He called me a fortress, then a tornado. So which is it? Both. Beat. You are always there, always huge, always untouchable.

What he wants is impossible. Fat girls haven’t wished ourselves away. We’re too conspicuous to be earnest. Our tears ooze while skinnier girls’ fall. Our faces fatten; their shatter. Every admission is grotesque, and every movement raw as meat. So what choice do I have? Neither fortress nor tornado conjures the absolute disgust I’ve come to expect, so this all strikes me as a significant accomplishment.

None of this is to say that skinny girls don’t have anything to contend with. It’s just to say that as a fat girl, there’s a whole world of things you learn (never) to do.

Do not, under any circumstances, cry. There is no interest in you. If you must eat, eat alone. Laugh hard at jokes about pathetic fat people. Get skinny, but never, ever join a gym. Stay silent, or perform. If you order a hamburger, feel ashamed. If you order a salad, feel ashamed. Never order dessert; still, always feel ashamed. Don’t like anything too much. Don’t like anyone too much. Do not trust any compliments.

There’s something, too, about the stock you come from. I had always thought of my family as a fragile bunch. To borrow a phrase, we were a glass menagerie—beastly creatures built to shatter, then break the skin.

But I did not know about Honora. My grandmother’s grandmother worked the fields after her family passed away in the potato famine. One day, while she farmed, some Englishmen burnt down her home, so she emigrated. When she arrived in New York, she was pregnant, unmarried, and 13. So much for fragility.

Years later, her daughter’s daughter homesteads in Montana, attends a plywood church, beats her children until half of those twelve run away from home. And her daughter’s daughter—watered down, uncertain and unsightly—is me. My grandmother taught me to vomit when I was seven years old. I never wonder if there is any of any of them in me.

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