How to Be Subversive
I come from a subversive stock. No, my parents never overthrew a government, but they were people who looked at certain institutions and made fun of them. The first time my mother saw my new baby, she said, “With that much head, you expect more body.” Another time, after my father had broken a bone in his neck and I said he looked like a poet because his hair had grown so long, my mother said, “Yes, a poet coming out of a drain,” because of his neck brace. Their wit and intelligence made it hard to condemn this behavior. When my father was a visiting writer at Bread Loaf, a venerated literary summer school, he kept threatening to put on what he described as his “Irish serf hat” and grovel on the lawn of the Director. He refused to socialize with the acceptable, high value people and instead hung out with the runaway nuns, very common during the seventies.
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Weight: A Love Story
I’m not sure if it was WWI or the Irish potato famine that caused my grandmother to be such an enemy of the plump, the chubby, the…fat. She passed this down to my parents who, especially my mother, were capable of judging an entire population based on their weight. When they visited me in Chicago they told me, “We love it here. Why is everyone so fat?” Which they weren’t except they were but who cares? My years of living in New York City during the eighties, one of the most fatphobic decades ever, being broke so I walked nearly everywhere but also like most New Yorkers took public transportation which burned plenty of calories. I had seen eating disorders up close, a woman I stayed with in Paris kept horrible bits of food in jars all over her flat and often arrived at the end of a restaurant meal to eat scraps from the table.
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Tonight is Not the Night
I was in an Uber headed to the airport when Rod Stewart’s raspy voice singing Tonight’s the Night filled the car with some of the most sexist, disturbing lyrics I’ve ever heard in my life. I came of age in the seventies. It sucked. Sex was everywhere and because of the lack of AIDS and a plethora of ways to not have a baby, it was offered the same way you might offer someone a glass of water. At least where I grew up. And then there was this.
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