Discussing Knopf’s acquisition of Stephanie Danler’s novel Sweetbitter, Herr acknowledged that the way an author looks can affect an advance. Last summer, Claudia Herr, then an editor at Knopf, casually told Entertainment Weekly that publishers think about certain factors unrelated to talent before they drop comically massive advances on debut authors. Yet we see, all the time, the ways it does matter. On the surface, this makes sense: Pages look the same no matter what the author weighs, right? Why should it matter? They express disbelief that fatness (a word they seem uncomfortable saying, or even alluding to) is any kind of obstacle to being a writer. Folks are often surprised when I make this point. As with so many other categories of identity-race, gender, sexual orientation-that lack of visibility is very much at odds with the makeup of the general population. The intersection of these realizations-that I hadn’t expected her to be fat, that I was so moved and excited that she was, that internalized fatphobia has such incredible power-surprised and disturbed me.Īs a fat writer, I have always been aware of how rarely I see other fat writers. Here was a woman I admired so acutely, in a body I wasn’t expecting, a body that in some ways looked like mine. The first time I saw Roxane Gay, at a reading in Philadelphia for her book An Untamed State, I felt like I’d been pinched.
