be trusted on this. I do not register pain as most people do, which is to say, my tolerance is high. It is probably too high. But the pain of a tattoo is something to which you have to surrender because once you’ve started, you cannot really go back or you’ll be left with something not only permanent but unfinished. I enjoy the irrevocability of that circumstance. You have to allow yourself this pain. You have chosen this suffering, and at the end of it, your body will be different. Maybe your body will feel more like yours. I’m overweight. I hope to not always be, but for now, this is my body. I am coming to terms with that. I am trying to feel less shame about that. When I mark myself with ink, or when I have that done to me, I am taking some part of my skin back. It is a long, slow process. This is my fortress. 54To tell the story of my body is to tell you about shame—being ashamed of how I look, ashamed of my weakness, the shame of knowing it is in my power to change my body and yet, year after year, not changing it. Or I try, I do. I eat right. I work out. My body becomes smaller and starts to feel more like mine and not a cage of flesh I carry with me. That’s when I feel a new kind of panic because I am seen in a different way. My body becomes a different source of discussion. I have more wardrobe options and there is that intoxicating moment when a much smaller pair of pants slips over my body and a shirt drapes easily over my shoulders. The vanity nestled in the cave of my chest swells. In such moments, I see myself in the mirror, narrower, more angular. I recognize the me I could have, should have, would have been and want to be. That version of myself is terrifying and maybe even beautiful, so I panic, and within days or weeks, I undo all the progress I’ve made. I stop going to the gym. I stop eating right. I do this until I feel safe again. Most of us have these versions of ourselves that terrify us. We have these imperfect bodies we don’t quite know how to cope with. We have these shames we keep to ourselves because to show ourselves as we are, no more and no less, would be too much.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  I cannot bring myself to detail the things he did to me before I was broken. It’s too much, too humiliating. But with each new transgression we committed, I lost more of my body. I fell further from the possibility of the word “no.” I became less and less the good girl I had been. I stopped looking at my reflection in the mirror because I felt nothing but guilt and shame when I did. And then there was that terrible day in the woods. And I finally did say no. And it did not matter. That’s what has scarred me the most. My no did not matter. I wish I could tell you I never spoke to Christopher again, but I did. That may be what shames me most, that after everything he did to me, I went back, and allowed him to continue using me until my family moved a few months later. I allowed him to continue using me because I didn’t know what else to do. Or I let him use me because after what happened in the woods, I felt so worthless. I believed I didn’t deserve any better. I was marked after that. Men could smell it on me, that I had lost my body, that they could avail themselves of my body, that I wouldn’t say no because I knew my no did not matter. They smelled it on me and took advantage, every chance they got. 14I do not know why I turned to food. Or I do. I was lonely and scared and food offered an immediate satisfaction. Food offered comfort when I needed to be comforted and did not know how to ask for what I needed from those who loved me. Food tasted good and made me feel better. Food was the one thing within my reach.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  I was not fat and then I made myself fat. I needed my body to be a hulking, impermeable mass. I wasn’t like other girls, I told myself. I got to eat everything I wanted and everything they wanted too. I was so free. I was free, in a prison of my own making. I got older and I kept eating mostly just to keep the prison walls up. It was more work than you might imagine. Then I was in a great relationship with a great man and I was finishing my PhD and my life was coming together and I thought I could see a way out of the prison I had made. We suffered a loss and it undid me. I needed to blame something or someone, so I blamed myself. I blamed my body for being broken. My doctor did not dissuade me from doing this, which was its own kind of hell—to have your worst fear about yourself affirmed by a medical professional who is credentialed to make such judgments. My body was to blame. I was to blame. I needed to change my body but I also wanted to eat because eating was a comfort and I needed comfort but refused to ask the one person who could comfort me for such sanctuary. This was something I had long known so well. Before that point, I had often joked that I wasn’t bulimic because I couldn’t make myself throw up, but when I really want to do something, I get it done. I learned how to make myself throw up and then I got very good at it. I am fat, so I hid in plain sight, eating, throwing up, eating. I am perfectly normal and fine, I told myself. One day, my boyfriend found me in the bathroom, hunched over the toilet, my eyes red and watering. It was a nasty scene. “Get the fuck out,” I said quietly. I hadn’t said more than a few words to him, to anyone, in months. He grabbed me and pulled me to my feet. He shook me and said, “This is what you’re doing? This?” I just stared at him because I knew that would make him angrier. I wanted to make him angrier so that he could punish me and I could stop punishing myself. He deserved to punish me and I wanted to give that to him as penance. He was, is, a good man, so he wouldn’t give me what I wanted. He uncurled his fingers and let go of me and backed out of the bathroom. He put his fist through a wall, which only infuriated me because I wanted him to put his fist through me.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  I was pretty vague about the release of An Untamed State and Bad Feminist. I was particularly silent on the revelations to be found in Bad Feminist. And then Time magazine reviewed it and referenced my rape, which is not a secret to anyone who has read some of my essays but was, at the time, a secret to most of my family. What happened is not something I discussed with my family. I couldn’t talk about it with them—it was too much. The memories are too fresh even now. The consequences are still with me. Or it was a secret. The day he read the article online, my dad called and said, “I read the Time review.” I was nonchalant, but I knew what he was getting at. A few weeks earlier, my mom had poked at me, in her way, and we had a conversation about how sometimes children, even ones with great parents, are too scared to talk to their parents about the trauma they experience. I told her that most of my writing is about sexual violence and trauma. We talked about how we hoped the world would be better to my niece, and that if anything happened to her, she would talk to someone. I realized my mother knew and I was grateful that she and I are so similar and that it was enough to talk around the truth rather than stare it down. When I went to visit my parents after the Time article, my dad asked, “Why didn’t you tell us about what happened?” and I said, “Dad, I was scared.” I said, “I thought I would get in trouble.” When I was twelve, I was so ashamed of what had happened, of everything I had done with a boy I wanted to love me leading up to what happened with him and all his friends, of the aftermath. I felt like it was my fault. My father told me I deserved justice. He told me he would have gotten justice for me, and I went inside myself as I all too often do. I went through the motions of the rest of the conversation, punctuated by a lot of staring at an electronic device. I could have handled it better, but I was hearing what I have needed to hear for so very long and I wanted to break down, though I don’t know how to do that anymore. My family knows my secret. I am freed, or part of me is freed and part of me is still the girl in the woods. I may always be that girl. My dad and brothers want names. I will not speak his name. My family understands me more now, I think, and that’s good. I want them to understand me. I want to be understood.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  Writing this book is a confession. These are the ugliest, weakest, barest parts of me. This is my truth. This is a memoir of (my) body because, more often than not, stories of bodies like mine are ignored or dismissed or derided. People see bodies like mine and make their assumptions. They think they know the why of my body. They do not. This is not a story of triumph, but this is a story that demands to be told and deserves to be heard. This is a book about my body, about my hunger, and ultimately, this is a book about disappearing and being lost and wanting so very much, wanting to be seen and understood. This is a book about learning, however slowly, to allow myself to be seen and understood. 3To tell you the story of my body, do I tell you how much I weighed at my heaviest? Do I tell you that number, the shameful truth of it always strangling me? Do I tell you I know I should not consider the truth of my body shameful? Or do I just tell you the truth while holding my breath and awaiting your judgment? At my heaviest, I weighed 577 pounds at six feet, three inches tall. That is a staggering number, one I can hardly believe, but at one point, that was the truth of my body. I learned of the number at a Cleveland Clinic in Weston, Florida. I don’t know how I let things get so out of control, but I do. My father went with me to Cleveland Clinic. I was in my late twenties. It was July. Outside, it was hot and muggy and lushly green. In the clinic, the air was frigid and antiseptic. Everything was slick, expensive wood, marble. I thought, This is how I am spending my summer vacation. There were seven other people in the meeting room—an orientation session for gastric bypass surgery—two fat guys, a slightly overweight woman and her thin husband, two people in lab coats, and another large woman. As I surveyed my surroundings, I did that thing fat people tend to do around other fat people—I measured myself in relation to their size. I was bigger than five, smaller than two. At least, that is what I told myself. For $270, I spent a good portion of my day listening to the benefits of having my anatomy drastically altered to lose weight. It was, the doctors said, “the only effective therapy for obesity.” They were doctors. They were supposed to know what was best for me. I wanted to believe them.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  My body was nothing, so I let anything happen to my body. I had no idea what I enjoyed sexually because I was never asked and I knew my wants did not matter. I was supposed to be grateful; I had no right to seek satisfaction. Lovers were often rough with me as if that was the only way they could understand touching a body as fat as mine. I accepted this because I did not deserve kindness or a gentle touch. I was called terrible names and I accepted this because I understood I was a terrible, repulsive thing. Sweet words were not for girls like me. I was treated so badly or indifferently for so long that I forgot what being treated well felt like. I stopped believing that such a thing existed. My heart received even less consideration than my body, so I tried to lock it away but never quite succeeded. At least I am in a relationship, I always told myself. At least I am not so repulsive, so abject, that no one will spend time with me. At least I am not alone. 70I am not good at romantic interactions that aren’t furtive and kind of sleazy. I don’t know how to ask someone on a date. I don’t know how to gauge the potential interest of other human beings. I don’t know how to trust people who do express interest in me. I am not the girl who “gets the date” in these circumstances, or that’s what I cannot help but tell myself. I am always paralyzed by self-doubt and mistrust. Normally, I force myself to feel attraction to someone who expresses interest in me. It’s mortifying to admit that, but it’s also the truth. I doubt I am alone in this. I often think, Maybe this is my last chance, my only chance. I better make it work. Having standards, or trying to have standards and sticking to them, has proven to be more difficult than I imagined. It is hard to say, “I deserve something good. I deserve someone I actually like,” and believe it because I am so used to believing, “I deserve whatever mediocrity comes my way.” In our culture, we talk a lot about change and growing up, but man, we don’t talk nearly enough about how difficult it is. It is difficult. For me, it is difficult to believe I matter and I deserve nice things and I deserve to be around nice people.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  I loved smoking after a meal, first thing in the morning, right before bed. In high school, I had to hide my smoking from faculty members, so I would walk downtown between classes and smoke behind the storefronts of Water Street, looking out onto the murky Exeter River. During those quiet moments down on the water, sitting on gravel and dirt, surrounded by abandoned cigarette butts and beer cans and who knows what else, I felt like a rebel. I loved that feeling, that I was interesting enough to break rules, to believe rules did not apply to me. Like most smokers, I developed elaborate practices for hiding evidence from people who might frown upon the habit—namely, my parents. I usually had an assortment of breath mints, gum, and the like on my person. If I was in a car, I would roll all the windows down as I drove, trying to convince myself that this would air me out. It didn’t take long for me to develop a pack-a-day habit, and sure, my lungs ached when I walked up stairs and sometimes I woke up coughing, and all my clothes reeked of stale smoke and the habit was becoming prohibitively expensive, but I was cool, and I was willing to make a few sacrifices to be cool in at least one small way. 22In the after, I turned to food, but there were other complicating factors. I was never athletic, even when I was slender. I was a child of the suburbs, so my parents enrolled me and my brothers in all manner of sports. Though they were both athletic, I never really excelled at any of the sports I tried, despite dutifully going to practice. In soccer, I was a goalie. To this day, my family loves to recount the story of me sitting near the goalpost, picking dandelions in the middle of a game. I do not recall this, but it doesn’t surprise me that the game held little interest for me. Flowers are pretty and soccer games are long and boring, especially when children, barely cognizant of the rules or the strategy of the game, are playing. When I played softball, I was the catcher, but I was afraid of the ball, how it raced toward me with such force and velocity. I did everything in my power to avoid that ball, which was not at all conducive to my mastering that position. I also had no interest in running around the bases. My ideal version of the game would have had me hit the ball, have someone else run around the bases for me, and never have to play when the opposing team was at bat.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  I do not weigh 577 pounds now. I am still very fat, but I weigh about 150 pounds less than that. With every new diet attempt I shave off a few pounds here, a few pounds there. This is all relative. I am not small. I will never be small. For one, I am tall. That is both a curse and a saving grace. I have presence, I am told. I take up space. I intimidate. I do not want to take up space. I want to go unnoticed. I want to hide. I want to disappear until I gain control of my body. I don’t know how things got so out of control, or I do. This is my refrain. Losing control of my body was a matter of accretion. I began eating to change my body. I was willful in this. Some boys had destroyed me, and I barely survived it. I knew I wouldn’t be able to endure another such violation, and so I ate because I thought that if my body became repulsive, I could keep men away. Even at that young age, I understood that to be fat was to be undesirable to men, to be beneath their contempt, and I already knew too much about their contempt. This is what most girls are taught—that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society. And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but it’s something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us. 5What you need to know is that my life is split in two, cleaved not so neatly. There is the before and the after. Before I gained weight. After I gained weight. Before I was raped. After I was raped. 6In the before of my life, I was so very young and sheltered. I knew nothing about anything. I didn’t know I could suffer or the breadth and scope of what suffering could be. I didn’t know that I could give voice to my suffering when I did suffer. I didn’t know there were better ways to deal with my suffering. Of all the things I wish I knew then that I know now, I wish I had known I could talk to my parents and get help, and turn to something other than food. I wish I had known that my violation was not my fault.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  After that, he tried to never leave me alone. He tried to save me from myself. Ha! Ha! Ha! I’m better, I told him. I’m done with all that, I told him. I was better, I suppose. I was better about hiding what I was doing. He couldn’t follow me everywhere. I learned how to be very quiet. We were better, or as better as we ever were going to be, and then I graduated and I moved and he didn’t follow and I was finally living alone and I could do whatever I wanted. I was an accomplished professional, so it was easier than ever to hide in plain sight. In the new town no one really knew me. I had “friends,” but it’s not like they came over to my apartment or had gotten to know me well enough to see that anything was off. When we’d go out to dinner, friends remarked that I always went to the bathroom after I ate. “I have a bad stomach,” I demurred, politely. It was a half-truth. Immediately, I was extraordinarily on the rebound, involved with a guy. The one time he caught me throwing up he said, “I’m glad you’re working on the problem.” For him, the real problem was my body, and he never let me forget it. He punished me and I liked it. Finally, I thought. Finally. He made his cruel comments and gave me “advice,” which only reminded me that everything wrong with my body was, indeed, my fault. “Why are you with this asshole?” so many people—friends, strangers who saw us together in public—asked. The longer I stayed with him, the worse he made me feel, and the better he made me feel because, at last, someone was telling me a truth about myself I already knew. Something had to give. Something always gives. My grief began to subside. I was way too old for this shit, I realized. The heartburn had started up and I realized I needed to stop punishing myself. I had finally, after more than thirty years, found a best friend who saw the best and worst parts of me, and even if I didn’t talk about what was going on, she was there and I could have told her and it would have been fine. That’s a powerful thing, knowing you can reveal yourself to someone. It made me want to be a better person. I wanted to stop, but wanting and doing are two different things. I had a routine. I starved myself all day and then I ate a huge meal and then I purged myself of that meal. I made myself empty and I loved that empty feeling. I ignored my yellowed teeth and my hair falling out and the acid burns on my right fingers and the scabs on my knuckles. “Why is my hair falling out?” I asked the Internet, as if I didn’t already know.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  In other ways, I was intimately aware of every single pound that accumulated and clung to my body. And everyone around me was also intimately aware. My family’s concern became a constant chorus of nagging, always well intended, but mostly a reminder of how I was a failure in the most basic of my human responsibilities—maintaining my body. They were relentless in asking me what I was going to do about my “problem.” They offered advice. They tried tough love. They offered to send me to specialists and spas. They offered financial incentives and new wardrobes and new cars. There is nothing they would not have done to help me solve the problem of my body. They mean well, my parents. They love me. They understand the world as it is, and how there is no room for people of my size. They know that the older I get, the harder it will become to live at this size. They worry about my health and my happiness. They are good parents. My parents also want to understand—they are intellectual, smart, practical. They want my weight to be a problem they can address with the intellect they apply to other problems. They want to understand how I could have let this happen, let my body become so big, so out of control. We have that in common. And still. They are my personal Obesity Crisis Intervention team. They have been actively pursuing the problem of my body since I was fourteen years old. I love them so I accept this, sometimes with grace and sometimes without. It is only now, in my early forties, that I have started to put my foot down and say, when they try to broach the conversation of my body, “No. I will not discuss my body with you. No. My body, how I move it, how I nourish it, is not your business.” There was a time when every conversation included some kind of question about my weight. My parents, and my father in particular, make inquiries as to whether I am dieting, exercising, and/or losing weight as if all I am is my big fat body. But they love me. This is what I remind myself so I can forgive them.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  We don’t necessarily know how to hear stories about any kind of violence, because it is hard to accept that violence is as simple as it is complicated, that you can love someone who hurts you, that you can stay with someone who hurts you, that you can be hurt by someone who loves you, that you can be hurt by a complete stranger, that you can be hurt in so many terrible, intimate ways. I also share what I do of my story because I believe in the importance of sharing histories of violence. I am reticent to share my own history of violence, but that history informs so much of who I am, what I write, how I write. It informs how I move through the world. It informs how I love and allow myself to be loved. It informs everything. It is easier to use detached language like “assault” or “violation” or “incident” than it is to come out and say that when I was twelve years old, I was gang-raped by a boy I thought I loved and a group of his friends. When I was twelve years old, I was raped. So many years past being raped, I tell myself what happened is “in the past.” This is only partly true. In too many ways, the past is still with me. The past is written on my body. I carry it every single day. The past sometimes feels like it might kill me. It is a very heavy burden. In my history of violence, there was a boy. I loved him. His name was Christopher. That’s not really his name. You know that. I was raped by Christopher and several of his friends in an abandoned hunting cabin in the woods where no one but those boys could hear me scream. Before that, though, Christopher and I were friends or at least shared a semblance of friendship. During school hours, he would ignore me, but after school we would hang out. We would do whatever he wanted. He was always in control of the time we spent together. In truth, he treated me terribly and I thought I should be grateful that he bothered to treat me terribly, that he bothered with a girl like me at all. I had no reason to have such low self-esteem at twelve years old. I had no reason to allow myself to be treated terribly. It happened anyway. That gnawing truth is a lot of what I still struggle to free myself from.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation70 king as his son, but that did not mean that the king was exempt from criticism. Nathan explains that just as an earthly father would discipline his son whenever the child did something wrong, God will discipline the king. Yet just as earthly father would remain committed to his son—even a disobedient son—God will remain committed to David and his heirs forever. ‹ As we continue reading 2 Samuel, we find that despite the promise of God’s support, David is deeply flawed. He is capable of infidelity and brutality and must come to terms with the consequences of his own personal failings. ● In 2 Samuel 11, David is at home in his palace in Jerusalem while his army is fighting many miles away. One day, David catches a glimpse of a beautiful woman, Bathsheba, bathing in a house nearby. Her husband is away on active military duty. David has Bathsheba brought to his room, where he sleeps with her. Sometime later, Bathsheba lets David know that she is pregnant. ● David thinks he can cover up the affair by bringing Bathsheba’s husband back from military duty for a short home visit. But the husband refuses to sleep with Bathsheba while all his men are camped in the field. Then, David sends Bathsheba’s husband on a suicide mission and takes Bathsheba as his own wife. ● The prophet Nathan is appalled by David’s machinations. Nathan had told David that God wants to build him a dynasty and that God will establish David’s kingdom forever. Nathan confronts David by telling a parable (2 Sam. 12), in which a rich man unjustly slaughters the lamb of a poor man. ● Outraged at the injustice in the parable, David condemns what the rich man has done and declares that the rich man must repay the poor man four times the amount taken. Already, we can see the parable doing its work. Nathan did not have to tell David that what the rich man did was unjust. The story moved David himself to see the injustice. This allows Nathan to turn David’s judgment against the rich man in the story into a judgment against David’s own actions. ● T o make sure that David does not miss the point, Nathan tells him that if it is wrong for a rich man to take a poor man’s lamb, then it is far worse for the king to seize another man’s wife. And it is unconscionable to have the man killed in order to cover up the affair. This audacious confrontation of the king works. David acknowledges his wrongdoing. That is perhaps the one admirable trait David displays in this whole sordid affair: He proves capable of taking ownership for what he has done.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation 70 will endure forever. Once God has built a house or dynasty for David, one of David’s sons can build a house or temple for God. ‹In that same passage, Nathan compares God’s relationship to the king to that of a father and his son. In ancient Israel, people believed that God adopted each king as his son, but that did not mean that the king was exempt from criticism. Nathan explains that just as an earthly father would discipline his son whenever the child did something wrong, God will discipline the king. Yet just as earthly father would remain committed to his son—even a disobedient son—God will remain committed to David and his heirs forever. ‹As we continue reading 2 Samuel, we find that despite the promise of God’s support, David is deeply flawed. He is capable of infidelity and brutality and must come to terms with the consequences of his own personal failings. ●In 2 Samuel 11, David is at home in his palace in Jerusalem while his army is fighting many miles away. One day, David catches a glimpse of a beautiful woman, Bathsheba, bathing in a house nearby. Her husband is away on active military duty. David has Bathsheba brought to his room, where he sleeps with her. Sometime later, Bathsheba lets David know that she is pregnant. ●David thinks he can cover up the affair by bringing Bathsheba’s husband back from military duty for a short home visit. But the husband refuses to sleep with Bathsheba while all his men are camped in the field. Then, David sends Bathsheba’s husband on a suicide mission and takes Bathsheba as his own wife. ●The prophet Nathan is appalled by David’s machinations. Nathan had told David that God wants to build him a dynasty and that God will establish David’s kingdom forever. Nathan confronts David by telling a parable (2 Sam. 12), in which a rich man unjustly slaughters the lamb of a poor man. ●Outraged at the injustice in the parable, David condemns what the rich man has done and declares that the rich man must repay the poor man four times the amount taken. Already, we can see the parable doing its work. Nathan did not have to tell David that what the rich man did was unjust. The story moved David himself to see the injustice. This allows Nathan to turn David’s judgment against the rich man in the story into a judgment against David’s own actions. ●To make sure that David does not miss the point, Nathan tells him that if it is wrong for a rich man to take a poor man’s lamb, then it is far worse for the