Is “Fat” A Dirty Word?:
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from the way people attack her due to her weight. Later in the novel, Cannie’s
surprising friendship with movie Star, Maxi Ryder is strengthened by Maxi’s
having been an ugly duckling herseif at one time, and she has never been
confident with her body image after that. Geraldine in Jemima J is not alone in
her insecurity—the age-old principle of divide-and-conquer encourages women
to fear and be wary of each other’s beauty in order to be isolated from each
other, thus undoing the female solidarity strongly encouraged by the women’s
movement. Even a movie Star like Maxi, thin and sexy now, feels discomfort
because of her previous avatar and finds some kind of camaraderie with Cannie
because Cannie is someone who can truly understand the unhappiness and lack
of self-esteem caused by an overweight body.
Unlike Jemima, Cannie exercises agency in romantic relationships eyen
when she is at her heaviest weight. It is her decision to break up with her
boyfriend, Bruce, who reacts by Publishing an article in a national magazine
called “Loving a Larger Woman,” a confessional detailing his relationship with
Cannie (called ‘C’), her struggles with her weight, and her lack of selfappreciation. He portrays her body as curvy and womanly: “Her shoulders were
as broad as mine, her hands were almost as big, and from her breasts td her
belly, from her hips down to the slope of her thighs, she was all sweet curves
and warm welcome” (Weiner 14-15). After describing her body so
affectionately, he moves on to say that his pleasure in her body was not enough:
•
Being out with her didn’t feel nearly as comfortable. Maybe it
was the way I’d absorbed society’s expectations: its dictates of
what men are supposed to want and how women are supposed
to appear ... Loving a larger woman is an act of courage in
this world, and maybe it’s even an act of futility. Because, in
loving C., I knew I was loving someone who didn’t believe
that she herseif was worthy of anyone’s love (Weiner 14-15)
Cannie understands the validity of Bruce’s comments about her own
lack of self-love, and aims to win Bruce back and make peace with her body by
losing weight. At the beginning of the novel, Cannie says, “I wished I wasn’t a
reporter. I wished that my job was baking muffins in a muffin shop, where all
I’d have to do was crack eggs and measure flour and make change, and nobody
could abuse me, and where they’d even expect me to be fat. Every flab roll and
cellulite crinkle would serve as testimony to the excellence of my baked goods”
(Weiner 20). Cannie almost always refers to her plastic surgeon father when she
speaks of her problems with Bruce, and calls her father “the author of all [her]
insecurities and fears” (Weiner 305). She had always feit “like a walking affront,
like a Collection of things [her] father spent his days waging war against,” and
the psychological scars which her troubled relationship with her father left on
her—he abandons her family to marry a better-looking woman and have prettier
daughters—influences all of her relationships with other men (Weiner 105). In