‘Fat Swim’ and the Work of Having a Body

I was struck immediately when reading Emma Copley Eisenberg’s Fat Swim, a book of interconnected short stories, out today from Hogarth. In the opening story of the collection, also called “Fat Swim”, we meet Alice, eight years old, who lives on an avenue in West Philadelphia with her father, and who has confusing, relatable, and evolving thoughts about her own body. Alice, in a moment that seems like it may change her life forever, strikes up a friendship with the fat women who come to swim at the public pool in her neighborhood.

First, I was struck by the relationship between young Alice and her father. Much has been written in other reviews about the lovely, vivid descriptions of the fat women and persons Alice sees swimming in the pool across her stoop, which I love, and drew me deeper into the collection as a whole, but less about this: the emotional realities we glimpse through the windows and doors and stoops and neighborhoods Eisenberg’s characters inhabit, and to which we are only visitors.

Alice is fat, and she is lonely. As is her father, for reasons that will become clearer as the book progresses. But still, even in that opening, we see the way a lonely only child (and in this case functionally) single parent’s relationship borders shift. You go deeper, even when they try to protect you. And you are, at the end of the day, loyal to them. Tied to them, like the form you inhabit. There’s an emotional tenor here, and a lived bodily reality, which is so often removed from contemporary literary fiction.

Alice is precocious in ways I was and ways I was not. For Alice, early tendrils of desire, which are well-wrought though occasionally uneasy to read (in a good way), as her explorations of her body shift and go deeper, also allow her the power to acknowledge her own fatness, and even begin to appreciate it.

This, we learn, and perhaps we know, is just the beginning of the long hard work of having a body. Especially a fat one.

Let me deliver to you an image. I’ve lived in this city of seven hundred thousand people for years now, and I like it. I do. I like the Asian District and the many branches of libraries and knowing the secret best spot for coffee or lunch and going across the big empty field to walk at the community college. According to the Internet, and perhaps my own common sense, this broader metropolitan area hosts over 1.4 million people. I’m from a town that still bans the sale of liquor on Sundays. I read Fat Swim in my backyard mostly, at my camping table, but also in the lobby of the eye doctor, in a town of only 126 people, and in the middle of another field.

Philadelphia, I learned, isn’t that much larger a city than my own. One and a half million people in the city but with a greater metropolitan area of 6.33 million.

While most stories in Fat Swim, which is composed of ten tales, are set in Philly, a few go even further afield. One, to the Jersey Shore. A few to the wildness of Central Pennsylvania. But throughout, we are connected to Philly, to that web of millions of people. Picture it, won’t you.

Still, in Eisenberg’s detailed rendition, we live in the microcosm. The neighborhoods we enter function as townships in their own right. Though all are too liberal to ban the sale of alcohol, you still wonder what it might be like to be a part of them. One recognizable person out of many.

While there are ten stories in Fat Swim, there are many more than ten characters (many recurring), reflective of the community element present in all of Eisenburg’s work. In “The Dan Grave Situation”, we see the pervasiveness of alcohol and drinking problems in the MFA, queer solidarity in academia, loneliness as theme. In “Beauty,” the reality of a fat body. Tea tree soap and fibrous breasts and how one who wasn’t fat and now must reckon with the “consequences.” In “Mama,” Cara, who we met in “The Dan Graves Situation” and who is an important character to remember, recurs. We think, oh what a miraculous thing, to have a mother like this. Oh, how impossible, and how odd. In “Lanternfly”, we understand a character we had met previously in a new context. The uncomfortable nature of desire in a body that isn’t what other people want it to be, that is not usually seen as desirable. In “I Want a Friend” which takes place in Paris instead of Penn, the idea of “my other self,” that is, a fat person’s inner incessant societally programmed monologue, is deeply present. This is a refrain throughout all the stories and takes different forms. The voice in your head, the air conditioning unit that constantly runs.

I won’t spell out all the connections in this book, for discovering them yourself is part of the delight, but suffice it to say there are many, and in my notes for this review I tried to web them together in a cohesive way, but would need a thousand more words to expound on them. These are interconnected stories, yes, and that is some of the honest pleasure of reading Fat Swim. 

Sometimes the truth of the characters we meet, particularly in “Swiffer Girl”, stings. For example, Alice’s father returns, and casts a new light on the beginning. One can never say that Fat Swim does not tap into societal truths. The odd perception that fat people do not know they are fat, and are waiting, simple and stupid, for a thinner person to tell them so. The way a fat child’s parents can wreck their relationship with food, with their body, or heal it, forever. The way that a person can say something and mean wholly another.

Of the narrators in Fat Swim, it is the recurring “I” that is my favorite (we also have: Alice, Tracy, Meredith Lovelace, Marion, Jules) and that makes me so fanatical about this book. The “I” orbits everyone and acts as a daring experiment, as interstitial. In another review, the reviewer says the book ends in, “a ponderous metatextual coda rather than a deeper sense of who these characters are,” which I must disagree with, as I think it slides past the point. Yes, desire is messy, and so are our bodies, but this is not a book that avoids filth, nor is it one that lingers. It is the “I” that pushes forward and operates the spine of all the stories. We are peeking into Philly neighborhoods, into their windows. As readers, we all embody “a body,” though not this body. With the “I” we can become, for a moment, someone else, and so can its author.

There is the sensation in these stories of the briefness and transitory nature of life. The way we enter in through one door and leave out another. The way we occasionally bump into someone that we wish we hadn’t. And the way, everyday, we must contend with ourselves, money, space, time, pleasure, pain. In-betweenness. Some stories are stronger than others, yes, but so it goes in a short story collection. My personal favorites are: “Fat Swim,” “Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar,” “Beauty,” “Lanternfly,” and “Camp Sensation.”  Nonetheless, the characters we meet, even if it is briefly, and even if they throw us for a loop, are memorable in their flawed humanness, in their recognizable bodies. They stuck with me, their feelings about their forms, even long after I finished reading.

So it is embodiment, and lack thereof, I think, that is the unifying presence in Eisenberg’s work. Not feeling embodied appears, too, in Housemates (her first novel), in many ways, but most notably for me in Bernie, a character who, without a doubt, is thin. In this world of Meta and AI, of Instagram and the endless scroll, the characters in Fat Swim (and Eisenberg’s work largely) contend with the presence of the Internet just as we do, in a country that, above all, wants us to be disconnected from the matter of our flesh, to not give into our bodily desires, to be emaciated and weak and skinny, skinny, skinny.

This is another reason why I can say “fatness” isn’t really the theme of Fat Swim, though perhaps, like Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar, it is part of the celebration. And what is celebration if not looking closely, observing, lifting up? It is why I can recommend this book widely and without prejudice, for who, among us all, does not have this thing we call a body?

Fat Swim by Emma Copley Eisenberg is out now.