Dietland

a wickedly funny, feminist revenge fantasy novel of one fat woman's fight against sexism and the beauty industry

Sarai Walker

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782399308
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

A wickedly funny, feminist revenge fantasy novel of one fat woman's fight against sexism and the beauty industry. Dietland will be adapted into AMC's 10-episode straight-to-series starring Julianna Margulies and Joy Nash. Wow... ferocious and hilarious - Margaret Atwood A book with a message, loud and clear - Guardian Plum Kettle does her best not to be noticed, because when you're fat, to be noticed is to be judged. Or mocked. Or worse.
But when a mysterious woman starts following her, Plum finds herself involved with an underground community of women who live life on their own terms. At the same time, a dangerous guerrilla group called "Jennifer" begins to terrorize a world that mistreats women. As Plum grapples with her personal struggles, she becomes entangled in a sinister plot, the consequences of which are explosive.
Part coming-of-age story, part revenge fantasy, Dietland is a bold, original and funny debut that takes on the beauty industry, gender equality and our weight loss obsession - from the inside out, and with fists flying.

DRINK ME

•••

• • •

TWO DAYS AFTER FINDING Adventures in Dietland at Kitty’s office, I had nearly finished reading it. I should have been at the café answering messages, but I’d abandoned my work for the book. I soaked in a bath while reading, careful not to dampen the custard-colored pages.

Twelve years had passed since I was a Baptist. I had rarely thought of that time over the years, but as I read, the memories of the Baptist Plan came alive in my mind. I could taste the food: the metallic, watered-down tomato of the pizza and pasta, the casseroles that tasted the way carpet cleaner smells. I remembered the Baptist Shakes, their chalky texture, their medicinal, sour aftertaste. When the company closed, I knew only the most superficial details: Verena Baptist inherited the company and as the sole shareholder she had the power to shut it down, which she did within days of her parents’ fiery car crash. I had hated Eulayla Baptist’s daughter then, but I had never known her name. Now, thanks to the girl, I held her words in my hands.

Verena wrote that after she closed the company, she was left with “gallons of Baptist Shakes, vats of beef stew, and truckloads of chicken breasts slathered in a mysterious goo,” all of which were given to soup kitchens and homeless shelters, “to people who were starving by no choice of their own.” Verena described this as an act of charity, and I supposed the Baptist meals were slightly better than nothing.

I couldn’t help but feel disgusted and angry while reading about Eulayla Baptist. Like all Baptists, I’d been destined to fail, but I blamed myself when I did. I may have hated Eulayla’s daughter once, but as I read the book I was glad that she’d exposed her mother. I knew my failure as a Baptist wasn’t my fault.

I did wonder why Verena turned on her mother so publicly. Verena slipped through the pages of the book for the most part, but in the first paragraph she was there, most tellingly: “Before my birth, Mama was a slim young bride. She and Daddy set up house in Atlanta and for one shining year things couldn’t have been better. Then one tipsy night after martinis on the veranda with the Ambersons from across the street, Daddy impregnated Mama with a bomb that took nine months to blow up, leaving her fat and scarred, with stretch marks and a waistline that looked like an inner tube.”

That bomb was Verena. She had ruined her mother’s figure, which led to an obsession with dieting, which led to the horror of Baptist Weight Loss being inflicted on the world. I wondered if this was why Verena had decided to disgrace her dead mother in print and reveal her secrets: She’d been made to feel guilty for being born.

The book wasn’t only about Baptist Weight Loss. Verena attempted to expose the entire weight-loss industry. She wrote extensively about the many weight-loss authors and gurus, diet drugs, even the surgery I was planning to have. She devoted a whole chapter to liberating oneself from what she called Dietland. “Dietland is about making women small,” Verena wrote. I thought my mother would enjoy her book. I was sure she would have sent me a copy if she knew of its existence.

Inside the book were photographs of Eulayla, one from her beauty queen days and another from her fat years, as well as the famous photo of thin Eulayla holding up her fat jeans. In one photo, her face was taut and her legs were slim, but she was still slightly roomy in the hips. I looked at the photo and thought that in death, Eulayla had finally achieved what had eluded her in life. As a corpse she was as thin as she could ever hope to be. Just skin and bones, I imagined.

There was a short author bio on the back of the book: “Verena Baptist lives in New York City, where she manages Calliope House, a feminist organization.” That was it. There was no photograph of her, no way to put a face to the name of the woman whom I had once hated so much for ruining my dream.

I closed the book and tossed it onto the bathroom floor, not wanting to think of my Baptist days any longer. After I was forced off the Baptist Plan, I spent most of my senior year of high school eating. I couldn’t stop. At Delia’s restaurant I served as an apprentice to the woman who did the baking, and I gorged on cakes and cookies and pies. By the time I started college I had gained back all the pounds I’d lost and added many more. In college I joined Waist Watchers, since they held meetings right on campus. When I became disillusioned with their program I followed the diet plans outlined in books and magazines. I took diet pills, including one that was later recalled by the FDA after several people died. I took a supplement from a company in Mexico, but gave it up after it caused violent stomach pains. For all of my junior year, I drank a chocolate diet shake for breakfast and lunch, which turned my bowel movements into stones, causing hemorrhoids, and which tasted even worse than the Baptist Shakes had tasted. I was too squeamish for bulimia and lacked the masochism needed for anorexia, so once I had cycled through every diet I could find, I went back to Waist Watchers.

In the years that had passed since I’d joined Baptist Weight Loss, I’d gained nearly a hundred pounds. After reading Adventures in Dietland, I felt certain that surgery was the right option for me. Verena would have been horrified by this response, since she railed against weight-loss surgery except in life-threatening situations, but her intentions in writing the book didn’t matter. She had proven that dieting doesn’t work. I was grateful to her for that.

The memories exhausted me, and I relaxed for a while in the tub, the water lukewarm but not unpleasant. I no longer thought the girl was trying to be mean by giving me Verena’s book, but I still didn’t know what she wanted. When the phone started ringing, I didn’t want to get out of the water. Whoever it was didn’t leave a message, but a few minutes later the ringing started again. Annoyed, I left the bath and stomped naked down the hallway, leaving pools of water behind me on the floor.

“Is this Ms. Kettle?”

“Yes.”

“Is this Plum?”

“Who is this?”

“This is Erica calling from Austen Human Resources. We need you to come to the office on Monday at ten a.m. to sign a form.”

“What form?”

“A form you need to sign. There’s a problem with your health insurance.”

“All right,” I said, irritated at the thought of another trip to Manhattan.

“Please come to the Human Resources office on the twenty-seventh floor. Thank you, goodbye.”

Austen Media was the furthest thing from my mind. Since starting Verena’s book I had ignored Kitty’s girls. They were trapped inside my laptop—a Pandora’s box I refused to open.

• • •

ON THE TWENTY-SEVENTH FLOOR of the Austen Tower, I stepped off the elevator and walked down a long carpeted corridor. At the end was a floor-to-ceiling window, revealing the breadth of midtown Manhattan in a blaze of sunlight. The corridor was like a diving board perched above a sea of buildings. I placed my toes and forehead against the glass and looked down at the streets below.

Erica, the woman who’d pestered me on the phone, greeted me in the Human Resources office. She produced a clipboard with a form that had the logo of Tri-State Health at the top. “Please read this and sign,” she said, sitting next to me in the waiting area. The form contained little content and only asked me to confirm the insurance plan I’d chosen when I began working for Kitty.

“Terrific,” Erica said when I handed the clipboard back to her. “I’ll walk you to the elevator.”

“That’s it? I came all the way from Brooklyn.”

“You don’t want your insurance to expire, do you?”

I wanted to reply to her in the same snotty tone, but it wasn’t worth it. I gathered my things and she escorted me out of the office, which I thought was unnecessary.

As we waited for the elevator, I looked out the window and thought of the diving board again. The idea of lifting off, of diving into midtown, absorbed me until I heard a crinkling sound. The corridor was so bright that I had to strain to see that Erica had removed my insurance form from the clipboard and was stuffing it into the mouth of a trash can.

“Hey, that’s my form.”

“Go to Basement Two,” she whispered. “B-Two. You’ll have to change elevators at the lobby.”

“What’s going on?”

She held her arm between the elevator doors, preventing them from closing. “Go on, hurry up. I have to get back to work.”

I was in the elevator and descending, my vision splotchy from the sunlight, when only one thing came to mind: the girl.

In the lobby, I hesitated, but then couldn’t resist finding out what was going to happen if I followed Erica’s directions. I looked for the bank of elevators that would take me to B2. When I reached the basement, two floors beneath the Austen Tower, I was standing before a set of double doors, a tarnished silver portal with a sign attached to it that read BEAUTY CLOSET. There was a keypad to the right of the doors, and a button, like a doorbell.

The elevator doors closed behind me. I stepped to the silver doors and rang the bell. A number of seconds passed, but there was no sound or hint of a human being on the other side.

I was about to ring the bell again when I heard the faintest noise. I pressed my ear to the door. Click-clop, click-clop. The sound grew steadily louder. Click-clop, click-clop, like a horse in a Western film. Click-clop. I listened for a minute longer and realized it was the sound of someone wearing high heels, approaching from a great distance. Click-clop.

“Coming,” a voice called, and then one of the doors opened slightly and a head popped out. “I am Julia Cole, manager of the Beauty Closet. How may I help you?”

“I’m Plum. I don’t know why I’m here.”

The woman opened the door, allowing me entry, but she didn’t speak. I stepped inside and what I saw made me gasp. The Beauty Closet was hardly a closet. You could easily fit a 747 inside it, perhaps two. For as far as I could see were steel shelves reaching to unknown heights, with blinding lights overhead; it was like a supermarket on the grand scale of a temple constructed by the Babylonians. Ladders on wheels were positioned in each aisle, extending so high that the tops of them were whited out by the lights, as if they were ascending into the sky. There were signs at the end of each aisle—LIPS, LIDS, LASHES, HAIR, and so on—and each shelf was lined with black lacquered trays filled with products.

“You call this a closet?”

The woman stood before me, wearing a silky mauve blouse and cream-colored slacks that ended just above her ankles, with heels on her feet. Around her slender waist was a black canvas tool belt, filled with brushes and tubes of lipstick.

“For you,” she said, handing me a metallic tube. On the bottom it said, “Juicy Plum.”

Julia motioned for me to follow her. We walked down the Lips aisle, which was subdivided into sections for lipstick, gloss, liner, and balm; each of these sections was subdivided by color, with swatches on display, like the inside of a paint store. Taped to one of the shelves was a handwritten sign: LIPS: MINORA AND MAJORA, with an explicit illustration of a vulva. “Just a little humor,” Julia said when she saw me looking.

In the middle of the aisle were two stools on wheels, where Julia and I sat. “To answer your question, we call this the Beauty Closet for old times’ sake. When the Austen Corporation was founded on this site in 1928, Cornelius Austen’s daughter was put in charge of organizing the cosmetics for the two fashion magazines Austen published at that time. It was just a way to keep ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Rabbit Hole
• Alicia and Plum
• Drink Me
• Underground
• Eat Me
• Imprint page
• Acknowledgments