Four books about bodies
A cross-post between Well Read and Gray’s Anatomy
January is a tough time to exist in a body. There may be less chat about making this year your thinnest yet than there was, say, five years ago, but there’s certainly an air of expectation for all of us to be leaning into extreme ‘wellness’ habits (read: diet culture). So, today
- the book recommendation Substack - is crossposting with, a Substack about bodies.Here are some books we love which centre around the way we feel about our physical selves and work towards unpicking narratives around weight, shape, beauty and the relevance of it all.
The Vegetarian by Han Kang
Some books are incredibly hard to describe and The Vegetarian is one of them. Most simply, it’s the story of Yeong-hye who lives a very ordinary life as an obedient wife in South Korea - until she makes the unheard of decision to become vegetarian.
But over the 180 pages that follow, The Vegetarian descends into a weird, dark, enrapturing tale about agency and subversion. It shows a woman liberating herself from an imprisoned body in a way that is both dream-like and visceral. Brace yourself: this novel gets under your skin, leaving you feel shaken yet strangely empowered.
Disobedient Bodies by Emma Dabiri
Dabiri - author of What White People Can Do Next and Don't Touch My Hair - writes that, “We need to recognise that the attention focused on our bodies - particularly female bodies - is accompanied by a deeply entrenched contempt for them… By becoming disobedient, my hope is that we can, against all the odds, take pleasure in the experience of our bodies, outside of the restrictions and demands of a system that insists we hate and punish ourselves.”
If the thought of enjoying your body without worrying about what it looks like feels alien, then Dabiri will convince you of it over the course of this 140-page, pocket-size book. She maps her own history of beauty, weight and her relationship with her body against the cultural, social, political and economic factors that influence it - and how she broke free.
Supper Club by Lara Williams
Roberta is hungry - and bored of it. So she invents Supper Club, a secret society for women who are sick of being told to take up less space. They feast on food and have parties that make you want to be part of the gang.
Their bodies grow in size in tandem with their uncontrollable behaviour and, as their gorging on drugs, booze and food gets out of hand, Williams’ asks a simple question in this rich, salty novel: if you feed a starving woman, what will she grow into?
Hunger by Roxane Gay
“People see bodies like mine and make their assumptions. They think they know the why of my body. They do not. This is not a story of triumph, but this is a story that demands to be told and deserves to be heard.”
‘Powerful’ is an overused adjective when it comes to describing books, but if any read warrants it, it’s Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger. It’s the story of how experiencing a horrendous act of violence when she was a child led her to eating and eating in order to build a “fortress” for herself. It’s also a story of shame, of judgement, of PTSD, of pleasure, of consumption, of appearance, of health, of womanhood. This book is raw, enraging, heart-shattering and courageous.
And finally…
Leaving this gorgeous Wendy Cope poem, The Orange, here.
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