It’s almost October and I haven’t had a single pumpkin spice latte. We’re midway through Hispanic Heritage Month and I only just posted about it today on Instagram. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has been out since September 6th and I haven’t managed to even check my local showtimes.
I’m late to do all the things I’d meant to do this month because 1) everyone in my family came down with bacterial pneumonia including me, and recovery took a long time, 2) we experienced two deaths on my father’s side of the family, both somewhat unexpected, and I had to fly to Texas and help out, and then also take time to grieve myself, and 3) it seems to take me longer and longer to get back into the swing of things after an interruption like travel or illness, and since my life these days is interrupted with one or the other about every 2 weeks, I feel like I’m losing weeks and weeks just trying to play catch up.
Of course I know to cut myself some slack, but at the same time I have stuff I need to do, and losing days or weeks at a time makes me feel stressed, which somehow causes me to procrastinate even more, until everything backs up like train cars and my whole life feels derailed. I think we all want to feel like we’re being pro-active rather than re-active, anticipating things rather than endlessly responding to emergencies, and yet sometimes the latter becomes a loop we can’t break out of.
Now I don’t know how you handle stress, but my methods tend to involve some combination of ice cream and wine, french fries, whiskey, brownies, third helpings of spaghetti and meatballs, saying yes to whipped cream, yes let’s make it a large, add guac and cheese, just one more drink before bed, one more bite, and another and another and and and…
Being a woman, I have a lot of issues with my weight. I absorbed all of the fat-phobic messaging of the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, devoured fashion magazines promoting heroin chic and models with figures like teenage boys, and grew up idolizing Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly, Jane Birkin and Jackie Kennedy, Madonna and Salma Hayek and Elizabeth Hurley - all very, very petite women.
I’ve always had issues with my weight, despite that I’ve never really been overweight. However I have felt overweight since the 5th grade, and have been scheming ways to diet and slim down for over thirty years.
Thirty. Years. For over thirty years I have woken up every day and worried about what I was going to eat, whether I should skip breakfast or lunch (or both), counted calories, tried to think about ways to feel full without eating, only to get a few hours into my day, face the fact that I am ravenous by 10am, and proceed to eat (and on many days, overeat) until I go to bed guilt-ridden and ashamed, vowing to do better the next day, and so on, and so on. I think it’s possible I have issues with my weight precisely because I’ve never been overweight (a circumstance that likely has as much to do with luck and genetics as anything), as it is this terror that keeps me locked in this perpetual cycle of fear and shame and eating and disordered thinking.
And just to make clear - there’s nothing wrong with being overweight. I am so happy that the phrase “body positivity” has entered our vocabulary. I’m thrilled my kids are growing up at a time when stores feature models of different sizes and body types. And it’s well past time that fat-shaming is getting called out and renounced.
Nor am I unaware of the very real struggles that overweight people face in a hostile world that often hates and demeans their bodies. I read the memoirs Heavy by Kiese Laymon and Hunger by Roxane Gay, each detailing the author’s struggle with being visibly overweight, and the kind of unrelenting scrutiny and ridicule visited upon them as they simply try to go about their day. I am not comparing my experience with theirs, as I’m very cognizant of the privilege I have of being a person whose body is largely accommodated in the world of airplanes and restaurants and clothing stores. I am simply saying that I’m not immune to the toxic messaging around weight, and have been making myself miserable because of it since before I even experienced puberty.

During the early days of the quarantine in 2020, many of us hunkered down with junk food, using it as a palliative against the uncertainty of the pandemic, the stress of having children out of school, and the economic terror of an entire planet on lockdown. I gained five pounds that spring, and then gained another five when we moved across the country a year later.
I have enjoyed enormous success in my career in the last 3 years. But along with this success has come a tremendous amount of work, travel, commitments involving multiple concurrent projects, major life events both good and bad, health scares, and undertaking entirely new challenges requiring me to learn things quickly and perform at an elite level pretty much from the outset. When I was hired to write the screenplay for the film adaptation of The Bullet Swallower my husband said it was like jumping from junior varsity to starting in the NBA — when someone passes you the ball you’d better hope you know what to do, or you’re going to look like a damn fool.
All of this stress caused me to gain another five or so pounds, at which point I noticed that my clothes no longer fit. And suddenly my fears about my weight were no longer abstract. They were, in my mind, entirely justified.
I’m 42 years old. For a long time I could tell myself I was still young and that my face didn’t yet show its age, but I’m now starting to get called “ma’am” by young men, and I’ve realized I can actually hurt myself by stretching behind me to get something out of the backseat when I’m in the car. My husband has kindly told me that I might fall over an “aging cliff” at the age of 44, wherein researchers say most people experience a rapid decline in their abilities in a short amount of time. I’m starting to feel torn between a nagging suspicion that I ought to “dress my age” and a frantic desire to cling to short hems and plunging necklines and neon colors like they’re the last lifeboats on the Titanic.
I’ve reached an age where it’s notoriously difficult to lose weight, as the body stubbornly holds onto its pre-menopausal fat stores in case of pregnancy, famine, robot apocalypse, whatever. I’ve been trying to lose a few pounds since 2021 and have only managed to put on more weight and make myself angry and more ashamed. I’m angry because I cannot control my body in a way that I could in my 30s, and I’m ashamed because of how fixated I am on an issue that is, objectively, stupid and irrelevant. No one cares about my weight except me. No one is asking me to lose this weight, nor am I receiving negative feedback from anyone except myself. This is an issue only to me, perpetuated only by me, and, ironically, solve-able only by me. I am, as always, the sole agent of my own undoing.
I suspect part of my fixation with my weight has to do with the fact that I am aging, and therefore losing status in society as an object of men’s sexual desire. Not that I was ever any kind of pinup model, but in our society, many of us were brought up to believe (and still subconsciously, stubbornly believe) that our value as women derives in large part from our ability to sexually excite men. It’s why the entire concept of the male gaze was invented.
Because a lot of us are still trying to be sexy and attractive in order to preserve status, elicit admiration for the benefit of our own egos, and conform in a society that rigidly upholds cis-gender femininity as the standard of beauty. It’s retrograde and unfair and harmful and gross and I can’t break out of it and doubt that I ever will.
So here I come back to my problem. I have put on weight. I want to lose the weight. I can’t lose the weight. I feel bad because I feel I should lose the weight. Both to satisfy my own ego and fear of becoming overweight, as well as to satisfy a patriarchal notion that I only have value as a human in so far as I’m attractive. I realize the lunacy in this and feel bad about wanting to lose the weight. And yet I still want to lose the weight.

I don’t really have a conclusion to this. I want to wrap this up and say, “And then I realized blah blah blah and learned to love myself and yada yada yada…” But I didn’t. I’m still in this hamster wheel of fear and loathing and self recrimination. As far as I see it, I’ll get out either by losing the weight or finally accepting my body, and neither seems likely at the moment. So much of modern life is lived inside contradictions.
I don’t have any plans this Friday night. Maybe I can finally get a PSL and take my family to see Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. I’ve heard it’s really good. And a big bucket of buttered popcorn sounds heavenly.
In case you missed it:
I interviewed Nicolás Medina Mora about his Bolaño-esque debut novel America del Norte
I’m coming to Saratoga Springs, NY this weekend!
And I’ll be in Austin for the Texas Book Fest in November!
Fox News (yes, Fox News) recommended my book as a great read for Hispanic Heritage Month. Muchas gracias Fox!
xoxo,
Elizabeth
What a wonderfully real take on both small and big moments in life. Thanks for sharing and making me smile today!
My grandmother, at 95, as we were out for dinner, was still focused on her weight..."I shouldn't eat that," she said, looking at her birthday cake. And, of course, she ate it. She always ate it. We all always ate it, eat it---but why does if have to come with that stinkin' side of guilt and self-loathing. (Wish I could say it stops!!!!) As I always say to my daughters, 'be nicer to you.' xxxx