Fat Swim, Emma Copley Eisenberg’s third book, is a collection of linked stories following a cast of characters as they reconcile their relationships with each other and with their bodies. These stories and tensions float in a common pool together, as both individual chapters and repeated characters rub up against power dynamics, digitality, and the way our bodies fit into the myriad containers of modern life. These diversely-bodied, queer characters share concerns that seem of this particular moment. Yet, Fat Swim is deft in its assertion that the corporeal, human body has its place in literary fiction, rendering the collection’s deceptively hyper-modern concerns both timely and timeless. It is the shape of this book, the shapes of these stories, and the book’s many-shaped fat bodies captured with dignity that make this collection stand out against the existing canon of American literary fiction.
The collection celebrates the human body and reckons with the many ambivalences that come with embodiment. “Beauty” follows a fat makeup influencer, Marion, and her complicated relationship to her provocative, fat-forward online presence after her previous work in the diet-wellness industry. As she receives an onslaught of messages from one of her fans, Marion thinks to herself: “It is not that I am in hell, or if I am, it is the most beautiful hell. […] My freezer is full of ice cream and also some frozen chili I made the other day, and my fridge is full of pears. But I am in Jenn’s hell, and in Beatrice’s too, and that of the Marion I was when I knew them” (89-90). Marion isn’t in hell, but she isn’t not in hell. Online, Marion is ridiculed because of her fatness and her increasingly ridiculous videos in which she uses more and more absurd quantities of makeup products. Marion lives in solitude, but it is a secure kind of solitude; she lives in an idyllic countryside among birds, foxes, and a black bear. Marion is alone, not pathetic. Her life may be a kind of hell to some, but the story indicates that it is enough for Marion to claim her autonomy. At the story’s end, Marion refuses to publicly post her most ridiculous video yet—her magnum opus—and instead saves it for herself. There is no need for Marion to shrink herself or provoke others with her body; it becomes hers alone.
In this collection, the body, its desires and relationships, embroil with each other, but these tensions never strip characters of their individual authority, nor do they reduce characters into objects for the reader to analyze. In “Swiffer Girl,” Hannah is haunted by the memory of illicit videos she watched during her adolescence after seeing a woman who reminds her of the subject of one of these videos in a public pool—the Swiffer Girl. As a teenager, Hannah worried her that relationship to her father was tainted due to her fascination with an incest fetish video. As an adult, she reflects: “. . . I know these facts don’t mean I actually wanted to have sex with my father, and I know that my father worried he was sex, just as I now worry I am. What happens to make sex huge, a force that can hijack a life, catapult it up into the air then slam it back down again, is a question I have often asked myself. But the answer is: anything” (160). The story follows Hannah’s ambivalent relationship to her body and its sexual desires. In her young adulthood, Hannah was convinced she was addicted to sex. As a married adult, the haunting of Swiffer Girl delays Hannah’s decision to have children. Hannah’s sexuality is not psychoanalyzed nor drawn into any kind of moral question through the story; instead, the narrative follows her as she teases through her own relationship to sexuality and family. The story is brave and honest in its assertion that sex and family can come into friction with each other, even if this friction occurs indirectly. In “Swiffer Girl” and the rest of the stories in Fat Swim, bodies, desires, and systems of power—like the patriarchal family—are assessed through their indirect, side-by-side relation to each other.
It is Eisenberg’s ability to harness these indirectly related tensions between fat bodies, desire, and power that makes Fat Swim special against the current landscape of literary fiction in which fat bodies and odd desires are flattened or rendered dramatically grotesque. In each of these brilliantly conversational and innovatively-structured stories, people are forced to face the reality of their bodies, their desires, and what those realities may mean for them. The book itself does this in its resounding final question, addressed to the writer of the story from her own body: “Without me, where would you be?” (219). By taking a final autofictional turn in which Eisenberg’s body directly addresses both herself and the reader at the end of collection, and by constructing a book unified by subjects underrepresented in literary writing, Eisenberg embraces the fluidity of fiction, a flowing body in which all kinds of categories and binaries melt and meld.
