To qualify for the trials, you had to be, like Smith, officially fat. At 6 feet tall, for example, participants had to weigh at least 220 pounds, or no less than 200 if they had fat-related health problems. After two years of testing, it appeared that overweight people who took the drug lost an average of seven to 10 pounds more than those who didn’t. Xenical also lowered levels of problem cholesterol beyond what could be explained by the weight loss.

For the desperate to reduce, such benefits may justify the fact that Xenical is chemically addressing what is essentially a social problem. In a rational world, one might suggest not eating whatever you don’t want
to digest. But in our culture, at once obsessed with both food and
thinness, the blue capsules are being embraced as a way of tempering the
consequences of excess. And not just by the truly overweight.

More than 210,000 Xenical prescriptions have been sold in the drug’s first seven weeks on the U.S. market. Apparently the appeal of the fat-be-gone pill trumps any memory of the recent recall of fenfluramine, another diet drug that was shown to cause heart damage after being pounced on by eager dieters. It also overshadows Xenical’s own hazards, which are many and troubling.

In fact, the FDA panel considering Xenical was at first split on whether to
approve it, with nay-voters stuck on distressing medical points, such as
the fact that the drug leaches vitamins from the body and disrupts the
normal digestion process. Perhaps most alarming, one study the panel
reviewed found that drug takers had a higher rate of breast cancer than
those not on it. New data that the breast cancer cases didn’t
appear to be linked to the drug eased panel members’ concerns enough for
them to approve Xenical in May. But even after approval, Jules Hirsch, an
internist and nutrition expert who served on the panel, says “there is a
residual worry” over the breast cancer question.

And, since Xenical has been only tested for two years, its long-term effects add up to a big question mark. “We don’t know what this drug does over long periods of time to gastrointestinal function,” says Hirsch. “It’s coating the intestine with a thin layer of fat. We just don’t know
what this will do to intestinal function over years.”

Those interested in taking the drug seem less concerned with such medically
weighty matters than with the drug’s embarrassment-potential. As one dieter
encountered in the weight-loss chat room at href="http://www.thriveonline.com">thriveonline.com delicately put it: “I heard it makes you mess your pants.” The rumor was confirmed by another chatter, whose daughter is taking Xenical.

According to the Roche product information, such “adverse events” –
including anal seepage, oily spotting, orange stool and something
disturbingly described as “fecal incontinence” — occur in about a quarter
of drug takers, but can be minimized by scaling back fat intake. That
side effects increase according to the amount of fat a person consumes is
helpful, at least when it comes to defending Xenical against charges of
fueling an unhealthy compulsion to overeat. Like antabuse, a drug that
makes alcoholics violently ill if they drink, Xenical could theoretically
hem in behavior. But, even when eating light, the potential for oily
spotting and emergency trips to the bathroom remain.

One might be willing to withstand such symptoms in the name of extending
life or avoiding serious disease. Maybe. But would anyone risk such
humiliation for the sake of obsessive vanity? Apparently so. Ben Krentzman,
a weight loss specialist in Venice, Calif., reports that 18 of the 20
or so patients who have asked Krentzman about taking Xenical so far were
not fat enough to meet the criteria. “People who want to lose five pounds
can suffer the same torment as people trying to lose 500,” Krentzman muses,
by way of explaining the generalized lust for Xenical. (At 400 pounds,
Krentzman says he is considering taking Xenical himself, but “wants to see
how it all works out.”) Krentzman will only prescribe the drug to patients
who fit the official guidelines. But less scrupulous doctors can legally
approve it “off-label” for just about anyone.

And those who can’t get Xenical from a real doctor can get it from someone who plays one over the Internet. At least a dozen sites, most of which also
sell Viagra, offer the diet drug “without a prescription,” “in six easy
steps,” or “with complete privacy and confidentiality!” In lieu of a
prescription, the buyer is usually asked to have an online consult, which
involves answering questions about height and weight.

There is no way of verifying the information, of course, which means that
the drug is available to pretty much anyone who has the roughly $120 it
costs per month. (Insurance pays in only a minority of instances.) That
worries some eating disorder specialists. “Bulimics quite consciously
engage in the consumption of large amounts of calories followed by a
behavior to avoid the consequences,” says Tim Walsh, director of the eating
disorders research unit at the New York Psychiatric Institute. As Walsh
sees it, Xenical has the potential to be yet another consequence-avoiding
tool, along with self-induced vomiting

No one makes any money off vomiting, however. So while marketing rights to the finger remain, for the moment, unclaimed, analysts project that
Hoffman-La Roche will make some $3 billion from the drug. Roche, a
pharmaceutical giant known for selling Valium, can’t be held responsible
for the abuse of its product, which it warns bulimics against using.
(Bulimia, remember, is a medical condition, Xenical is a treatment.) But
even while drug materials clearly state that Xenical is for the obese, the
launch campaign seems to extend a extremely friendly hello to most everyone concerned about weight. The promotional information announces: “First and only in a new class for weight loss, weight maintenance, and reduced risk of regain.”

And, to muddy matters more, Roche is promoting something called the “taste
of healthy living campaign” in conjunction with Xenical. The PR
extravaganza — which extends to 18 cities and has employed everyone from
high-end chefs to former New York mayor Ed Koch — doesn’t directly
plug Xenical. But it does use the same shiny, blue folders and lettering as
the Xenical materials to reach out to the population at large. That
includes “Laura,” a woman the promotional brochure describes as wanting “to maintain her weight of 128 pounds.” “You’ll see that you don’t have to
deprive yourself of foods you love to eat,” assures the “healthy living”
dieting guide, which, at the bottom of every page, says “Brought to you by
Hoffman-La Roch Inc., maker of Xenical.”

There is nothing wrong with the eat-light message of the campaign, in which
high-end restaurants are paid to put “healthy living” icons near low-fat
menu options. (So far, no chefs have accepted Roche’s offer to directly
promote the drug itself.) And there was nothing wrong with the
“healthy-living” fare at Sonora, a New York Latin-fusion restaurant
participating in the promotion. The lobster mango ceviche was tasty and the
baked red snapper — which comes in at a startlingly lean 117 calories –
were perfectly good. But what of the fact that the little healthy living icon on the menu will be associated with Xenical?

And, perhaps more to the point, what of the Dulce de Leche cheesecake
listed on the menu just inches from the sensible fish dish? Surrounded by
the constant celebration of richness, how could anyone not consider that
Xenical would help them repel calories from cheesecake as well as from
lighter fare? By reducing their calorie intake, wouldn’t Xenical make people already partial to heavy foods more likely to indulge?

Desperation may dwarf such questions. Obesity contributes to some 300,000
deaths per year. It’s hard to fault the ideal of making any dent in that
number. And there’s also the emotional relief to consider. Smith, the bank
worker who participated in the clinical trials, for instance, says she was
profoundly changed by her weight loss. “I enjoy life a lot more now,”
gushes Smith. “I feel so much better about myself.”

Who wouldn’t want that for our entire nation? Yet, given our ever-mounting desire for consequence-free excess, Xenical seems more likely to nudge us in the direction of even greater consumption, stretching our stomachs to
accommodate bigger sundaes and whetting our appetites for the next big
nutrient-blocking pharmaceutical. Something to think about as we pass a
little oily wind and run like hell to the bathroom.

But I have gone to three parties recently. (I felt I had to go to all
three, for reasons I won’t go into here.) At two of these parties, I spent the
entire time thinking about how much I hated everyone on earth and wondering
what kind of nightmarish roommates one gets in heaven if one thinks such ugly
thoughts: survivalists, jazzercise instructors, the GOP House managers and
their ilky ilk. But at the third of these parties, with a good friend on
either side, I realized once again that there is only one person any of us
really hates. It’s the gift our parents gave us that just keeps on giving.
It’s the potted plant of self-loathing they asked us to hold for a moment
– like one of those old “Candid Camera” setups where the innocent bystander is
asked to hold a plant, or a cat, for a troubled but friendly stranger who
then never shows up again. And so the nice person like me stands there
holding the damn cat, wanting to do the right thing.

So, it was a birthday party that moved outdoors when the winter sun
surprised us all one afternoon, and I plopped down on a rough wooden bench
between these two old friends. Both are women in their 50s who had come
alone. Both are brilliant, and a little fat.

One of them has always been zaftig from the waist down: Her
granddaughter says to her with enthusiasm and admiration, “You have a great
big butt!” But the second woman has always been thin and beautiful and
ambitious, in a distinctly soft and soulful way. She has been considered a
player in Hollywood, an actress turned director of art-house movies. Then she
got cancer. She had surgery and chemo; then she went to convalesce at a
nearby Zen center.

I had not seen her since then, but when I walked into this party, I
saw that she had gained a lot of weight. Some of us old bulimics are
like people at carnivals who can guess weights within two pounds. So I’m
guessing 25 or 26 new pounds. I kept noticing her hands resting on the swell
of her belly under a simple stylish black linen dress and I was secretly
shocked. I know this does not make me look very spiritually evolved, but here
goes anyway: It was like seeing Kate Moss with fat arms.

“You look so wonderful,” I said. And that is true — she looked
stunning — but what I wanted to say was, “Oh my God! You got fat!”

She has the most exquisite eyes: soft heathery green, stormy sea green.

“I’m used to you being so skinny,” I said. “You look so much better.”
She really did; she looked softer, rounder, this big soft sweet pillow of
tummy rising out of her dress. But I wanted to ask, “Would you mind coming
into the bathroom with me and hopping up on the scales?”

It’s a very complicated dynamic for me. In the last year, I have joined
the big comfy underpants set,
and it has taken me a year to stop thinking of myself as morbidly obese. People tell me I look normal now, but what I hear is that they think I look like Marlon Brando.

It’s so automatic in me: I recently saw a beautiful woman I knew when I
was still drinking, who betrayed one of my best friends. She used to be one
of those shapely sylph types, and now — this may sound harsh — she looked
like a really pretty manatee. And I thought, Hah hah!

So there I was at the party, with all my usual feelings of shyness and
dread and social retardation, talking to these two women I’ve known forever
and adore. And for a while I comforted myself by thinking, Well, at least my
butt is not half as fat as HERS, and my stomach is not as fat as HERS. But
then I’d feel misery, hold my little potted plant of shame.

- – - – - – - – - -

After lunch we were informed that there was a dessert in the kitchen, one
requiring some assembly. First you put a slice of yellow cake on your plate,
and then hot chocolate sauce. Then you covered that with three kinds of
berries and crème fraîche. I watched my two friends make up plates for
themselves, and I felt fear and craziness build up inside me. At first I
claimed to have a stomach ache and just took a pile of berries.

The three of us sat outside in the sun eating. Susan said that as part of
her healing at the Zen center, she decided to let herself have the comfort of
cookies with her afternoon lattes. I thought how great that was; I mean, if
you had cancer. I sucked on a blueberry. I don’t even like blueberries.

Many of the women at this party work in film, or their partners do, in
Hollywood, and they are mostly quite trim and well-appointed. My friend Susan
sat on the wooden bench looking like a cross between Meher Baba and Linda
Evans, with her hands on her belly, beneath her black linen shift. A number
of women were wearing the same sort of tastefully simple linen that Susan had on,
but they were poised and mingling and busy, darting around as if
trying to catch something they could use, and she was just sitting there,
listening, smiling.

I’ve known many of the people there for years, and I like them. They’re
smart and kind and cool: For the most part, they’ve been assigned vacation
lives, like I have — creative lives in beautiful surroundings. But this
day I watched them work the party, because it’s hard not to. They commanded
time, compared notes on how well things were going, all but handed out
business cards. I felt a certain tenderness toward everyone, and tried not
to check out their butts and tummies. The three of us sat with our hands
cupped like visors over our eyes, like squinty see-no-evil monkeys.

People came over to talk to us but no one sat down. Everyone stopped by
to find out how Susan was doing and to catch her up on their lives, which are
seriously happening lives. I tried to listen with Susan’s compassionate Zen
ears, and so it was all quite touching, to hear them lay their lives out like
smorgasbords — “Oh, this is so tasty” and “I think you’ll like that” and
“Here’s
an interesting morsel”; and Susan would taste, and say by her kind face,
“You’ve
made such a good banquet, oh, these are all such delicious dishes. Thank you.”
But then people would bustle off to other vertical, thin, happening people
– the head of a major studio, a well-known actress, the director of a
major film
festival.

There was a woman there who is my age and we’re the same height. But she
is still quite thin, and now I’m part of the comfy underwear set. She has the
body of a 20-year-old, toned and buff, and she drank mineral water and ate
celery sticks, like the eat-no-evil monkey. And I decided then and there
that I must become thin again. I would wake up the next day, go for a run,
and then get into The Zone. Eat more meat, fish, eggs, bacon. Maybe I would
get a housekeeper to get my son ready for school, while I was at the new
Pilates studio in Mill Valley. And she would have bacon waiting for me when
I returned.

Susan got up and went inside for a moment and I said, smiling to my
other friend, “God, she has always been so skinny.”

Now, through the window I could see that Susan still looked
extraordinarily beautiful, radiant, attentive, gentle. But I kept thinking of
all the women in my childhood who let themselves go, and how my father watched
them and let me know that it was disgusting to him. The softness of women’s
bodies, the thighs that are not like a man’s, the joy and abandon in all kinds
of food, the lack of self-control.

My friend smiled and finished up her first serving of dessert. I sucked
on another blueberry. I actually dislike blueberries. I picked one up and
tossed it into the bushes. “I hate blueberries,” I told my friend.

“Then why don’t you go get some cake?”

I didn’t answer for a moment. “Because Susan’s stomach is fat,” I said.

“No, it’s not. She’s just not skinny anymore.”

I thought about this for a minute and went back to savoring the image of
how lean I would be after all that bacon. I sucked on this hope like a
Lifesaver. But when I turned to listen to something my friend was saying, I
realized I was looking at her through my father’s eyes, seeing what he would
have seen, which was someone he didn’t want to sleep with. This is where I
got my sense of beauty: women my father wanted to fuck. My friend looked so
beautiful, rosy, basking in the sun, while I sat eating food I didn’t like.
And then in my mind there was a fluid, undulant movement, like the shiftings
inside a lava lamp, and after a minute I said, “I think when I need a daddy,
I start to become him. I channel this ancient disgust, so I can be with him
again. It’s like … Norman Bates.”

My friend looked at me gently. “Could you channel someone nicer?”

So I did. First I channeled Grace Paley, and then Whoopi Goldberg, and
then my friend Susan, who was still in the house. And all of them thought I
should have some dessert. I got up and went inside. I got some cake, with a
ladle of hot chocolate sauce, crème fraîche, raspberries on the side.

“Don’t you want some blueberries?” the dessert caseworker asked.

“No, thank you,” I said. “I hate blueberries.”

I walked back outside with my dessert and sat on the long wooden bench.
My friend with the big butt tried to get me to give her a bite, as a finder’s
fee, but I held up my fork in a threatening way. It was so delicious. I ate
while we watched a long-haired man with a didgeridoo set up in the garden. A
didgeridoo is one of those long, tubular Australian instruments that Aborigines
play; they are termite-hollowed logs. The man blew into his didgeridoo, and
out came a low windy moan, dirgelike, eerie. I finished my cake, put the
plate down on the ground, then closed my eyes to the party, to the sky, so I
could hear better. I felt someone sit down on the bench beside me, and I knew
that it was Susan. I reached for her hand without opening my eyes. The
voice of a didgeridoo is a call from far away, centuries old. If you
pressed your ear to the earth, it’s the sound the earth would make. Some of
the notes are like an enormous animal panting at the end of its life. I
opened my eyes and smiled at my two friends, who looked ripe and yielding and
soft, like things that were rising and ready to bake. The three of us shook
our heads in wonder at the man and the music he was making. It sounded like
an ancient God, or the way desert winds must have sounded to the first ears on
earth. If it were a color, it would be rich and planty purple, like eggplant,
earthy with light behind it.

But then Lara develops an obscure metabolic disorder and gains weight.
A lot of weight — within a few months, 100 pounds. Before,
she had joked that she’d rather be dead than fat. Now she begins to grapple with how obesity reshapes her life. She loses
control over her main source of power, her body, gaining weight even on a
monitored semi-starvation diet. No more size 4 dresses — now she drives to the other
side of Nashville, where nobody knows her, to shop at Lane Bryant. Her parents accuse her of sneaking food into her room late at
night, eating when they aren’t looking. Though her boyfriend says he still loves
her, it’s obvious he’s no longer attracted to her. Her classmates call her “lard ass.”

Along the way, however, Lara comes to see things that were hidden in the shadows of her thin, picture-perfect life.
For the first time, she recognizes that her parents care more about
appearance than anything else — and that her father is having an
affair with a younger woman. She throws away her
pageant persona and learns to speak what’s
really on her mind, even at the risk of standing alone with her
opinions. But she discovers that even that’s not so bad — as
outcasts, she realizes, fat people have a freedom that insiders rarely possess.

Lara becomes a stronger person, but still, she’s only human. She continues to look down on
obese people — after all, she has a metabolic disorder while
other fat people are slovenly overeaters. At the book’s end,
Lara is beginning to lose some of the weight, although neither she nor her doctor
knows if she will ever lose it all. By then it doesn’t even really matter:
She has come to accept herself and a new group of friends, many of whom
are overweight.

“Life in the Fat Lane” is sure to strike a chord among teen girls and
young women. Author Cherie Bennett knows what’s on girls’ minds: Her teen advice
column “Hey, Cherie!” is syndicated
and she has written numerous young adult novels, including the
award-winning “Did You Hear About Amber?” and all 40 installments of
the wildly popular “Sunset Island” series. Her address is printed in
the back of most of her books with a note telling readers that they
can write her. And do they. After a new book is released, she receives an average of 150 letters a week from girls and
boys ages 9 to 18. One wall of her office is covered with photographs of kids who have sent
her their pictures. But Bennett’s novel will also enlighten
parents. As she has discovered touring
the country speaking to groups of mothers and daughters, the issues of
weight and looks never fail to create household tension.

Salon spoke recently with Bennett, who lives in Nashville.

What prompted you to write “Life in the Fat Lane”?

It was a combination of things. One is that I’d gotten around
10,000 letters over the last seven years from kids, and second only to
the letters about love and sex were those about weight and body
image. I have a whole stack of them. They would just break your heart.
I’ve gotten everything from “I weigh 250 pounds and school is a living
hell and I want to kill myself” to “I’m in the binge-and-barf club at
my school and we’re the popular girls but what people don’t know is
that every day we go to the bathroom and barf together.” These
binge-and-barf clubs of the cool girls are a trend that’s going around
the country.

You mean these girls are out about it?

In some places nobody knows
about it, and in others people know about it but it’s
considered cool. The weight and body image letters are the scariest letters I’ve
received. Girls who wear a size 12 or 14 or 16 refer to themselves as “disgusting fat pigs” — and they mean
it. It’s become such
a cultural obsession, and it is killing — literally and figuratively,
spiritually and emotionally — a generation of young
women.

I also have a personal interest in this issue. I was a fat teenager.
Actually, I wasn’t all that fat, but I was fatter than other kids, and
I suffered for it. So when I get these letters, I know exactly how
these girls feel. Lara’s journey was not literally my journey, but her
pain is something that I knew. As an adult, I lost weight. I was round. I had
crossed that line from fat to voluptuous. But around eight years ago,
I got rheumatoid arthritis and was really sick. I was bedridden, then
in a wheelchair, then walked with a cane. One of the drugs I started
on was prednisone, which is a steroid. Plus I couldn’t exercise, I
could barely walk. And if you take steroids and get no physical exercise, and
you have a genetic propensity to gain weight in the first place, and
you have utterly wrecked your metabolism with the diet thing from the
time you were a kid, you gain weight — and gain weight and gain
weight. That’s exactly what happened to me.

How much weight?

Eighty pounds. I remember looking in the mirror and seeing my face
blowing up like a balloon, because steroids do that to you. They make
your face get round and they cause you to gain weight in the middle of
your body. I would put on something one day and it would fit, and the
next day it wouldn’t fit. So even though I didn’t have the disease in
the book, it felt exactly the same. I felt like this monster thing had
invaded me and there was nothing I could do about it.

Did people treat you differently after you gained weight?

Absolutely. Interestingly, as a fat woman you become both an
object of ridicule for taking up too much space and invisible at the
same time. You are no longer looked at sexually by the majority of
men. Thin people, especially
women, feel superior. They think, I
can control my appetite and she can’t. People
would very patronizingly offer me their diet plans.

You know, we don’t know anything by looking at people from the
outside, but people assume they do. I couldn’t wear a
sign that said, “Excuse me, I’m taking large amounts of prednisone and
I can’t walk across the room; ergo, I’m gaining all this weight. It’s
not because I have an uncontrollable appetite and eat 24 hours a
day. Thank you.”

Did you fall victim to the thought process that Lara goes through in the book? “I’m fat because of this disease, not because I overeat.
Other people are fat because they overeat.”

Somewhat. But as an adult, I had some maturity and insight
that she doesn’t have.

A lot of people make fun of Alicia Silverstone and Kate Winslet
for being fat and looking like “pigs.” These are two young women who
are anything but overweight.

It’s a perfect example of the kinds of pressures that exist now
that didn’t exist 20 years ago. My mom’s generation wanted to look
like Marilyn Monroe — and that was tough enough for many women. Then
the standard got thinner and thinner. By today’s standards Marilyn
Monroe is fat. Now not only do you have to be thin, you have to be
thin and buff. The standards are always a little too difficult to
attain. And women stay insecure. They stay feeling that they have to
buy products and do things to be OK.

The first thing we have to get across to girls is that who you are is
not the size you wear. You can be unhappy with the size you wear and
still be happy with yourself. I don’t know anyone who’s happy with
every aspect of herself. If your body size defines who you are,
there’s a real problem there.

If I say to a 13-year-old, “Madeleine Albright is not obsessing
about her fat thighs when she goes in to the U.N.,” that
13-year-old is going to say to me, “Well, I don’t want to look
like Madeleine Albright.”

But does she want to be Madeleine Albright?

Some do. They want to be Madeleine Albright and look like Gwyneth Paltrow.

So your book is an answer to that point of
view.

I hope it’s the beginning of standing up and saying, “We’re not
going to take this anymore.” We created this insanity, so we can change it. Call me
crazy, but I really believe that. If one size 14 model appeared with a size 8 model in the pages of
Seventeen, everybody would be shocked at first.
Then let’s say the next month there are two size 14
models. This begins to change people’s
perspective. What is shocking at first eventually becomes normal, and
normal becomes acceptable. And when it’s acceptable and part of the
culture, then a 15-year-old boy is not going to feel like he
can’t ask out the girl who wears a size 14 because his friends are
going to rag on him.

By the end of “Life in the Fat Lane,” Lara learns to accept
herself. While I wouldn’t say that she’s happy, I think it’s fair
to say she’s content. In the context of the book, her transformation
works. But in reality, do you think a girl who gains 100 pounds would learn
to accept herself the way Lara does?

I think she’d be a hell of a girl if she could. You know, nobody
whom I’ve known, at 17 or 70, decides, “I’m
OK,” and then feels OK every day that she wakes up. There would be many days that she would wake up and hate
the way she looks and hate the things that people say
to her. Because as long as we live in
a world that is telling girls that their worth is based on their size,
any teenage girl is going to want to get thin. What we have to do is
change the message. That is part of our responsibility as adults.

Yet Lara’s parents are incredibly
superficial and self-centered, and you make it clear that they are a
major cause of Lara’s problems. Have your letter-writers complained
about much the same thing to you?

Yes. The good news is that a lot of kids out there really like
their parents — more so than I think people appreciate. But I get a
lot of letters from girls who have problems with their parents. The
whole thing with mothers and daughters and weight is a really big
issue. If the generation of women with teen daughters obsesses about
weight, how are we supposed to raise a generation of girls who don’t?
The mom, being enlightened, will often say to her daughter, “Honey,
you’re fine just the way you are. All that matters is that you’re
healthy.” But it’s lip service, it’s
bull.

Even if the parent really believes that, nobody else does.

Even if the mom believes it 80 percent of the
time, it’s only part of what she believes. There are other messages.
One of them is: “Oh my God, I don’t want my daughter to be fat because
I know how painful it will be for her if she’s a fat teenager, so I
will help her to lose weight.” Another message is: “I really want my
daughter to be thin because she’ll have so much more fun, and I
can vicariously have fun with her. She’s going to have dates and be
popular, and after all, isn’t that a reflection on me, her mother?”
Or if the mom is fat, she often feels guilty if the daughter is
fat. But if she’s thin, then
she’s proven she’s a good mother.

What do you tell mothers when you speak to mother-daughter groups?

I say that first of all you have to get OK with your own body. Then, as difficult as this is — and
this is very difficult for a lot of mothers who mean well — short of a true medical problem, your daughter
should not go on a diet if she is 10 or 12 or 14.

So how does a mother who wants to lose 15 pounds herself maintain
an anti-diet message for her daughter?

First of all, I think she should examine why she wants to lose 15
pounds. Does she really need to? Or is it her own obsession with
wearing a size 6 instead of an 8 or size 10? Then I would say she needs to approach
weight loss from a health point of view and not from a denying-of-food
point of view. I am pro-athletics for girls because athletics make you
feel strong and confident in your body and healthy and have nothing
to do with guys or being looked at as a sex symbol. So if the mom
becomes more athletic and more fit and toned, and ends
up losing weight, then more power to her. Then she’s a good role model
for her kids.

Some of your other young adult books, such as “Girls In Love” and “The Bridesmaids,” are
designated as romances. Yet you don’t seem to write in the traditional romance formula.

Scholastic, the publisher, has characterized those books as
romance novels because that helps to sell the books. Every book I’ve written is a girl-empowering, girl-advocate
book. Many of them have an element of romance to them, but I have
never written a “romance.”

Does the characterization bother you?

It bothers me in the sense that I know what the romance novel
formula is and these books are not that. In adult fiction,
there is something called “women’s fiction,” which is about a woman’s
journey. But there is no such delineation for young adult fiction, there is no “girl-empowering” category,
which is too bad.

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B O O K++I N F O R M A T I O N:

“LIFE IN THE FAT LANE”
BY CHERIE BENNETT DELACORTE PRESS260 PAGES

In the courtroom were members of various “fat acceptance” groups, on hand to provide Corrigan support. They will be there again today when the preliminary hearing in the Corrigan case begins.

The case became a media feeding-frenzy, with the story of Christina’s death making the front pages of Bay Area newspapers. “A lot of news reports have focused on the weight of Christina, but that doesn’t matter at all,” said Detective Don Horgan of the El Cerrito Police Department, one of the first officers to arrive on the scene. “She was lying in her own filth. It wouldn’t matter if she was 30 years old or 50 or 80 or if she weighed two pounds or 5,000 pounds. This case is going to trial because of the conditions the girl was living in.”

But Marlene Corrigan’s lawyer, Michael Cardoza of San Francisco, believes the case is mired in anti-fat bias. Pointing the finger at the investigating coroner, Cardoza said that no internal autopsy was performed on Christina’s body and that the official cause of death — congestive heart failure due to morbid obesity — is simply a catch-all conclusion used when obese people die. “Marlene Corrigan asked them to perform an autopsy but all they did was examine Christina externally,” Cardoza said. “She could have died from choking on a chicken bone! The coroner was simply lazy.”

Regarding the neglect charge, Cardoza denies that the Corrigan house always looked the way it did on the day Christina died. “Adolescents are not neat. What was her mother supposed to do, be her kid’s maid? Christina showered and took care of herself.” What about Christina’s physical condition? “Her mother never saw any bed sores,” Cardoza said. “Marlene made clothes for her daughter. She wrote a letter to Richard Simmons asking for help. Christina lived in good condition until the dam broke.”

Last week Salon talked with Judy Freespirit of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), one of the organizations that rallied around Corrigan after the death of her daughter.

Why is NAAFA supporting Marlene Corrigan?

Well, I am supporting her because the media is making a circus out of this case. If this child had weighed 120 pounds and everything else had been equal, this story would not have made it to Page 30 of the newspaper, let alone Page 1. It is making front pages because the media has picked up on the fact that this is about weight. They would not be prosecuting this woman if the child hadn’t weighed so much. Now the prosecutor is saying that weight is not an issue, which is so obviously a lie — the issue is fat. Part of NAAFA’s purpose is to educate the public. Anywhere where the issue is fat, NAAFA is going to come in because a lot of miseducation is going on in a case like this.

So you think Marlene Corrigan is being targeted primarily because she was the mother of a fat child?

We’re very concerned about the chilling effect this is going to have on mothers of fat kids. Parents might now start pressuring their kids even more, because they are afraid they are going to get sent to jail if their kids get too fat.

What about all the other circumstances in this case — such as the fact that Christina was found in terrible condition, seemingly uncared for? You might be supporting a woman who was a really bad mom.

You are innocent until proven guilty. If she did anything really terrible, that is not what we are defending. We are defending her right to a fair trial, to a fair hearing, which she is not going to get if there is the kind of prejudice that has traditionally existed in the courts over the issue of fat. This is a single mother, working full time, with a 13-year-old child. Let’s say she wasn’t clean — you can’t wipe a 13-year-old’s ass.

Still, people are looking at this case thinking it is horrific and that someone should be held responsible, because this child was a child. And that someone would be the adult living with her, in this case her mother.

The information about how to deal with physical things for someone that size is not readily available. Over the years we have developed a lot of things, like gadgets you can use to help reach places that are hard to reach, but this mother would not have known about that. We know that the child didn’t go to a doctor for a number of years; she refused. Any single fat person will tell you that going to the doctor is a nightmare. To try to get this child to go, when she can’t physically lift the child — there are a whole lot of assumptions that people are making about what this mother should have done. They didn’t walk in her shoes.

Couldn’t a doctor have come to the house?

The family had Kaiser Permanente insurance. Have you ever tried to get a doctor to do this? This is all conjecture, but I think that this mother must have been quite overwhelmed. I will be at the trial to find out what is happening, and even if she is guilty of some things — there are things that she is not guilty of that she is being prosecuted for, like being responsible for the child who weighed 680 pounds.

People have been astounded at Christina’s size. In NAAFA’s view, is there such a thing as being too fat?

It is not for us to decide that. We don’t know why she weighed what she did. It is very possible that there was something physically wrong. This child, until she was 3, was on some kind of medication for the treatment of grand mal seizures. When she stopped taking it, she suddenly gained a lot of weight. This tells us something. She fell through the medical system’s cracks. You cannot eat enough to weigh 680 pounds at age 13 if your body is functioning properly.

In your opinion, who is responsible for Christina Corrigan’s death?

I think that there were a lot of people who were responsible. I think that the medical establishment failed her. She did not get adequate medical care, or she would not have gotten so terrified that she wouldn’t go see a doctor. I think the schools failed her, they let her fall through the cracks when she was supposed to go from elementary school to junior high. I think that a society that tells her that she is not OK, that she is a freak, has failed her. I don’t think that there is anybody who isn’t guilty.

Including her mother?

Her mother is part of this culture. She is oppressed in this culture the way everybody else is. I am not saying she is guilty of anything that could put her in jail. I don’t know. We will see what happens at the trial. I am not saying she’s not guilty, and I am not saying she is guilty. She is no more guilty than you and me, who allow this kind of attitude to keep going without rationally looking at it.

But you and I weren’t living in the house.

We don’t know the details. The mother was raised in this culture and must have felt that she wasn’t a good mother. I don’t know this, but everybody was telling her she was a bad mother. Her own sister turned her into the authorities several years ago. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t doing the best that she could do. It is an impossible situation. It is impossible to be the parent of a child this big. If the child had any other disability — and I would say that a 680-pound child at the age of 13 is disabled, she couldn’t walk — the mother would not ordinarily be blamed for the child’s disability, except in the case of crack. If she had seizures, or was in a wheelchair, people would have seen the mother as almost a martyr. But with a child who is fat, not only would she have to deal with this disabled child, but with the disapproval of everyone around her and the blame that, somehow, she should have stopped her daughter from eating.

In the courtroom were members of various “fat acceptance” groups, on hand to provide Corrigan support. They will be there again today when the preliminary hearing in the Corrigan case begins.

The case became a media feeding-frenzy, with the story of Christina’s death making the front pages of Bay Area newspapers. “A lot of news reports have focused on the weight of Christina, but that doesn’t matter at all,” said Detective Don Horgan of the El Cerrito Police Department, one of the first officers to arrive on the scene. “She was lying in her own filth. It wouldn’t matter if she was 30 years old or 50 or 80 or if she weighed two pounds or 5,000 pounds. This case is going to trial because of the conditions the girl was living in.”

But Marlene Corrigan’s lawyer, Michael Cardoza of San Francisco, believes the case is mired in anti-fat bias. Pointing the finger at the investigating coroner, Cardoza said that no internal autopsy was performed on Christina’s body and that the official cause of death — congestive heart failure due to morbid obesity — is simply a catch-all conclusion used when obese people die. “Marlene Corrigan asked them to perform an autopsy but all they did was examine Christina externally,” Cardoza said. “She could have died from choking on a chicken bone! The coroner was simply lazy.”

Regarding the neglect charge, Cardoza denies that the Corrigan house always looked the way it did on the day Christina died. “Adolescents are not neat. What was her mother supposed to do, be her kid’s maid? Christina showered and took care of herself.” What about Christina’s physical condition? “Her mother never saw any bed sores,” Cardoza said. “Marlene made clothes for her daughter. She wrote a letter to Richard Simmons asking for help. Christina lived in good condition until the dam broke.”

Last week Salon talked with Judy Freespirit of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), one of the organizations that rallied around Corrigan after the death of her daughter.

Why is NAAFA supporting Marlene Corrigan?

Well, I am supporting her because the media is making a circus out of this case. If this child had weighed 120 pounds and everything else had been equal, this story would not have made it to Page 30 of the newspaper, let alone Page 1. It is making front pages because the media has picked up on the fact that this is about weight. They would not be prosecuting this woman if the child hadn’t weighed so much. Now the prosecutor is saying that weight is not an issue, which is so obviously a lie — the issue is fat. Part of NAAFA’s purpose is to educate the public. Anywhere where the issue is fat, NAAFA is going to come in because a lot of miseducation is going on in a case like this.

So you think Marlene Corrigan is being targeted primarily because she was the mother of a fat child?

We’re very concerned about the chilling effect this is going to have on mothers of fat kids. Parents might now start pressuring their kids even more, because they are afraid they are going to get sent to jail if their kids get too fat.

What about all the other circumstances in this case — such as the fact that Christina was found in terrible condition, seemingly uncared for? You might be supporting a woman who was a really bad mom.

You are innocent until proven guilty. If she did anything really terrible, that is not what we are defending. We are defending her right to a fair trial, to a fair hearing, which she is not going to get if there is the kind of prejudice that has traditionally existed in the courts over the issue of fat. This is a single mother, working full time, with a 13-year-old child. Let’s say she wasn’t clean — you can’t wipe a 13-year-old’s ass.

Still, people are looking at this case thinking it is horrific and that someone should be held responsible, because this child was a child. And that someone would be the adult living with her, in this case her mother.

The information about how to deal with physical things for someone that size is not readily available. Over the years we have developed a lot of things, like gadgets you can use to help reach places that are hard to reach, but this mother would not have known about that. We know that the child didn’t go to a doctor for a number of years; she refused. Any single fat person will tell you that going to the doctor is a nightmare. To try to get this child to go, when she can’t physically lift the child — there are a whole lot of assumptions that people are making about what this mother should have done. They didn’t walk in her shoes.

Couldn’t a doctor have come to the house?

The family had Kaiser Permanente insurance. Have you ever tried to get a doctor to do this? This is all conjecture, but I think that this mother must have been quite overwhelmed. I will be at the trial to find out what is happening, and even if she is guilty of some things — there are things that she is not guilty of that she is being prosecuted for, like being responsible for the child who weighed 680 pounds.

People have been astounded at Christina’s size. In NAAFA’s view, is there such a thing as being too fat?

It is not for us to decide that. We don’t know why she weighed what she did. It is very possible that there was something physically wrong. This child, until she was 3, was on some kind of medication for the treatment of grand mal seizures. When she stopped taking it, she suddenly gained a lot of weight. This tells us something. She fell through the medical system’s cracks. You cannot eat enough to weigh 680 pounds at age 13 if your body is functioning properly.

In your opinion, who is responsible for Christina Corrigan’s death?

I think that there were a lot of people who were responsible. I think that the medical establishment failed her. She did not get adequate medical care, or she would not have gotten so terrified that she wouldn’t go see a doctor. I think the schools failed her, they let her fall through the cracks when she was supposed to go from elementary school to junior high. I think that a society that tells her that she is not OK, that she is a freak, has failed her. I don’t think that there is anybody who isn’t guilty.

Including her mother?

Her mother is part of this culture. She is oppressed in this culture the way everybody else is. I am not saying she is guilty of anything that could put her in jail. I don’t know. We will see what happens at the trial. I am not saying she’s not guilty, and I am not saying she is guilty. She is no more guilty than you and me, who allow this kind of attitude to keep going without rationally looking at it.

But you and I weren’t living in the house.

We don’t know the details. The mother was raised in this culture and must have felt that she wasn’t a good mother. I don’t know this, but everybody was telling her she was a bad mother. Her own sister turned her into the authorities several years ago. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t doing the best that she could do. It is an impossible situation. It is impossible to be the parent of a child this big. If the child had any other disability — and I would say that a 680-pound child at the age of 13 is disabled, she couldn’t walk — the mother would not ordinarily be blamed for the child’s disability, except in the case of crack. If she had seizures, or was in a wheelchair, people would have seen the mother as almost a martyr. But with a child who is fat, not only would she have to deal with this disabled child, but with the disapproval of everyone around her and the blame that, somehow, she should have stopped her daughter from eating.