Yesterday I idly Googled someone whose Substack I enjoy. I’d been reading their words for six months or so, but it dawned on me that I didn’t really know anything much about them or their background or what they might do or have done beyond the essays and musings I’ve been reading. I’m glad I did. Public writing must, of course, stand on its own merits and attract interest for its own sake. But it’s nice to know a little more about a writer whose work I like, and what I know gives me a little more context for their writing.
It occurs to me that the same might be true for at least some of you who read me here on Substack. Some of you have followed my online work for a long time now, so if you do already know me and my work in a larger context, I thank you for your readership. If you don’t, or are a new arrival to these parts, welcome aboard.
The short bio looks a little like this: I’m a former classical musician turned writer and historian. I hold a Ph.D. in history — I specialize in history of medicine and history of sexuality — and have also trained in and taught bioethics, specifically medical ethics. I’m not “an academic” in the sense that I don’t work in academia, though I have done so in the past.
I’ve been writing professionally for 24 years, if you count by when my first book was published. I think it’s more like 26 if you count by when I first got a check for something I wrote.
I am not “a professional writer” in the sense that writing for traditional public-facing trade publication isn’t my primary or sole source of income, which is what a lot of people seem to mean by that phrase when they use it. There can be this implication that if you aren’t earning your living by writing books or articles, you’re not really a “pro” writer.
Nonsense. You’re a professional writer if you earn money by writing things.
I am a professional writer in that writing and editing are my primary source of income. The transactional basis is different: most of what I am paid to write is used internally by clients.
There are professionals making a living by writing in literally every industry you can think of. I once applied for a job writing fortunes for fortune cookies because I thought it sounded like a fascinating gig. (I still do.)
Some people who write for a living go their whole careers never writing for traditional public-facing publications. Some, in fact, prefer it that way.
Of course there are those of us who do, or have done, both. But it’s not a requirement.
My most recent book? A slim volume on fat. Called Fat, it is a historically-rooted sociocultural study of fat as it relates to human beings and human bodies. It came out in 2020 as part of the physically beautiful, wonderfully curated Object Lessons series published by Bloomsbury.
(In case you wondered, yes, it was weird and difficult having a book released into the yawning abyss of pandemic lockdown.)
One of the things I like best about that book, looking back on it, is that it was one in which I had the opportunity to braid the personal and the academic. Nonfiction writing, particularly nonfiction that leans scholarly, doesn’t always allow for this. Because of the topic, though, it was important to me to be able to do it.
The aura of “objective” emotional distance that we’re taught is appropriate to scholarly undertakings isn’t always what’s wanted or even what’s appropriate. Sometimes, part of the reason for the scholarly work is to tug at the loose threads of human experience to see what you can unravel. In those cases, it makes sense to have human experiences be part of the narrative, and so Fat begins with a scene from my own life.
"Ugh, I just feel so fat today," the woman near me in the locker room says to her friend as they get dressed after their workout. I look over – discreetly, as one does – to catch a glimpse of the grimacing side of her face as she zips up a pair of close-fitting blue jeans over a barely rounded lower abdomen, hip bones evident under taut fabric.
As I sit putting on my socks, I wonder whether this woman, who has just complained of feeling fat, has even registered that there is an actual fat woman not ten feet away. While she "feels fat" as she frowns her way into her formfitting tank top and comfortable, slouchy cashmere sweater, I can feel my ample belly pressing against my thighs and the oddly comforting, distinctly sensitizing way the elasticated wicking compression fabric of my gym top squeezes my fat back and belly and breasts from all directions at once. The garment is a variation on the theme of the sports bra: breasts are not the only body parts whose size varies in part because of the amount of fat they hold within their contours and are not the only body parts whose contrary motion can make high-impact exercise uncomfortable. I like the reassuring pressure of the compression fabric, and don't mind that it reminds me of parts of my body, like my fleshy mid back, that I don't think about too often unless they are being touched or, as they are now, comprehensively squished.
Locker-room etiquette demands that this woman and I will not make eye contact, nor will I acknowledge that she has spoken. Yet she and I are actually engaged in conversation. In our individual ways, we are taking two separate (and sometimes opposing) sides in a dialogue about fat that extends deep inside, but also far beyond, our own individual bodies and what may or may not be true about their composition. In the moment of our chance encounter, both of us were feeling fat, yet our experiences occupied no common ground whatsoever.
This is part of the nature of fat in the early twenty-first-century West. For us, fat has multiple personalities, multiple lives. As often as not, they seem, or at least are allowed to seem, too have little in common. Like any other material substance, fat can be seen, touched, sampled, studied, and, of course, weighed. In our bodies, as with mine in my athletic compression wear, it can be felt, stroked, hefted, caressed, squeezed, experienced as it moves with and within the body. Fat is an everyday thing, a bodily organ and a biochemical substance without which we would not be able to survive. It is as mundane and ubiquitous and as much a part of our nature as blood and bone. But you'd never know it by the way we talk about it, the obsession we have with getting rid of it, our conviction that it is inimical not just to a good life, but to life itself. As a lifelong fat woman, I am acutely aware that the fat I feel and experience every day both is and is not the fat we as a culture so obsessively think and talk about.
We compartmentalize fat. We like to imagine that the fat that keeps us going when we are too sick to eat is not necessarily the same as the fat that jiggles on our thighs. We do not like to think of the fat that makes us sexy – fat is central to the production of sex hormones, and famously rounds out breasts, hips, and butts – as being, y'know, fat. In any case, we tell ourselves, it's not related to the odious stuff we attribute with the ability to depress, stupefy, make repellent, desexualize, and even kill. In our imaginations fat is insidious as mildew, materialising mysteriously through mechanisms invisible, and as seemingly resistant to eradication as cockroaches. When George Lucas wanted a viscerally loathsome intergalactic gangster who could menace the heroes of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, he created the slug-like – and enormously rotund, with hints of human chest and belly fat – Jabba the Hutt.
Yet without fat, there would be no Star Wars and indeed no George Lucas. Fat quite literally makes us possible. It gives our cells their membranes, helps us moderate our body temperature, enables us to reproduce. The human brain consists of approximately 60 percent fat. The protective myelin sheaths that insulate our nerves and axons have a similar composition. Without those fatty myelin sheaths, we would experience symptoms similar to those suffered by people with multiple sclerosis, the most common too the central nervous system demyelination disorders: loss of vision, weakness, numbness, nerve pain, brain lesions, tremors, cognitive and memory impairment, and much else. Without our fatty brains we could not, in the most literal of terms, think about fat.
If you’d like to read more of this, here’s your chance: I’m taking a leaf from the estimable ’s estimable notebooks, and giving away a signed copy of Fat — and I’ll send it anywhere in the world. All you have to do is become a paid subscriber of this Substack between now and May 1 and you’ll be in the running. On May 1, I’ll pick a winner out of the new-subscriber hat.
The opening paragraphs of Fat do more than just give the reader an insight into one of the myriad mundane ways that fat operates in our lives. I wrote them very deliberately in order to introduce myself as an overt narrator in the book, another writerly act that is typically a no-no in nonfiction outside of memoir and a small handful of other flavors of creative nonfiction.
I also wrote these paragraphs in order to create a setting for what I had to say. Because it is at its core an attempt to tell a historical story, the book ranges back and forth in time and place. But it seemed disingenuous to me as a writer to try to pretend that I wasn’t telling the story from a distinct, specific time and place, one in which my subject has particular resonance and meaning.
It was a problem that wanted solving. The question was how.
Academic historians have been grappling for some decades now with the problem of whether they should write history in a way that contextualizes them as historians in relation to the history they’re telling. In the past, this was generally frowned upon, with the full force of those severe, disappointed frowns from an authority figure that clearly communicate that You Are A Disappointment And Have Failed To Understand The Assignment.
The assignment, by the way, was objectivity, and the objective recording of historical events. It was connected on some pretty profound levels to the ways in which white European-descended male people, many of them from backgrounds of economic and social privilege and all of them with great educational privilege, created history as an academic discipline with themselves as the rule-makers and gate-keepers.
Being able to claim to have authority over information was asserting one’s self as a reliable and trustworthy representative of the past. It was solidly yoked to the idea that the information had a solid objective existence outside of the historian: names, dates, places, physical documents that could be not only cited but also produced for verification. As in the sciences, the notion that objective information — that is, actual objects as the basis for information — was superior to subjective information, which might introduce bias and interpretation and messy unreliable (feminine, hard-to-manage, changeable) things like feelings, was one of the foundations on which authority rested.
(This, incidentally, is why so much of the way history gets taught to children is so damn boring. If you grew up learning history that boiled down to memorizing a list of names, dates, places, and the names of important historical documents like the Magna Carta or the Declaration of Independence, now you know why.)
Historians have had some time to think about this. There’s a consensus, now, that writing genuinely objective history might not always be as possible as people have sometimes wanted to think. We’re human, we historians. We can only see the world through the eyes we’ve got, only from the place we’re standing, and only during our own individual and specific lifetimes. We understand the world like everyone else, through the scrims and filters of our own perception and experience.
What we’re supposed to do about that is still an open question within the discipline. I have sat through many historiographical discussions thinking can’t we put up a sign that says “Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear. Your mileage may vary.”?
In my own books, I’ve groped toward an answer that rests in the idea of context and setting. Who I am, as a writer who wants to be viewed as a trustworthy informant and interpreter, matters. It matters, too, that readers know where and when I am in the world, and where my own life intersects with my subject. Unlike some of my history-writing predecessors, I think it’s valuable when the Venn diagram of a narrator’s life and their subject overlap. It means you’ve got some skin in the game, some way or other.
It also means that, as a writer, you have some intuitive understanding of the setting you’re writing about. Where and when you’re writing from matter. If I were to write Fat all over again, the meteoric ascent of Ozempic and all its GLP-1 siblings as part of the picture of fat in the current moment would mean I’d need to rethink some things about how to tell fat’s longer story… and the book’s only four years old.
The setting of a nonfiction book, as I tried to convey by starting Fat in a locker room at a gym where a stranger was publicly expressing her body-loathing, does some important work. That moment couldn’t have been just anywhere. It couldn’t have taken place at just any moment in time. It couldn’t have involved just any random people. It’s distinctive, and the reasons it’s distinctive are some of the reasons the book and the information it contains and the ideas it communicates matter.
I hope that I managed to do the idea some justice. That’s what writers always hope, I think. It connects us all, the desire to communicate and do it effectively in ways that connect with readers.
I don’t believe there is such a thing as a writer who doesn’t care whether what they’ve written has hit home in whatever ways it was supposed to. Even in the most technical and dry informational writing — which I have done, and let me tell you it is no walk in the park — the goal is always twofold, not only to speak but to have what you say be clearly understood. Whether you write for the public or not, whether you write for money or not, that’s the center, the distinctively human heart, of the act of writing.
Yes and yes. I have too many thoughts for a comment section but I am thinking about how in religious academic work we often desperately seek clues to the context and origin and writer to understand what we are actually reading, and how nice it is when the author just says up front who they are and why they wrote it, and how I learned critical media reading and how I always want to know who says so, whatever so is in the moment, and how my one interesting experiment in anonymous publication scared ok people because if those words were said by a different sort of person they were probably dangerous.
Context matters so much, in what we feel we can say, and to whom, and what meaning will be made of it once it is out of our hands.
Evidently this was the nudge I needed to update my card details and get back to a paid subscription. 😆