What sorts of books inspired you asachild?
I loved reading the anthropology textbooks in my father’s university office and my mother’s Arthur Conan Doyle collection. Like many children, Ilonged to visit Narnia, loved Roald Dahl and obsessively reread books such as The Twenty-One Balloons, Harriet the Spy and all the Ozbooks.
Your new book explores the complex mythologiesthathave grown up around fat. Which books initially piqued your interest in this topic?
In the early 1990s, Idiscovered Hillel Schwartz’s Never Satisfied: ACultural History of Diets, Fantasies, andFat and was immediately fascinated that it was possible that fat and its corollaries such as weight-loss dieting could have ahistory. Around the same time, in a second-hand bookshop, Ifound Frederick Drimmer’s book from the 1970s, Very Special People: TheStruggles, Loves, and Triumphs of Human Oddities,which had achapter about circus fatladies. That led me to start reading and thinking about fatness and performance and the politics of being seen when one has an uncommon body.
Which books best illuminate the stereotypes about fat people and how these have changed?
I am fond of my friend and colleague Sander Gilman’s books – Fat: ASocial History ofObesity, FatBoys: ASlim Book and so on. Peter Stearns’ FatHistory: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West is also good, as is Christopher Forth’s Fat: ACultural History of the Stuff ofLife.
Where can one find good analyses of dieting and its cultural meanings?
In the realm of academic history, Iam fond of Rudolph Bell’s Holy Anorexia, Caroline Walker Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast: TheReligious Significance of Food to Medieval Women and Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s FastingGirls: TheHistory of Anorexia Nervosa, which are very insightful and instructive with regard to the cultural meanings of eating and not-eating in the West. The historiography on weight-loss dieting is oddly small, but includes Gilman’s Diets and Dieting: ACultural Encyclopedia and Walter Gratzer’s Terrors of the Table: TheCurious History of Nutrition. In the realm of popular history, Iliked Louise Foxcroft’s recent Calories and Corsets: AHistory ofDieting over 2,000Years and Susan Yager’s The Hundred Year Diet: America’s Voracious Appetite for Losing Weight.
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What is the last book you gave as a gift, and to whom?
Just yesterday Igave my spouse a copy of Shonna Milliken Humphrey’s delightful book Gin.
What books do you have on your desk waiting to be read?
Keith Wailoo’s Pain: APolitical History; Jen Manion’s Female Husbands: ATrans History; Thavolia Glymph’s TheWomen’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles forHome, Freedom, and Nation; and Mab Segrest’s Administrations ofLunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum are at the top of the stack.
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Hanne Blank works in the Faculty for Women’s and Gender Studies at Denison University in Ohio. Her latest book, Fat, appears in the Bloomsbury Object Lessons series.
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