The Geek Feminist Revolution by Kameron Hurley

Author:Kameron Hurley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780765386250
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Public Speaking While Fat

My body has always been a place of battle.

When I was younger, it was personal, self-inflicted strife encouraged by schoolyard taunts of “water buffalo!” and “pig!” supplemented by family matriarchs who were permanently obsessed with the width of their own asses (and, very often, mine and that of my siblings) despite advanced degrees, working-class jobs that soon became high-powered ones, and increasing awards and honors.

Near-death helped me put my body project into perspective. Three or four hours of exercise a day to maintain a still pleasantly plump physique seemed overkill. Hating myself when death had been so close, now that I had a chronic illness, seemed the worst sort of irony. So I gave up hating myself. It was weirdly liberating.

But giving up on one’s self-inflicted angst does not magically erase the pressures of a society that hems you in from all sides.

I admit that looking at pictures of myself the last couple of years always involves a bit of dissonance. Since my first novel came out and I switched to a job that no longer requires me to bike into work every day, I have—as has happened to many writers—put on about seventy pounds. This is easy to forget when you work at home a lot and don’t go out much. There are perfectly good reasons for this gain, as my metabolism is superefficient; I come from a long line of overweight people with a host of immune disorders who could, however, survive famines quite well. Folks often ask me how I can hold down a day job, freelance, and write a book a year. The answer is quite simple: I roll out of bed and I write. I am sitting in bed, right before I go to sleep, and I am typing away. My life has become a constant war with deadlines, trying to maintain momentum during book releases.

I’ve worked at hacking the fitness of this—I’m writing this article right now from the comfort of my treadmill desk—but the hard-core two hours a day I used to do is just something I’m not able to do and still write the 1500 to 3000 words of fiction-related work and associated blog posts I do every day. I hope to find that balance eventually, but the last few years have been hard.

The funny thing that people don’t get when they see me living it up at writing conventions is that I have, in fact, always been considered fat. From the time I was five years old, people told me I was fat. I was a size 14 in high school, and people told me I was fat. I was working out two hours a day when God’s War came out, eschewing ALL THE CARBS, and at 220 pounds, I was, of course, fat. And the thing is, when you’re fat at 220 pounds, you’re still fat at 290 pounds. There’s not a whole lot of societal difference. You maybe get hit on a little more at 220 than at 290, but that’s about it.

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