“Nothing is more brilliant and juicy to me than a woman stepping fully into her self—mind, body, and spirit, full throttle, without apology. Kimberly Dark has been illuminating the path for a long time. This book is a triumph. This book is a jailbreak from cultural inscriptions meant to keep us locked up, shut up, and conforming.” —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water and The Book of Joan Fat, Pretty, and Soon to be Old is a moving, funny, and startlingly frank collection of personal essays about what it means to look a certain way. Or rather, certain ways. Navigating Kimberly Dark’s experience of being fat since childhood—as well as queer, white-privileged, a gender-confirming “girl with a pretty face,” active then disabled, and inevitably aging—each piece blends storytelling and social analysis to deftly coax readers into a deeper understanding of how appearance privilege (and stigma) function in everyday life and how the architecture of this social world constrains us. At the same time, she provides a blueprint for how each of us can build a more just social world, one interaction at a time. Includes an afterword by Health at Every Size expert, Linda Bacon. Kimberly Dark is a writer, professor, and raconteur. She has written award-winning plays, and taught and performed for a wide range of audiences in various countries over the past two decades. She is the author of The Daddies, Love and Errors , and co-editor of the anthology Ways of Being in Teaching .
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Kimberly Dark. Fat, Pretty, and Soon to be Old
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Maintaining Appearances
2. Language, Fat, and Causation
3. Diamond Jim
4. Wanted: Fat Girl
5. Dances with Light
6. Thighs and Freedom
7. Big People on the Airplane
8. Cozy or Uncomfortable: Tight Public Places
9. Here’s Looking at You
10. Shadow on a Tightrope
11. Coming Out Fat
12. My First Lover Was Not a Lesbian
13. Becoming Travolta
14. Does This Limp Make Me Look Fat?
15. The Chance to Practice
16. The Aging Yoga Body
17. Migration Patterns
18. The Naked Place
19. Building the Good Body
20. Self-Help, Fitness, and Feminism
21. How the Women’s Movement Ruined Everything
22. Ha-ha. You’re So Fat! (Anatomy of a Put-Down)
23. Passing It On
24. Learning to Fish
Afterword
References
More Praise for Fat, Pretty, and Soon to Be Old
Copyright
Friends of AK
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Fat, Pretty, and
Soon to Be Old
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Look, I get it. So much of what’s influencing our lives seems out of our control. We just want to know what we can do to make things better. That’s why the neoliberal nonsense about self-improvement enhancing upward mobility (primarily via educational degrees and appearance modification) seems so attractive. Of course, personal improvement goals like degrees, weight loss, and wardrobe improvement overwhelmingly serve to feed the consumerist growth monster of debt and bolster the notion that we are not worthy unless we look and achieve in certain ways. That is, these aims actually rob of us of time, money, and personal sovereignty. The idea that people can assume debt in order to create a better future is the leading personal paradox of our time.
In her book, American Plastic, Laurie Essig calls the widespread availability of plastic surgery and consumer credit “the perfect storm.” She also points out that we are acculturated as consumers to believe that these entail our personal desires rather than cultural conformity. As she explains in the chapter “Learning to Be Plastic,” “To keep beauty profitable, our bodies must be colonized as if they were foreign lands. In this way, beauty can create new markets and extract more wealth.”
