In fact, few contemporary writers I've read display much empathy for large people. Inadvertently or otherwise, many novels and memoirs glamorize alcohol and drug abuse even while describing their destructive outcomes. RELATED: Talking with 'An Untamed State' author Roxane Gay (This linkage will not shock anyone who has worked or spent time with women with eating disorders.) 'Even at that young age, I understood that to be fat was to be undesirable to men, to be beneath their contempt, and I already knew too much about their contempt,' she writes.
In her harrowing new memoir 'Hunger,' fiction writer and cultural critic Roxane Gay discloses how she began eating compulsively and gaining weight after being gang-raped at age 12. To be a large person in America is like being the condemned figure of Kafka's 'In the Penal Colony.' The sentence of humiliation is embroidered on the body in trapunto: FAT.
