How to Lose 1000+ Hours—and an Awful Lot of Money

Or, shopping while fat, female, and femme: a primal scream

This post is brought to you by a completely frozen shoulder, some acrid arthritis cream, and the low-grade chronic fury of someone who has wasted countless hours this week clicking around the internet trying to find a formal dress. If you like what you read, please consider “liking” it below—it will only take a click (unlike my shopping adventures) and helps people find my writing. And, of course, the ultimate expression of support for my work is subscribing. Thanks!

This week, on Tuesday, I got some of the best news ever: my third book, Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia, is a finalist for the National Book Award in non-fiction. Words cannot express my excitement when I got the news unexpectedly—I thought I’d hear something later in the day—while lounging around in bed and preparing myself for disappointment. This was, after all, my little book that couldn’t. Being one of five finalists for what is among the most prestigious literary prizes in the country wasn’t even on my bucket list. I had been thrilled enough to make the long list!

I ran downstairs in my pajamas to scream and jump around with my husband, who was—bless him—so over the moon that he spent the rest of the week telling anyone who would listen. I, meanwhile, spent the rest of the week clicking futilely around the internet trying to find a dress to wear for the awards ceremony in NYC. It is, you see, a black tie event. There is a red carpet.

This is both my wildest dream come true and, unfortunately, a low-grade, recurring nightmare.

Ever since I got truly fat, when I was twenty, shopping has been an intensely lonely experience. Back then, there was no such thing as a plus size store in my home country of Australia that was even remotely trendy, geared toward young people, or sold anything but lurid polyester. I was compelled to march past the Espirits and Sportsgirls where I used to be able to find something to squeeze into as a teen and head straight into what I thought of as the Rich Old Lady boutiques, where there were at least some generously cut garments in interesting stretchy fabrics available for a price: inevitably, a high one. I could usually at least find a long black skirt and a couple of tops and jackets that would keep my upper arm stretch marks hidden. It was all way over my budget, of course. But that was just the price of being young and fat and femme in Melbourne in the early 2000s.

I wish I could say that, gradually, it has gotten better. But in many ways, it hasn’t. And the difficulty I have shopping is directly proportional to my size in ways that point to inequities in fashion so deep and painful that I didn’t even write about them much in my book. It was too ingrained an element of my experience to register until recently how very many hours I’ve wasted, and how many tens of thousands of dollars I’ve squandered, just to keep myself clothed and vaguely presentable as an anomalous body in academia—and, to some extent, public life, via occasional book store and public speaking appearances.

I remember the desperation when I was twenty-three and poised to leave Australia for philosophy graduate school the following year. I had applied for something called the General Sir John Monash Scholarship—a blessed monetary gift, to the tune of 150k, to put toward your graduate school overseas education. I got, to my delight and amazement, called in for an interview. I trawled up and down Bridge Road in Richmond, Melbourne, trying to find a suit jacket. I spent all day on the task—a day I didn’t have. I then spent money I didn’t have on yet another stretchy black skirt from Myer’s department store in Melbourne. It was too big, at a size 20.

Reader, I wore it, in desperation, with a belt, and somehow got the scholarship. I still keep the skirt in my closet just in case I ever find myself with a need for it.

Since then, I’ve lost and gained weight, probably hundreds of pounds, dozens of times, and settled at a weight that is actually lower than I expected. I have had the odd experience of being read as not fat—or at least, not fat enough to promote my own book—on my recent book tour. I suspect too that I have sort of grown into my body: a body that was highly anomalous in my teenage years and early adulthood, but that befits one of my present stations in life somewhat neatly. I have a “softish, curvy, 1970s Jewish mom body,” to echo Jessi Klein, that reads as pretty average in a lot of (though by no means all) rooms I frequent these days. I still identify as a “small fat” person, but I don’t typically wear plus sizes. At the same time, at 5 foot 2, I’m sometimes sized out of the petite sizes I really need to fit my arms and legs and torso. If you called me “borderline fat,” I would not be surprised (or offended).

Fatness can be many things. In my book, I defined it as being a size and shape that makes you, in virtue of your weight and girth, unable to fit into some of the spaces designated for you in society. That might mean being too big for an airline seat or unable to fit into a gown at your doctor’s office. It might mean being unable to ride on an amusement park ride with your kiddo—or find appropriate clothing easily, and having to shop at specialty stores.

I fit that definition of fatness only sometimes, and only at the edges, nowadays. (Although I have spent a lot of time indubitably fat by those measures—and I suspect the natural and extremely common process of weight restoration will return me to that place eventually, an inevitability I will shrug about.) But I can also see a case for defining fatness in femme people as a lack of thin privilege in society, which is arguably not only a matter of technically fitting but having a certain kind of sleek, slim, lean, and thus socially sanctioned appearance. I have never had that kind of appearance and, hence, privilege (which demonstrably incurs a huge financial advantage for thin women). I have always been soft, round, and stocky.

Fatness might also be defined in comparative and context-sensitive terms. Perhaps you’re fat in a room in which your body is noticeably different in being bigger and softer and rounder than other people’s. By that definition too, I move into and out of fatness these days—not because my weight is unstable (it seems to have settled, for now), but because I am frequently the fattest person in the room in elite academic circles. I am usually not the fattest person in the room when I step into my broader communities, as a parent and neighbor and denizen of the world.

As a denizen of my body, it can be a bit of a mindfuck.

Nonetheless, while borderline fat and arguably just plain fat by some definitions and in some contexts, I want to own the fact that I have a great deal of body privilege relative to many others nowadays. I am intensely aware of having written a book that has to rely on amplifying other voices when it comes to aspects of the fat experience that go well beyond my current—and even historical—perspective. I drew on work by writers and thinkers who identify as “infinifat,” like Ash Nischuk, in ways that felt essential but also like a heavy responsibility. It pains me to this day that these are some of the people whom critics of the book went after in an attempt to discredit me and my message that variations in body size are a natural and valuable part of bodily diversity. (The rejoinder consisted, essentially, in pointing and laughing at people above a certain size, who were implicitly deemed objects to be jeered at, not people whose brilliant ideas and stories demanded care and attention and engagement.)

Still. I write to you, now, angry. I write angry that I have spent countless exhausting days, consisting in endless exhausting hours, over the last twenty years, trawling around shopping centers and malls and websites in Australia and America trying to find outfits that would simply help me fit in. That would read as intellectual, or literary, or academic, let alone elegant or sophisticated or cute or trendy. I spent days trying to find a suit stretchy enough to fit both my (small) shoulders and (large) hips when I interviewed for the Harvard Society of Fellows back in 2010. Then, once there, on a post-doc’s salary, I had to find two years’ worth of little black dresses that were usually itchy or ill-fitting or boring—or all of the above—to wear at our weekly formal dinners. I dreaded the annual dinner, with its black-tie dress code.

While others of the junior fellows were off having interesting ideas, or socializing with each other, or having interesting ideas while socializing with each other, I would often be grimly traipsing around Marshall’s or TJ Maxx trying to find a way to vaguely look the part in a sea of lean, gamine, elite-reading bodies. For someone who had ostensibly chosen a life of the mind, my body felt like a dull, heavy, sometimes deadening, burden.

I want to emphasize that this is not about beauty. It’s about thinness as a marker of elite intellectual status. In a world in which everyone was trying to peg everyone else’s capacity for witty repartee and, sometimes, deeper conversation and connection, the body became a signal of what kind of mind to expect from someone. Mine signaled a mind that was, well, nothing special. A dear friend of mine once said that I was the smartest person in the room (untrue)—but you wouldn’t realize it until halfway through a dinner. I think he was trying to compliment me on being socially unassuming. I heard something else though—a commentary on the assumptions that elites make about the minds housed within fat bodies. More: fat bodies in frumpy outfits. In a fatphobic world, we project a kind of dullness; a plodding, flat-footed mentality that fails to surprise or sparkle. I can much more easily accept not being beautiful than I can accept that I have to fight that much harder in order to seem interesting. And even if my body is for me, as I’ve lately argued, it would be hard to say the same about anybody’s clothing. Part of me wants to embrace frump, like the dazzling Emma Copley Eisenberg. But I am not there yet. I still wish I had a uniform that read as a philosopher’s. Or a writer’s.

I have lately made my peace, more or less, with what I wear on a daily basis. My biggest desires: to not stand out, or look peculiar, without wasting more time or money or bandwidth than I have to. And, above all, to be comfortable. To not have to think about my body, which I resent on the best of days. I am especially done with the shapewear, shaping tights, body suits, corsets, and something ominously called “lipo in a box” that I wore to my wedding.

I found a certain pair of jeans that looks fine and fits like a second skin for some reason. They cost too much money ($98) and wear out way too quickly. Only one design from the company works for me and, of that design, I can only wear one of the washes. I now own five pairs of them. I figured out an (overpriced) tee shirt and a (very overpriced) sweater that are unobtrusive and, I sometimes imagine, quite nicely cut and colored. I have three coats (heavy, mid-weight, and lightweight) and three pairs of shoes to fit my fat little feet in each season: one pair of boots, one pair of sneakers, and one pair of sandals. I have bought each of these pairs of shoes twice, and will probably keep doing so forever. I might even buy some backups in case they ever stop making any of them. They will live with the reams of clothes I horde in my closet despite my minimalist aspirations, just in case I ever need bigger clothes and, characteristically, can find nothing. Or can only find items that I don’t like and don’t want to wear but buy simply because they fit, and I am frightened nothing else will.

When I was due to go on book tour, I panicked and hired a fantastic body-inclusive stylist who I love and who I trusted with my body story. Talking with Dacy Gillespie during our first meeting felt like, no was, therapy. Together we figured out a handful of knee length dresses and natty little jackets that I can mix and match and muddle my way through with.  

I thought I was all set. I was wrong. I now need a fucking ballgown—or at least something black tie appropriate. By mid-November.

Image: A screenshot from a search for petite plus size black tie dresses. God help me.

And so I find myself, nearly a week later, when I should be delighted by my extreme good fortune, and reveling in this career highlight, clicking link after link to try to find a dress that might allow me to enjoy a night catching glimpses (and who knows, maybe meeting) Miranda July and Salman Rushdie and other literary luminaries. My shoulder is stiff and frozen and painful from my efforts. I am slated to spend more than my finalist prize money to outfit myself to receive it. Dacy is helping, and I am hopeful we will figure it out in time for November. But I am not happy about my situation. I do not just want elegant clothes with a minimum of polyester and tat and taffeta. I want an elegant solution to the problem of getting dressed, in all of my various contexts. I want not to have to think about it. I want what men have—a uniform, to hire or buy, and a sanctioned alterations process—that works for my femme self. Hell, I want to be able to send someone my measurements and an inspiration picture and receive a beautiful dress in the mail made for my exact size and shape: short, round, soft, short-waisted. I do not want to waste one extra second or one further cent on trying things on and zipping them up and getting stuck or, alternately, lost in reams of extra fabric. (Not all fat people are tall! Or big in all areas!) I do not want to have to parcel up seventeen returns boxes or forget to check for the refunds on my credit card.

So this is my primal scream. I just want to enjoy my night and look like a person who might have been expected to be there (however much I didn’t). I want to feel like a person whose body is indeed the least interesting thing about her, by several orders of magnitude. I want to feel like someone who has moved on from all of this. Even if I haven’t—not quite, in this respect. I want to be comfortable taking up space, unshrinkingly, not trying to look smaller in something “flattering.” But how to reconcile that with my desire to look like just any other person who also deserves to be there?

The godawful Nordstrom website is not making this any easier.

Readers, do you find it similarly difficult or nigh-on impossible to find clothes to suit your own weird, or unruly, or even average, body? Any solidarity for the difficulty of being not thin and fitting into an elegant or elite crowd when you need to? Tips on how to dress myself for the occasion and exit this temporary hell are also welcome. I have ordered a bunch of somewhat plausible dresses, but would dearly love a back-up plan. Time is tight and I’m getting nervous.