The problem isn’t really with bodies, but with the relentless scrutiny to which they’re subjected. The problem is being a woman. Or being a woman subject to men. My once-Catholic mother’s deep shame about the female body’s functions and form had been passed on with vigor, and my father’s tendency to criticize her anatomy and then mine and sometimes those of women passing by in the most clinical terms didn’t help, nor did it that these were not unusual but ordinary parts of a culture that obsessed over bodies and in those days quantified female beauty according to precise measurements and sizes, and told us that the rewards were boundless for meeting them, the punishments for failing endless, and punished all of us anyway, because these were ultimately standards everyone would fail to meet.
And so there I was where so many young women were, trying to locate ourselves somewhere between being disdained or shut out for being unattractive and being menaced or resented for being attractive, to hover between two zones of punishment in space that was itself so thin that perhaps it never existed, trying to find some impossible balance of being desirable to those we desired and being safe from those we did not.
We were trained to please men, and that made it hard to please ourselves. We were trained to make ourselves desirable in ways that made us reject ourselves and our desires. So I fled. My body was a lonely house. I was not always home; I was often elsewhere. I imagined when I was young some science-fiction version of humans becoming brains in jars as a good thing, that our bodies were some sad thing we were mired in rather than instruments of joy, connection, and vitality, the non-negotiable terms of our existence. It’s no wonder I was thin, no wonder women were so praised for being thin, for taking up as little room as possible, for hovering on the brink of vanishing, no wonder some of us vanished through undereating like a country ceding territory, an army retreating, until it ceased to exist.
I had a body. I had been a small, wiry child, withdrawn but active in my own pursuits, roaming the hills and climbing trees, and then at thirteen I suddenly grew several inches, and it took many years for my flesh to catch up with my bones. I was five feet seven and less than a hundred pounds when I left home, and then weight came gradually, slowly, enough to push me over to a hundred that first year I was away from home and by my thirties I was more or less average. But for a long time I was unusually thin, not lean like young women who have little fat over their muscle, because I had so little muscle either.
My skeleton was not far from the surface. My iliac crests jutted out so that people sometimes thought I was carrying something in the front pockets of my jeans. I thought of them as pearl-handled revolvers. When I let the bathwater drain out while I lay in the tub a pool formed on my hollow belly. My ribs showed. I had a waist so small a gay man once quipped that I did not have a torso but, like a wasp or a bee, an abdomen and a thorax. It was my friend David Dashiell, and he used the word thorax, and we were friends partly because we could banter like that.
There is a picture taken by the man who was walking with us while I sang “Ready for War” shortly after I moved into the apartment. It’s of me in a gray 1940s suit I wore constantly as my dress-up outfit, or rather of me wearing the suit’s pencil skirt and a man’s vest turned backward and belted into a sort of backless top, without the jacket. I have my back to the camera, I’m pressed up against the wall with its rectangles of molding, head turned to the right, a little hat with a veil over a face that still looks childish, a back that looks vulnerable, unformed, and elbow-length black gloves on. I’m trying to take shelter in my shadow.
The clothing speaks of an attempt to be elegant, sophisticated, to be an adult, to be ready for the world and find a world ready for me, a portrait of all those aspirations of youth. The posture speaks of an attempt to elude and melt away. I’m trying to appear and to disappear at once. The waist of that skirt I measured before I gave it away when I was pretty sure it would never fit again unless I became deathly ill; it was twenty inches.
Being so thin made me frail, tired, limited in my energies, easily chilled; maybe it made me more of a target: I was the opposite of robust, and all that punk rock was partly an attempt to imbibe a spirit that would counter the frailty, or perhaps it was that my flesh was frail but my spirit was savage. I sometimes think I fled to the city in my youth because to run in the other direction, to the country or the wilderness, would have required a physical vigor that I didn’t have then. I could walk great distances, I could dance for hours, but I had waves of fatigue that were probably blood-sugar drops when I could hardly stay awake, and I had dizzy spells when I stood up suddenly, and I was often tired.
Being thin is seen as a virtue, as a consequence of discipline, and self-restraint, and so it’s often admired as though it is a sign of character. But it’s often just a sign of the genetic lottery or that phase of youth before the flesh catches up with the bones. Some people insisted that I was so thin because of anorexia or bulimia, eager to make what they envied pathological, undesirable (and there were years of jokes about concentration camp victims and comparisons of me to famine victims, as though my body was itself a disaster zone).
There’s an austerity to thinness, to having a hard body, to being closer to the solidity of bone than the softness of flesh. It’s as though you’re removed from the messy, squishy, leaky business of life, as though you’re looking on from outside, from someplace less mortal, less malleable. As though you disdain mortality and the pleasures of the flesh. It’s an irreproachably stern way to show up. Which is to say that thinness is a literal armor against being reproached for being soft, a word that means both yielding, cushiony flesh and the moral weakness that comes from being undisciplined. And from consuming food and taking up space.
Women’s bodies are usually soft if they’re healthy, at least in some places, and if softness is equated to a moral failing, and virtue to a low-body-fat hardness of surface, then that’s another way in which to be a woman is to be wrong, one that people starve their way out of. Roxane Gay wrote in her book Hunger that “we should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men. . . . And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but it’s something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us.”
Maybe starvation is how you apologize for existing, or slip toward nonexistence, but I was not trying to make myself thin. I was already there, and I ate, but food wasn’t one of the main things I was hungry for. I was hungry for love, but that was so strange and foreign and terrifying a phenomenon I approached it obliquely and described it with euphemisms and fled from some versions and failed to recognize others. I was hungry for stories, books, music, for power, and for a life that was truly mine, hungry to become, to make myself, to distance myself as far as possible from where I was in my teens, to keep going until I arrived someplace that felt better.
Later in my twenties, an older man I was seeing said, “Baby, you’re driven,” and in that age when I threw out sharp replies without thinking, I said all too accurately, “And you’re parked.” I was driven, to redeem my existence by achievement, to keep going until I reached a better place (and when I did, the habit was too ingrained for me to slow down), to make something, to stop being what I was and become something else, to meet all the demands placed on me, and of course to meet everyone else’s needs first or instead. There was real joy in the creative and intellectual life, but also a withdrawal from all the other realms of life. I was like an army that had retreated to its last citadel, which in my case was my mind.