I’m rereading Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me for class this week. The heroine, Min, has — thanks to her mother, her ex-boyfriend, and Society — significant body image issues, which create a barrier to satisfying relationships with men in general, and Cal, the gorgeous hero, in particular. The following conversation takes place about a third of the way into the book. At this point, Min and Cal are attracted to one another, and are spending some time together, but are resolutely “not dating”:
“Yeah,” Min said dismissively. “So what am I supposed to do about my weight?”
Cal put his fork down. “All right. Here’s the truth. You’re never going to be thin. You’re a round woman. You have wide hips and a round stomach and full breasts. You’re . . .”
“Healthy,” Min said bitterly.
“Lush,” Cal said, watching the gentle rise and fall of her breasts under her sweatshirt.
“Generous,” Min snarled.
“Opulent,” Cal said, remembering the soft curve of her under his hand.
“Zaftig,” Min said.
“Soft and round and hot, and I’m turning myself on,” Cal said, starting to feel dizzy.
“Do you have anything on under that sweatshirt?”
“Of course,” Min said, taken aback.
“Oh,” Cal said, ditching that fantasy. “Good. We should be eating. What were we talking about?”
“My weight?” Min said.
“Right,” Cal said, picking up his fork again. “The reason you can’t lose weight is that you’re not supposed to lose weight, you’re not built that way, and if you did manage through some stupid diet to take the weight off, you’d be like that chicken mess you just made. Some things are supposed to be made with butter. You’re one of them.”
It would be hard to overstate the significance of Min’s feelings about her body to this book. She doesn’t just have them, she talks about them, in every single scene with Cal, and in most other scenes. Even the very last page of the book has a reference to carbs. The repetition of themes or symbols (Krispy Creme Donuts, chicken marsala, Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella etc.) throughout the novel is signature Crusie, of course. Some readers find that Min’s focus on her appearance makes her unlikeable. Others object to it on more literary grounds: that it’s not quite believable, yet is forced on readers for plot purposes (got to have a reason Min and Cal can’t be together). Still others find it wholly believable and delight in a truly large heroine coming to terms with her size.
What do you picture when you picture Min, based on the above dialogue? I’ve gathered some photos, deliberately choosing ones in which the subjects are public figures posing for the press, and in general, looking fantastic (That is, no “shaming” pics of Kristie Alley in her bathrobe and bedhead grabbing her morning paper on her doorstep).
Kirstie Alley after weight loss
Actor Nikki Blonksy
Actor Melissa McCarthy
Min is described as having “smooth milky skin, wide-set dark eyes, a blob of a nose, and that lush, soft, full, rosy mouth.” Here’s how I picture Min:
Model Crystal Renn
Renn is model who suffered from anorexia, recovered, gained a lot of weight, wrote a book, had great success as a larger model, then lost all the weight, and has been criticized for it. (Renn also got in trouble in September 2011 for allowing her eyes to be “stretched” with tape for a Japanese Vogue shoot). In 2010, at a Glamour event, former Sports Illustrated cover model Paulina Porizkova stood next to Renn, noting that although they were the same size (Paulina hasn’t gained weight in 20 years, I guess), today Renn is considered a plus sized model.
Conceptions of what is “zaftig”, “overweight”, “lush”, not only change over time, as the exchange between Paulina and Crustal indicates, but differ from person to person. As Renn has said, of reading blog comments,
one person will say, ‘Wow, she’s so fat. Look at her. She’s so obese.’ And then right underneath, someone else will say, ‘Look how emaciated she is. She’s so anorexic.’ Fat is relative. One person’s thin is someone else’s so-called fat.
Whenever we read, we have to fill in details about the physical appearance of the characters. As I was rereading Bet Me this time around, I realized that it mattered to me just how big Min was, that I was really trying to nail it down. I’ve even written a blog post about it! I’m guessing that’s partly the result of the fact that my attention was drawn over and over to the issue by the text, but that’s not all of it. There’s also my own complicity: my own anxiety and heightened interest in size due to being a woman living in a culture that is keenly interested in this question, and sharing that concern myself. Read this way, this whole post is just an exercise in further “policing” Min.
This is one of the things we’ll talk about in class today.
Related posts:
I was bored with all the weight talk and the repetitive Chicken Marsala is Fantastic! I Must Have Another! chorus. Probably because I felt the whole thing felt forced, detached and, as odd it may sound, insincere. I’d not be surprised if I’m the only one who thinks this because quite a few readers looked at me as if I’d lost marbles.
A novel usually have the “this is fiction” vibe, but Bet Me has those faint outline traces of a Paint by Number painting. It’s all about the craft and art of writing, rather than the actual storytelling, basically. I’m not even sure if this makes sense. But yeah. I also think that book was where, for the first time, I didn’t like Crusie’s (or so I perceived at the time) love affairs with Martyrdom: the Hipster Edition and Being A Good Example to Aspiring Writers. I’d truly wanted to like it as I quite enjoyed Welcome to Temptation and some older category romances, but alas, Bet Me was the beginning of my break-up with Crusie. So heartbreaking.
I enjoyed Johanna Edwards’s The Next Big Thing quite a bit. It deals with weight & image issues, TV entertainment/reality TV, the internet, men and the society’s belief that fat equals lack of self-control.
Here’s hoping you’ll report back what your students have to say. I’m not too crazy about the premise of the book, altho the fact that they’re friends before lovers makes some of their early conversations friend to friend rather than “oh, my new bf validates and likes my size unlike my family of origin and former bf”.
Feeling truly comfortable in your own skin is an inside out process and it’s not superficial. Clearly Min is walking around with a real nasty internal soundtrack. Cal w/this palaver (below) about butter and diets just makes me cringe. Is he a nutritionist, a lifestyle expert, a trainer? Then where does he get off? In any case, obsessively talking about weight, donuts, butter, marsala, nope, not my cuppa.
Having read the book, I am guessing Min might be obese by medical standards (which are pretty narrow), but I would bet money (bet me!) that she isn’t supposed to be so large she has difficulty fitting into a seat on an airplane, or into a restaurant chair with arms. Does she ever even shop in the Women’s section? (Which my mother called the “Fat Ladies’ Section)?
All of the language in the book, to me, is saying Min isn’t really all that fat, that her mangled self-perception and the mangled perceptions of her family are at fault, and she is actually proportional and conventionally attractive. I’d go with one of the first two pics.
I do love how Crusie uses Cal’s pov to show what he finds hot about Min – I think that really works.
Though I’m sad Min is never truly cured of her fear, I feel it’s realistic that even love wouldn’t instantly erase a lifetime of obsession with self-image. I can see her relapsing into old thought patterns again and again after the HEA.
I read Min as Nigella Lawson-like because that word zaftig always seems to me to be about softness and shapeliness. I think talking about weight alone and not taking into account body shape and height as well as weight misses the point that if you are short and/or round like an apple in your torso and have no defined waist you will always be fat looking in people’s eyes even when you are not. These days I would think of the singer Adele as more representative of the description of Min’s body and general attractiveness. Like Min she isn’t coy and Nigella is unfortunately.
http://images.theage.com.au/2011/04/20/2317571/adele_729-420×0.jpg
Maili’s comment about weight and control is really interesting to me
because the situating of everything to do with being fat within the body of the person ignores how we construct bodies and identities in relationship to the world around us.
I should care about this issue. I really don’t.
I should care as a fat woman, but I don’t. I should care as a writer, but I don’t. I should care as a woman, period, and I still don’t.
Is Crusie part of the patriarchy, or is she merely reflecting the patriarchy when Min’s size is such a (excuse the imagery here) heavy-handed application of soft, pillowy, lush pats of butter? Or is she exorcizing her own body issue ghosts? (I’ve been told–don’t know if this is true–that Crusie doesn’t go to conferences as a speaker in part because she doesn’t like the way her hair looks and she’s self-conscious about it.)
In real life, my obesity (and I’m in Melissa McCarthy territory, only twice her age and half as cute) was an issue for about ten minutes before I married my first husband. I asked him how he felt about it, and he said sensibly that it was a package deal. If he wanted to marry me, then he was taking me as a total person. Then his voice changed, and he admitted shyly that, “It’s just that our heads fit together so well.” That’s pretty much the last time I worried about his opinion of my body.
As a writer, I find size doesn’t come up with my characters. I suspect that Elise, my heroine in Blackjack & Moonlight, is larger than some arbitrary height-and-weight chart would recommend. But she never thinks about it, and Jack never thinks about it (he thinks she’s gorgeous) and theirs are the only POVs in the book, so how’s it even going to come up?
To put that another way, if neither character cares what the other’s waist measurement is, that specific number isn’t going to be in the book. Add to that my personal belief that body issues are personal ones, so that each person should (optimally) have resolved them, made peace with them, or just shrugged them off before entering into a romance. I don’t think Min, or any woman, can calm her anxieties about her weight by having a man say, “Don’t worry, honey, you’re gorgeous and I love you just the way you are.” He might love her just the way she is, but she clearly doesn’t love herself yet.
Regardless of where negative body images come from (the patriarchy, one’s parents, peer pressure, or personal mishegas), adult women have to deal with them. It’s a valuable process, but (and this is just me) I don’t see it as relevant to a romance.
Your description of Bet Me is why I side-eye books that feature overweight heroines. I want to see more of them, but every single one I read the weight is always an issue–the heroines are constantly insecure and often the heroes don’t come across as simply liking /preferring the heroine’s looks as much as they fetishise them. Shannon McKenna does this and it’s partly why I stopped reading her–it’s like she’s overcompensating for society’s body ideal. I don’t want to be preached at when I’m reading fiction.
I’m certainly not immune to body insecurity, but I just can’t relate to the constant worrying romance heroines exhibit. I realize that that’s probably cultural–while I grew up with woman who talked diets I rarely saw the deep insecurity over body size, and a “zaftig” woman having an active dating life wasn’t an anomaly. When I read a book about a women whining because men just don’t find her attractive I wonder where she’s been looking.
@Maili:
You’re not alone, and while I agree with just about everything you wrote, this in particular struck a chord:
It makes perfect sense to me. I felt like I was reading something very constructed – to the point that I was more aware of the construction, and the effort that went into it, than the story and the characters. It was, for me, Crusie’s Greatest Hits with a Very Special Message, rather than a fresh and compelling story.
That’s not to say Bet Me is a bad book – but it is not one that I would care to revisit.
I like Bet Me and after years of Weight Watchers, I think Min’s characterization certainly reflects the experience of many, many woman who struggle with their weight as well as the way that they constantly think about fat and food. They have been defined by their body. Their identity is circumscribed by their relationship to food.
It isn’t that fat is just about body image. What fat shaming does is equate worth as a human being with weight. It isn’t just a sign of lack of self-control, it is a sign of moral turpitude. This is reflected in Bet Me by Min’s mother’s constant harping on her weight. Min’s mother makes her love conditional on Min’s weight. Min never gets praised for any other accomplishment. Her mother measures Min’s value as a person on Min’s dress size and reiterates over and over again that Min will never be valuable if she does not lose weight. I think we are supposed to infer from the incidents in the book that Min’s mother has always done this to her and that the reason Min is attached to her grandmother’s furniture is that it represents the unconditional love her grandmother gave her. This is attached to food as well. Of course it is. Food nourishes us. We use it in rituals and celebrations. We use it to get to know people, to offer comfort. We go to coffee or dinner in order to socialize. If you are constantly dieting you cannot participate in these experiences fully. If you are constantly dieting, you become hungry both literally and metaphorically. You are never satisfied because you can never be a part of the rituals of dinner or dessert, Thanksgiving, or communion, weddings or funerals, dating or friendship. And when you do, you feel that you have failed as a human being. Your humanity and your morality is defined by your ability to deny yourself food. And yet that denial prevents you from ever feeling full, both spiritually and physically. You become isolated from the shared experience of eating because you cannot eat without feeling like a criminal. You begin to believe that when you eat, you are committing a mortal sin. It is not just about feeling ugly on the outside, it is about feeling ugly on the inside.
Min’s mother talks about butter the way Puritans talk about the devil. What Cal is telling her in the above quote is not about nutrition or health, it is about love. He is telling her that there is nothing morally wrong with butter or morally wrong with her. More importantly, he is telling her that her value and appeal as a person is not based on food. The significance of Cal both feeding Min, giving her the cat (accidentally), and finding her grandmother’s snow globe shows us, the readers, that what he is actually giving her is acceptance and love without conditions.
If you think feeling good about your body as a fat person is easy, do a Google search for plus-size wedding dresses. Most of them are ugly, even by wedding dress standards. More importantly, they are rare and make up only a small percentage of the many, many wedding dresses out there. If you watch something like TLC’s “Say Yes To Dress” about bigger brides, you’ll notice that the brides try on the same five dresses in every episode. What does that say about the way our culture views fat bodies? That wedding dresses for fat women are so difficult to find? It’s as if the very lack of options for fat brides says to them, “You’regetting married?! Who would marry you?” Even though this is patently ridiculous and is demonstrably untrue, it echoes throughout our culture in so many ways that a woman who thinks of nothing but her weight is probably not as rare a bird as we’d like to hope/think.
Perhaps we wish that Min and other romance heroines were not like this because we hope we are not like this. But unfortunately, I think maybe the way Min thinks about her body and food is far more accurate than is comfortable.
P.S. This is what I think of when I think of Zaftig. All these ladies are much bigger than Min and super chic.
http://www.gabifresh.com/
http://www.leblogdebigbeauty.com/
http://jaymiranda.com/
http://an-olive-a-day.blogspot.com/
@Magdalen:
That is so romantic. I was thinking as I read this that I am most bothered by Min’s continuing obsession with her weight at the book’s end. Yes, it’s better, but she’s mentioning it when Cal’s clearly desperate for her. TMI time: Ironically, one of the few times I never think about my weight/body image is when I’m having sex. Sure, it helps that I’ve been with my husband forever and he contributed to the ways my body is less than “ideal” (hello, stretch marks and c-section scars). I’d probably be self-conscious with a new partner. But it’s also because I’m focused at those moments on how my body is able to give pleasure to me and someone else.
I understand Maili’s “paint by numbers” point, but I like Bet Me a lot. When I listened to it on audio, though, I realized this is a book I could fall out of love with, precisely because of the endless focus on Min’s body. I’ve had female friends like that (I went to a women’s college; after four years, pretty much everyone I knew had a disordered relationship to food and body image, to some extent). Sometimes you’d just have to stay away so you didn’t get sucked into it. I feel that way about Min.
And finally, @Lazaraspaste: that comment was so eloquent and wonderful. Thank you. And great links.
Thank you Lazaraspaste! That was an awesome comment and I could not agree more. As someone who has been “overweight” most of my life, I have done more than my fair share of obsessing over my body and how others judge me based on what they see. I have struggled with those issues you describe above, from finding my own wedding dress to participating in parties and rituals involving food.
For those interested in a different look at food and weight control, I strongly recommend Gary Taubes’ Why We Get Fat. Some of the statistics he presents in the beginning of the book about obesity in other cultures are startling, especially those involving women vs. men. I have had to face some of my own disturbing prejudices as well.
Fascinating post + comments. I have minimal tolerance for people who want to angst over their weight/diet/cellulite/ect. mostly because I am inevitably fatter than they are and perfectly happy- no need for others to be raining on my parade. Yet Min’s one-track “I’m fat” wank never bothered me, mostly because Bet Me takes meta to the next level.
I did appreciate one thing, however, and that was one of the last scenes where Min tries on Cal’s shirt after sex and it doesn’t button. That, I thought, was a very nice commentary about how those who deviate from the hyper-commercialized “norm” of sex/sexiness are forced to write their own script as to what constitutes romance, sexiness, ect. In reality, of course, we should all be writing our own individual stories of what makes us fall in love or at least revs our engines (“It’s just that our heads fit together so well.” = uber romantic Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane lurve in my book!). Yet everyone is walking around with their own particular social script (porn + rom coms + bad Cosmo advice + mom’s advice + Victoria’s Secret) and I think it makes many people unnecessarily anxious at how they deviate from the script, because if you don’t follow the script, how are you guaranteed your happy ending?
Great post and comments… I want to reread Bet Me now, because it’s one of the few books featuring a fat woman that I did not find offensive as a fat woman. I intensely dislike fetishizing, putting down of skinny women to make fat women seem better, and over focusing on weight as an issue, so the fact that I loved this book makes me pretty sure I didn’t perceive those issues in it on the first read.
I’d like to add, to LP’s terrific comments, a mention of Animal Vegetable Mineral by Barbara Kingsolver. I listened to it on audio shortly after joining Overeaters Anonymous and I was very struck by a point she made about how impossible it is to try to create a food culture out of deprivation. Food is very strongly connected to ritual and occasion and constantly being the beggar at the feast is a very depressing way to live ones life. I’m still a very grateful member of OA, but both body acceptance and food appreciation are important parts of my program.
I’m going to trying to piece together an argument I was making on Twitter yesterday, within the odd constrictions of the tweet format. Apologies for that. But now there is no character limit, and I will respond *excessively*.
I too remember finding Min and Cal tremendously appealing, both separately and together, and one of the reasons I come back to Crusie again and again is that the formula she espouses (and it is, as you note, quite formulaic, as becomes evident when you glom the whole backlist, as I, er, definitely did) fills me with a sense of warmth about bodily differences among other issues (I also like the occasional reminder that a HEA doesn’t look the same in every case, and it doesn’t always mean marriage and children, just as true love doesn’t always start with a mind-blowing tumble in the sack).
But I also found myself becoming exasperated with Min’s particular insistence, in the face of all kinds of contrary proof, on the limits of her own attractiveness. I think that has less to do with questions of the realism of that response (I’ve turned the conversation to realism! Don’t worry, I’m leaving it behind quite quickly.), which seems to me quite plausible (anxiety and neurosis are deep patterns of thought and behavior, and take time to respond to evidential reasoning, if they do at all), than it does with questions of how narrative shapes our readerly relationship to the protagonist.
What bothers me is when the anxiety or poor self-image of a hero or heroine becomes the primary obstacle to a HEA in the romance genre, and that obstacle is portrayed as irrational. This is because (it seems to me) that as readers we are sympathetically aligned with the drive to the happy resolution. Unless an obstacle is written carefully, emerges organically from the narrative, and is imbued with its own ethical urgency, my tendency is to view it somehow as the narrative enemy which needs to be swept away in order to achieve the necessary end.
This is fine if the obstacle is some piece of pure villainy, but when the obstacle is, say, a protagonist’s bad self-esteem – something that works outside of the realm of conventional narrative logic – I find myself in the terrible position of finding the obstacle (a human being’s self-worth!) merely exasperating. Why? Because the structure of narrative makes me long for a HEA, and this problem (this problem that defies logical solution) is standing in the way. I always find myself resenting a novel at the point where I find myself saying, “If only s/he could just… get over it”. It’s an unworthy response, and one that is produced by certain sorts of plots and certain treatments of characters’ anxieties. That sort of narrative belittles the complexity of human experience by portraying it as an irrational self-denial of happiness.
So what I like to see instead is romance where the deferral of HEA is created by obstacles rendered so that the reader empathizes with and respects (ethically and logically) both the obstacle and the protagonists. This requires great care when dealing with issues as complexly coded-by-culture as body image (or mental health, which is a similar obstacle I’ve seen mishandled in a lot of heroes, oddly. Why are these two sorts of obstacles so gendered?).
@Ariel/Sycorax Pine:
Also, I immediately thought of gorgeous Min as Miracle Laurie.
I was so delighted by the romantic turn on Dollhouse [SPOILERS] that took one hero her way, and rarely have I been so angry as Joss Whedon as when that romance was squandered in favor of the excruciating Eliza Dushku.
I’ve never read this book because everything I’ve ever seen written about it seemed to indicate it followed the trajectory disability-themed romances follow: character outside the norm repeatedly laments his/her otherness, uses it to keep love interest at arm’s length, love interest fetishizes the otherness/repeatedly proclaims how turned on he or she gets, HEA.
I was overweight only briefly in my short life, and I’m sure many women would scoff that my tight-fitting size 10 jeans ever qualified as fat. Just the other day I stuck my skinny foot in my mouth, chewed and swallowed with a fat comment on Twitter, so I clearly don’t understand life as a fat woman. However, I am physically disabled as all get out, and figure the two issues are sort of related, at least as far as how they inform romance narratives. If I make any crazy assumptions below, feel free to set me straight.
Weight and disability both have a strong tendency to depersonalize and desexualize people, though in different ways. Overweight people are depersonalized as “fatties” and scorned for not working harder to lose weight and fall into line with the norm. Disabled people are spared the scorn, but instead get the pity of non-disabled people who make assumptions about them and what noble, suffering martyrs they are. While different beasts, scorn and pity are two sides of the same shitty coin. Both reactions speak to society reducing you from an individual to an example, to people then ignoring your own story and personality to fit you into the narrative they have in mind already.
So my point, and I swear I have one, is that I have a hard time buying into romances that fetishize the other. Having the hero gush about the heroine’s curves is the weight equivalent of having the non-disabled heroine swoon over the disabled hero’s accomplishments in spite of his challenges. In both cases, the other character is still subjugated to his or her otherness. The traits the love interest is praising don’t really have anything to do with the individual. Popping a chubby over a heroine’s “softness” is as superficial as swooning in the face of her traditionally flawless beauty.
My favorite romance with an overweight heroine was “The Sweetest Tattoo.” The heroine is pink-haired, tattooed, size 16 woman whom the hero loves in whatever package she comes in. There’s no swooning over her curves, comparing her favorably to all the waifs in his past or him endlessly soothing her body image anxieties. He’s much more enamored of her attitude, her successful career as a tattoo parlor owner and how they share the experience of overcoming a rough childhood. It embodies Magdalen’s awesome comment, “It’s just that our heads fit together so well.” It’s not about loving someone despite/because of her body, it’s about loving her as a person. And that really should be what it’s all about.
I really liked this book and didn’t have a problem with the fixation on weight. Or chicken marsala. Cal’s comments strike me as romantic, not fetishy or unhealthy.
I read this when I was pregnant with baby 2, so maybe I was extra-soothed by the “men like soft curves” theme, which I believe to be true even when I’m not pregnant.
IIRC, however, Min’s mother was trying to get her to squeeze into a size 8. So I pictured Min as a 14 at the most. Maybe I have that wrong.
I think the Rachel Ray picture is closer to how I pictured Min while reading (and re-reading and re-reading) Bet Me. I love this book! Like Jill Sorenson pointed out: the mom trying to get her the size 8 seems indicative that Min is not exactly tipping the scales in reality, just not as skinny as she’s “supposed to be” according to her mother’s really really suspect opinion. The constant focus on Min’s weight seemed pretty organic to me since she was raised by such a critical mother. I don’t know any woman who’s satisfied with their own body and having been exposed to far too many Seventeen Magazines in the 1980s (instructions on how to make your imperfect face resemble a perfect face by the application of makeup, instructions on how to disguise imperfections in your figure, ad nauseum) I have had my share of self doubt and still do to this day. The constant chicken marsala eating on the other hand did get a little tiresome. I love a good chicken marsala; I do, but every time I read this book it’s the last food I want to eat for about a month!
In my mother’s vernacular, I thought of Min as ‘big boned’. She was a big girl, was always going to be a big girl, and she seemed old enough to me that she was way past the time to react as she did to what her mother thought. (I know, I know – a mothers influence is for a lifetime, but…isn’t that what maturity is all about?) What bothered me was that she did not reconcile herself to her physical attributes, but rather that it took someone other than herself – a man – to come to terms with her size.
I love Bet Me. It’s my favourite Crusie book and I’m a fan of her work generally. I’ve read the book and listened to it as well a few times and I have never been bothered by Min harping on about her weight. I noticed that it was an issue but I never grew impatient with her. I can certainly understand that after a lifetime of her mother, who was supposed to be one person who could be relied upon to love her without condition, telling her in every way possible that she was not lovable and not good enough unless she was a size eight, and the most recent ex referring to her as chunky (or something like that anyway), that she might not be inclined to trust a man who is gorgeous and who purports to think she is beautiful just the way she is. It makes sense to me that those fears don’t just go away and that a level of ongoing reassurance would be required. min covers it with snark and competence a lot of the time, or tries to anyway but she wants to be loved for who she is and she is scared that if she lets her guard down with Cal that she will have a hard time recovering. I still relate to that.
Everyone’s got their baggage. Mine isn’t so much weight related (although I’m by no means a stick) but it does relate to self worth. My husband accepts me as I am and I love him for it (and many other things) but I still need reassurance every now and then. Like Jill Sorenson and the very eloquent Lazaraspaste before me, I just didn’t have an issue with it.
As for what she looks like, I picture maybe a size 14/16 but with a bit of a tummy. A “normal” looking woman in other words. (as opposed to model-like). As it happens it seems men are often far less concerned with a flat tummy than women are and Cal’s attitude seemed right to me.
A dear friend has pushed Bet Me my way for years and I’ve always resisted. As a woman who has always, always, always been less (more?) than the ideal size by far I find that plus-size (or, as it seems in this case) average-size heroines really ruin the story for my by interfering with my willing suspension of disbelief. It’s because of my superior suspending skills that I enjoy so well reading romance and I find I can believe all kinds of crazy notions in the pursuit of a satisfactory HEA. Having lived my life as a large woman – and having enjoyed all the privileges that brings, such as men mooing at me out their car windows, restaurant servers asking me if I truly want the dessert I’ve ordered, and so much more – I simply cannot suspend the disbelief that a woman who looks like me could ever star in a romance narrative. My life experience would interfere with the reading process and I have no desire to read about women who look like me.
Anyway, yesterday I downloaded and read Bet Me, to gain some context for this discussion and…I agree with Pamelia that Min probably can’t be any larger than a size 14 or so, given the amount of weight she was supposed to loose to fit into the dress. At size 14, both Min and the book work for me because, for me, size 14 is ohmygod so slender and the last time I was at that size I was throwing up nearly everything I ate, but also had lots of attention from lovely men. If Min was written to be closer to my current size – which I will not disclose lest I trigger anyone reading – there is no way, none that I would believe anything that happened in that book. For me, love and acceptance come in spite of rather than alongside of my appearance. This is reality as I experience it and it’s a reality that doesn’t play well in my romance reading, Bet Me included.
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At the McDaniel Conference I talked about “writing the body” (you were elsewhere–tsk, tsk); involved with that “writing” is the construction of the woman and the body. Woman is confined by her biology and evaluated by size, shape and function. Heroines (in this case, Min) struggles to define themselves culturally, socially, morally and sexually and grapple withthe tangle of contradictions implied by those combinations.
US cultural definitions of female beauty are pretty narrow and specific. Crusie is challenging the issue of weight and size. Of course, Min is obsessed with it; she’s been taught that by the surrounding culture. Cal’s duty as hero is to convince Min that weight is not everything; he must reassure her of her value and beauty. By the end of the novel, the socio-cultural restrictions have been cast-off and denied. Crusie is writing and re-writing woman. Cixous would be happy.
What Maryan said!
Great discussion—I don’t think that I can add much to the discussion about Min—but I did want to note that Crusie carefully sets up Bet Me so that both Cal and Min are struggling with/against family expectations and self-image problems. And both have trouble committing to others in part because they have problems believing that anyone who truly knows them will respect or love them.
In the beginning Crusie sets it up that Cal appears more confident, more physically attractive, more successful than Min. In the bar scene not only does Min note how conventionally good looking Cal is (especially when compared to her), but the bet is trigger by the fact that Cal is successful at dating and business (which triggers Min’s ex’s jealousy). But as the book progresses Min and the reader find out that Cal’s parents disapprove of his profession (although he is highly successful) because they wanted him to become a lawyer and join the family firm. They also deliberately treat Cal’s dyslexia as a moral failing (if Cal just tried harder, he would overcome it and become a lawyer)—so their reaction is similar to the way that Min’s mother reacts to Min’s weight. Min is in a complex dance with her mother throughout the book; however, in the end there is no doubt that Min’s mother loves her–she just goes about expressing her love poorly. In part she does this because of her anxieties about her own body and her own fears that no one (especially her husband) will love her if she isn’t physically perfect. (In Bet Me women’s weight/body image issues are not just general cultural/social issues or personal problems, they are also a family tradition that is handed down from mother to daughter.)
Cal’s parents are clearly more emotionally withholding and cold than Min’s (just look at the two family dinner parties)—and the result is that Cal and his brother (and his brother’s wife and son) have had to struggle with their own self-worth issues. If Min is afraid of people seeing her as fat, Cal is sensitive to being seen as stupid.
[...] For this rambling blog post courtesy of the mess that is my mind, prompted by SLWendy’s innocent statement about Adele (quote: “I don’t get Adele. At all.”) and the comment thread on RRRJessica’s post on zaftig* heroines. [...]
Books about plus sized heroines are so ify for me. Being plus size and having real serious body issues myself regarding it, this is a particular niche I’m not comfortable reading about. While I enjoyed Bet Me overall, part of me was very uncomfortable with Min continually vocalizing her thoughts about her size to Cal. And I just couldn’t picture a woman with body image issues doing that really. In my own case, I never spoke to my husband about how insecure I was in that area of my life – meanwhile it had a huge influence over me and how and what I thought of myself.
I read He Loves Lucy by Susan Donovan and had such a loathing for that book and anger at the author from the very beginning. Right near the start of the book, the heroine chokes on a piece of candy and they are barely able to get their arms around her to perform the Heimlich Maneuver. It was played for laughs and I was so completely livid with the author for her total lack of empathy for this character – who was her HEROINE!!
I’ve read other books where the heroine suffered a very embarrassing moment in her school years due to her size and I feel her pain.
But for the most part, I avoid them like the plague. I live the issues those heroines have and I don’t want to bring it with me when I read to escape from life’s struggles.
Very interesting discussion. I quite like Bet Me, though it isn’t my favorite Crusie. I’m not bothered by Min’s focus on her weight because it felt very true to me. Like Kathryn, I feel that Min and Cal were both dealing with defining themselves against common assumptions by people important to them. If we look further at the rest of the major characters I think it was an issue for them as well. We just weren’t invited into their point of view to see their self-consciousness at work.
It’s been a while since I read it, but Tony is described by Liza as “bullet-headed” which I took to be a shorthand implication that he was more of a jock and a player than the thoughful guy we come to know. Liza is viewed by Roger and Cal as sharp and very hard-edged. By the end of the story we see that she is taking a fairy godmother role. Bonnie is cute and little and assumed to have a Napoleon complex by Tony and Cal. Roger is first described by Liza as big and dumb looking. Even Cal and Tony talk about watching him date being like watching a toddler play in traffic. Bonnie comes to see him as deliberate and thoughtful. Diana is seen as a princess, sweet and perfect – until her wedding.
So, although we focus on Min (and Cal) as the main characters of the story, all of them are dealing with image and self-image conflicts. Lots of layering there. Very typical of Crusie as you all have pointed out.
@Lazaraspaste:
i really like your point about Cal’s statement about butter being about love. yes.