welcome to the azalea garden!

Warning: Mentions of disordered eating (due to health issues and medication side effects, not an eating disorder) in first paragraph.

I read less than usual in May. The cramping from my probably-endometriosis has a negative impact on my appetite, and while the codeine helps significantly with the pain, it also nearly entirely eliminates my appetite. For the most part, it’s just a matter of making more of an effort to remember the fact I haven’t been getting hungry, since it generally has no effect on my ability to eat. It’s started causing awful migraines; from 19-23, I required semi-regular hospital visits due to how bad my migraines would get, and the ones I’ve had recently were nearly that bad. On top of that, everything has been going wrong in my apartment because despite it being significantly over-priced compared to market value, it’s been maintained poorly—assuming you’d go as far as to describe it as “maintained” to begin with. I believe there were also parts of the month, especially in the first half, that were emotionally rather tumultuous, but I don’t recall (which is likely indicative).

In May, I read four books—Happy Fat by Sofie Hagen; Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte; The Thick and the Lean by Chana Porter; and Charlie Bone and the Beast by Jenny Nimmo.

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Happy Fat was a really good read. I wasn’t previously familiar with Sofie Hagen, as I don’t really watch stand-up comedy and I’m not sure if Hagen is well-known in the US, but I’ll be seeking out her comedy in the future as almost none of the jokes in the book fell flat for me.

I’ve had an active interest in the inner workings of fatphobia, the blatant scientific misinformation that links fat to poor health, the highly dubious studies funded by companies that have a lot to gain from “proving” that fatness is unhealthy, the life experiences of fat people, etc since I was around 19. This was an essential part of me fully recovering from anorexia and bulimia, as well as entirely doing away with insecurities around weight gain and body image. There’s always more to learn and understand, especially as someone who isn’t fat. If at some point in the future I become fat, that alone also won’t make me an expert on fatness, how to react to fatphobia (from responding to pointless cruelty to challenging biases people often don’t even realize to knowing medically/scientifically incorrect talking points and the facts that debunk them), and how to demonstrate that I sincerely care about fat people as a marginalized demographic; these are things you learn, rather than innately knowing.

My most significant complaint is that I felt catered to at every part of this book that was meant to be directed toward thin people, even when Hagen notes that what she’s saying may seem harsh to thin readers. I can appreciate why people writing about their marginalization will make this choice, but I dislike the sense that my feelings are being considered by someone talking about marginalization that I don’t experience, because my feelings don’t matter. Wanting your feelings catered to is contradictory to the desire to learn about oppression you don’t experience.

That’s a minor complaint, though; the book is well-articulated, funny where it’s meant to be, fully cited (as far as I could understand, though I’m not an academic), and insightful. I appreciated Hagen’s open admission that she can’t speak on how her experiences related to fatness might vary from that of fat men’s, and while I would have liked at least one of the interview segments to have focused on fat experience as a man, no book can be everything all at once. All included interviews were insightful and offered in a range of fat experience: multiple interviewees are Black, one is a disabled full-time wheelchair user, and one is a trans man, and all interviewees have different relationships to their fatness and how that fits into and interacts with their overall sense of personal identity. I also really enjoyed her interview with a fat scholar, who addressed the misconception that the idealization of thinness is a modern phenomenon that didn’t exist—and was certainly not widespread—in eras past while empathizing with people who want to believe that there was a point in human history where fatphobia fully didn’t exist. Additionally, it was refreshing to see someone saying that, no, the commonly cited paintings and statues of previous centuries (including Rubens, the whose name is the origin of “rubenesque”) depicting mostly thin people, or possibly mid-sized people at the very largest, are not in fact fat representation.

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Rejection is an awful reading experience, in a way that’s deeply compelling. It’s a collection of five short stories and two additional works at the end that I’m not sure count as stories, all of which center around, as the title might suggest, rejection. The unpleasantness of the stories is due to how realistic and complex each character is. All the characters in question face ongoing rejection in their lives due to their own actions; regardless of how understandable or not their thoughts, feeling, and behaviors are, the continued rejection they face in their lives is, ultimately, a consequence of their behavior—and, interestingly, one of the stories depicts rejection that exists, in large part, inside the point-of-view character’s head, rather in his actual reality.

The end of the third story and much of the fourth and fifth ones are difficult to read, to the extent that in the fifth one required me to take breaks because my focus kept wavering and my eyes would simply glaze over; this is to Tulathimutte’s credit, though, as it’s a natural consequence of his dedication to depicting his characters as realistically as possible. Usually, when there are large portions of text, or entire stories, that are meant to be written by the point-of-view character, I lose interest quickly either because it doesn’t feel distinctive enough or it’s written like a short story rather than as the character’s own writing, and nothing is more annoying to me than a short story that reminds readers with every single word that it’s a work of fiction by an author writing as a character who doesn’t sound at all like a person. The parts of Rejection meant to be written by different characters feel authentic to the people the characters are portrayed as, and Tulathimutte’s willingness to make it difficult and/or uncomfortable to read makes the characters feel fully realized in a way they wouldn’t have otherwise.

The second to last entry in the collection is titled “Sixteen Metaphors” and is exactly what it says on the tin; it didn’t work at all for me, but I always respect when an author is willing to try something experimental with their work, whether it appeals to me or not. The final entry is a fake rejection letter addressed to the author about the book, and while I think it provides interesting analysis on authorship and the writing of characters, especially as it relates to how much or how little one puts into their characters and the potential motivations. It’s interesting, but I didn’t find all of it engaging and I felt it dragged a little despite it not being very long. But again, I’ll always respect an author being experimental.

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The Thick and the Lean is bad. The worldbuilding collapses entirely if you think about it for a single moment, the sexual element of this society that is allegedly massively important is irrelevant for the majority of the story and detracts from the story whenever Porter attempts to make it relevant, its political messaging is stupid and harmful, and I don’t think “What if people not from a marginalized group got held to the same standards and experienced very similar/the same treatment as people from that marginalized group do in real life?” is a good premise. It’s honestly pretty dismissive of real-life fatphobia, especially considering that fat people in this world are treated much better than fat people are in real life. More about it here.

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I’m still having fun with my reread of Children of the Red King, though I don’t really think there’s much to say about it beyond what I already have. When I went to add another book in the series to my currently reading list, however, I found that Nimmo released a couple more books in the series after I outgrew the series, and I think reading them will be a lot of fun.