Obviously, Weiner’s books haven’t fully cured my propensity to despair of my size, but they’ve provided me with a rough script of a future-or even a present-in which my size doesn’t define me. I’ve never met a Weiner protagonist who had to shed half her body mass to find herself in a wedding gown she generally holds back from the pure saccharine, gifting her characters with razor-sharp ripostes and circles of wisecracking best friends who bring them back to reality, but the fat women Weiner writes about are never presented as anything less than worthy. Sure, her characters might count calories and drag themselves to Weight Watchers just like I do, but that’s merely part of their journey, not its sum total. When I delve into a Jennifer Weiner novel, I know the way her protagonist’s body looks-the way my body looks, for that matter-isn’t going to be the crux of the story.
For me, it meant treating myself to secondhand copies of almost all of novelist Jennifer Weiner’s work. As quarantine isolation got to me, I resolved to stop forcing myself to read the highbrow, so-called “improving” literature I kept heaped on my nightstand and turn to novelistic comfort food instead: After all, why punish myself further during a pandemic? For some, that might mean digging out the Dean Koontz or the Gillian Flynn (or the Meg Cabot, if YA is your thing). This summer, though, unfolded a little differently. A BLT packed with ripe, juicy summer tomatoes? A whopping 21 points, i.e., don’ t even think about it. A s’more fresh off the campfire? Too many points, but fewer if I omit the Hershey’s chocolate and make do with one square of graham cracker. A lobster roll on a trip to Maine? Ten Weight Watchers points, doable but not ideal. Normally, I mark this three-month expanse of warm weather not by beach vacations and picnics in the park, but by the inventory of food I deny or permit myself at those events.
It’s almost the end of yet another summer, a season that entrepreneurial body image profiteers long ago learned to market as “swimsuit season.” (Translation: Whittle your body down to as fine a point as possible so you’ll be more inclined to buy things).
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