Who you callin' fat?

Going into the book, did you know exactly what you wanted to do? Did you have a finished product in mind?

I've been a columnist for Grace, I've written for Mode and other magazines, so I thought I'd string together a bunch of essays and laugh my way to the bank -- or not. What I found while I was writing was that I had a lot more to say than I thought I did. It's really about covering the evolution I've made in terms of thinking about my body, particularly over the past couple of years. After I went to the Duke Diet and Fitness Center (which I talk about in the book), I sort of had this epiphany. It felt like that material I'd written before and the way I thought about body image before that just seemed irrelevant. I've come to terms with, "OK, here's my body. It's fat." I don't have to be in love with it, but I certainly have to appreciate it and stop fighting what it wants to be and what it wants to look like.

I checked out the fat-acceptance Web site Big Fat Blog that you mention in your book. Responses to "The Fat Girl's Guide to Life" were mixed: Some from the Big Fat Bloggers felt that you were ambivalent about "true fat acceptance," that you sounded "deeply conflicted in [your] own journey to self acceptance," and that you gave "seemingly contradictory recommendations."

I think that the fat-acceptance crowd is going to be a lot more critical of this book than the mainstream reading audience. To the regular girl who's reading Glamour or Marie Claire, the idea that your body can look however it wants to look is a pretty radical notion. To the Big Fat Blog audience, it's offensive that you would think any other way. This book might be a little too gentle for a group that already feels empowered and already feels politicized about size issues. So I'm not surprised that they're going to be tough on me. I anticipated it and am very interested in hearing it.

As you were writing the book, did you ever reach a point when you were like, who is my target audience here? Am I talking to the kind of woman who is willing to wear the control-top pantyhose and the girdle, or am I talking to the ones, like those at BFB, who want to just let it all hang out?

At first I was really torn, I wanted to be everything to everybody. I remember sitting in my living room with little index cards that said things like "Fat and Happy," "Fat and Concerned," "Fat and Fit," "Fat and Wondering," and thinking, Who am I writing for? At some point I realized that this really does have to come from my experience. People will either agree or disagree. The trickiest part of writing this book was to talk about that ambivalence and to talk about that complexity. I really did not want to write, "I'm fat and happy and I love my body!" because the truth is, I don't. Some days I do, and other days I'm like ugh! I'm like anybody. That's really what I'm trying to get at here.

Having worked in TV and magazines, do you feel conflicted that the same system that perpetuates unrealistic images of women (or children, or men, or homes, or lifestyles, for that matter) is the same system from which you derive professional fulfillment? The same system that helps you pay the rent?

Yes, definitely. But my goal has always been, well what can I do from inside the system to get that alternative voice out there. How can I be subtly subversive? One of the delightful things about working at TRL on MTV was that my underlying ambition was to get girls on TV that didn't all look stick figures. If we're going to show girls dancing at the MTV Beach House, let's also show girls who aren't wearing bikinis, who are wearing T-shirts and shorts. Let's show girls in the audience of different ethnicities; let's show girls speaking in a humorous voice instead of just "Ohhh, I love Justin!"

Entertainment is so intense. It's really hard to knock on the outside and say, "Put a fat girl in a movie!" It's a lot easier to do that from the inside.

How do you feel about America's newly declared "war on obesity"?

I think it's terrible. The U.S. Surgeon General recently said that the threat of obesity in the United States is worse than the threat of terrorism. I guess that makes me Osama bin Larden. That's ridiculous! What I put in my mouth will not destroy lives in America. I was supposed to be on CNN last week, and they bumped me because hostages were taken in Iraq. I was like, Well, CNN doesn't think that my fat ass is more important than terrorism, so why does the U.S. Surgeon General think so?

What would be the ultimate reward for writing this book?

Let's see ... I guess one of the greatest outcomes would be Brad Pitt hooking up with a fat girl in a movie in the steamiest sex scene ever and everybody saying, "Wow, that was hottest thing I've ever seen!" That would be symptomatic of this book having an effect.

The other best thing has already happened. I got a letter from a woman who said, "I've felt weird and freakish my whole life. I just read your book, and I want to thank you for being you, and for being a Fat Girl." I thought: OK, I'm done. I'm going to cancel on Salon, I'm going to cancel on CNN, I'm going to stop selling the book, because this one woman in Brooklyn said this, and that just totally does it for me.

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