Tag Archives: Larger than Death

Spinning a Dream that Includes Us–My Journey with Larger Than Death

Lynne Murray says:

cover for the new edition of Larger than Death

I spent a long time crafting a sentence that would introduce the heroine of my mystery series to the world. When I started reading it out loud at signings, people gasped on more than one occasion. Sadly, all these years later, I know it still shocks some people. Larger Than Death begins:

My name is Josephine Fuller and I’ve never weighed less than 200 pounds in my adult life—not counting the chip on my shoulder.

I wanted to write about a woman who was capable and self-confident, who didn’t suffer fools or put up with put downs. I consciously tried to evoke Raymond Chandler’s “I was calling on four million dollars.” opening from The Big Sleep.

Unlike Phillip Marlowe (Chandler’s detective protagonist), I wanted my heroine to respect the people she worked for, even if that respect was hard-won (on either side):

Friends sometimes call me Donna Quixote because tilting windmills is what I do for a living. How did I get started? I answered an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Need person of substance for special assignments: part bloodhound, part bulldog, part lone wolf. Job requires quick study, travel and communication skills. Must genuinely care about the advancement of women.”

As a matter of fact, I was feeling quite concerned about the advancement of women in general and myself in particular at the moment I read the ad. I had just landed in San Francisco for a breather and a much-needed infusion of salaried work after divorcing my husband, a world-class photographer, adventurer and philanderer.

In other words, I needed a job. Nothing permanent. After all I hadn’t stayed in one place for more than a few months for years.

One way of keeping people down is to trivialize their stories, another is to censor them from the public view except as objects of ridicule. The tremendously insightful feminist literary historian Susan Koppelman pointed this out during a recorded conversation with other authors and Pearlsong Press publisher, Peggy Elam.

[Entire conversation archived here]

Another thing Susan said that struck me was arithmetical. She asked when Larger Than Death came out. When I told her 1997, she said “Fourteen years ago.” I may be math-challenged, but I could have figured that out. Hearing her say it made me realize that for most of those years the Josephine Fuller books have been out of print.

And now they’re back.

I’m happy to say that this week an ebook edition of Larger Than Death will be published by Pearlsong Press, with a trade paperback coming out a few days later. The other three Josephine Fuller books are being reissued over the next several months.

I wrote the Josephine Fuller books with a clear agenda–to show a fat woman as the heroine of a mystery novel, doing what fat people do in real life–solving problems, falling in love, behaving heroically. I wanted life-sized characters and I worked as hard as I could to tell a good story, to be entertaining, and to write a book good enough to stand next to other mysteries.

When Josephine calls on her future employer, a multi-billionaire (rich characters need billions these days, four million dollars doesn’t impress anyone anymore), Mrs. Madrone gives her attitude and she gives it right back:

“You do seem to be a person of substance,” she remarked, looking me up and down just a shade shy of insolence.

I looked back at her in silence until enough time had passed for her to take my point.

“Mrs. Madrone, I never let size stop me and I don’t allow anyone to intimidate me. It took awhile, but I learned not to obsess about being larger than average. In my family it comes with the genes. Good health, great teeth and high IQ. You want any one of the above, you get the whole package.”

For a moment she retreated back into her shell, then she hitched her wheelchair forward and smiled for the first time since I met her. The smile made her young again and clearly she had once been a dangerous beauty. She looked as if she still had all her teeth and those brown eyes remembered pleasure.

For the first time since I’d rung the doorbell and entered that quiet mansion, I began to feel a glimmer of the spark her ad had kindled when I read it.

“How did you get such confidence?” she asked.

I told her about Nina.

My choice to write books telling stories that revolve around women and men whom society works so hard to exclude has not resulted in stunning success in the publishing industry. Those times I remind myself that every page I write spits in the teeth of powerful assumptions–wrong, but powerful nonetheless. The voice of truth crying in the wilderness is seldom associated with financial security.

This is my mission, it chose me and I chose it. No one promised me fame and fortune for doing what I love. But what I do means everything to me, so I keep doing it.

And, hey, if you want to buy one of my books, or books from the very few authors who challenge this particular stereotype, you can think of it as helping to fund the body-positive fiction revolution one page at a time–and reading a fun book too.

Roseanne Barr

Laurie and Debbie are on a blogging vacation, because they’re both at WisCon in Madison, Wisconsin. Debbie will be back next week. In the meantime, have another post from the wonderful Lynne Murray:

Lynne Murray says:

I recently read a long New York Magazine interview with Roseanne Barr, which is accompanied by some stunningly beautiful photos.

artistic head shot of Roseanne Barr

I’ve long loved Roseanne, and the article offers a fascinating glimpse into her greatest achievement, and it is well worth reading, just for the blow-by-blow dissection of how hard Roseanne had to fight to get her own truth and her comic genius a fair showing, when after her show was number one in the ratings, and one would assume she would have some clout.

Hollywood hates labor, and hates shows about labor worse than any other thing. And that’s why you won’t be seeing another Roseanne anytime soon. Instead, all over the tube, you will find enterprising, overmedicated, painted-up, capitalist whores claiming to be housewives. But I’m not bitter. Nothing real or truthful makes its way to TV unless you are smart and know how to sneak it in, and I would tell you how I did it, but then I would have to kill you.

I’m not bitter. I’m really not. The fact that my fans have thanked and encouraged me for doing what I used to get in trouble for doing (shooting my big mouth off) has been very healing. And somewhere along the way, I realized that TV and our culture had changed because of a woman named Roseanne Conner, whom I am honored to have written jokes for.

I’ve read a couple of Roseanne’s autobiographies. The first one influenced me most in that it included pictures of her at various weights. It came out when I was writing Larger Than Death, and I included a sequence where the heroine finds an album of photos taken of Nina, her role model in size acceptance, “At different ages. Different sizes.” This scene was directly inspired by Roseanne’s book [I’ve cropped my quote a little].

Most fat people have such a sequence of pictures. The first picture in the book showed Nina as a teenager, with the glowing energy of youth. At that age she must have been around a size fourteen—the largest size on the rack in most women’s clothing stores. Of course she felt fat and everyone told her she was unacceptable.
. . . In the next photo I scarcely recognized my old friend. She had lost a substantial amount of weight. She was wearing a tight sweater, very short micro-mini skirt, and an expression of frenzied animation. I had seen enough desperately dieting women to understand the forced gaiety in her face.
“Well, here it is, the Holy Grail. I’m finally at a normal weight. Why do I feel so crazy? I’m always thinking about food. I’m terrified to eat. Men’s heads turn when I walk by, women see me as competition. I’m getting the attention I always wanted. Why do I feel so driven and hopeless? What will happen to me if I gain weight again?”
Over the next series of photos she did.
. . . Her body testified that normal for it was not the size of the Nina in the micro-mini. In the last few photos I thought she looked glorious. Glowing with health and confidence, wearing clothing she had designed to show off a body she had come to accept and even celebrate. This was the Nina I’d known and loved.
As I looked at the last picture I realized that every one of Stack’s clients would call it a “before” picture and would suffer any pain or indignity to get to the slender “after” mode, never facing the fact that for many of them it was unnatural, even damaging to their health, and impossible to maintain.

I realized I was crying without knowing when I had started. [Larger Than Death, Chapter 35]

Like a lot of fans who feel they “know” Roseanne, I’ve always felt affection for her even when I’ve been saddened by her struggles with self-esteem, including gastric bypass surgery. While each person’s health care decisions are that person’s business, Roseanne’s had the unfortunate effect of canceling out some of her size positive message. I must note that this also is also her business–she’s a human being, not a walking role model, and she’s entitled to do what she wants based on her own feelings. But the upshot is that sites pushing the surgery list her as a celebrity victim. They don’t call her a “success” as they note that she regained much of the weight she lost. The gastric bypass community blames her for this, following the conventional commercial delusion that any weight regained is always the fault of the fat person. Roseanne appears to blame herself as well, judging by her joke: “Since I had my gastric bypass surgery in 1998, I eat like a bird. Unfortunately, that bird is a California condor.” That sort of comment saddens me even more.

On a positive note, I’m glad to hear that Roseanne seems to have found happiness with a compatible mate, growing macadamia nuts in Hawaii. She has a web presence that links to video clips, a radio show and her many causes.