Jen Larsen's Blog, page 6

Going through my inbox last night was an exercise in the destruction of my self-esteem in an overwhelming tidal wave of guilt. I had surgery the week before Thanksgiving (abdominoplasty, whee! Ow!), and everything that came after that seemed to sort of slowly wash past me in a muddy trickle. I knew time was unrelenting in its march, that history was being made and written, that things and stuff were being things and stuff but it was hard to pay attention to it all.

Part of it was the drugs, certainly—I was briefly on lortab, and then I got off it, and then I realized that there was a reason they gave me more than just a handful of days’ supply. But a lot of it was that lingering sense of being knocked out of orbit, that feeling of aimless and unmoored meandering through the universe. And it’s a state that’s nigh-impossible to combat when you’re smack in the middle of an especially empty, floaty period, miles out from any marker stones, partially because one of the major symptoms is “not actually being aware that time is slipping away and you are bobbing around unmoored and worthless like a wad of squishy space flotsam.”

Hello, I am squishy space flotsam! How’s it going?

I’m still struggling to get a handle on things—deadlines, to-dos, not being squishy space flotsam, going places other than the doctor’s office for follow-up appointments. Returning long-overdue emails, sent to me during my Golden Hazy Hours of Endless Eternity. Trying to come up with ways to say, “I’m so sorry I haven’t been in touch, I’ve had a lot of surgery” that don’t make me either sound like an asshole looking for sympathy, or a liar pulling out an enormous lie gun and firing it straight into the air and smirking while the enormous lies waft back down to the earth, covering everything with sticky embarrassment for you and on your behalf.

It is a struggle not to end every sentence about surgery with, “I swear! I did! I WILL SHOW YOU THE ENORMOUS T-SHAPED SCAR!”

But then people write back and say oh, surgery? You had surgery? Why did you have surgery? Are you okay? I am hoping it is a side-effect of the Timeless Gravity-Free Jetsam that I am having trouble remembering that my own life is not as all-encompassing to everyone else as it happens to be to me, and that everyone is not actually fully aware of every movement I make every day of my life, no matter how many hours I spend on Facebook clicking Like on pictures of grumpy and adorable toddlers.

I had an abdominoplasty. A tummy tuck, if I want to get all “aging starlet desperately trying to recapture her youth” about it. I am still recovering—and am astonished to realize it has only been two and a half weeks, not the ENDLESS LIFETIME it feels like its been, wearing a post-surgery garment.

Oh yes, I have a stretchy garment to wear at all times. Nerves that were killed dead are now—regenerating? Regrowing? Reattaching? Coming back to life, zombie-like and looking for blood? They’re doing whatever it is they do and it frequently feels like I am being whipped with a very hot wire by a very angry small person with a good arm. I get exhausted easily, I still can’t stand up quite straight. It still feels like someone punched me a lot in all of the below-the-boobs places. You can see my sexy surgery garment under most of the things I wear—it’s got bulky sides, and it goes down to my knees!—which is way better than a milkshake any day, when it comes to boys in your yard. And when I take it off to wash it—I don’t want to talk about it.

It has kind of sucked and I keep waiting for it to not suck and I can’t expect any sympathy because hello, I did this electively! I signed up to be flayed! I paid a lot money for it. It is like some kind of creepy Japanese horror film up in here.

But the difference is astonishing. I’m still all swole up like a stuck pig, but the change in my shape is remarkable. It feels like I’ve been uncovered. It feels like I’ve been transformed. It feels like I’ve been spending way too much money on sexy 60s wiggle dresses and high-waisted pencil skirts.

And yet, and still, because I can’t ever simply be happy, having a tummy tuck feels—problematic to me. I am still struggling with the idea of it. It feels like I am a liar again, after spending so long trying to get my head around the truth of self-acceptance and the reasons behind why I got weight loss surgery. In a lot of ways it feels like I am abandoning all the work I did after I lost so much weight and realized I still didn’t like the body I was left with, my skin, the person I was and looked like. But it also feels like this has been inevitable, unavoidable, necessary. A good thing. A confusing thing full of conflicting ideas. It can’t be taken back. I wouldn’t take it back. Do you want to see my enormous awesome scar? It’s seriously epic.

I Think I Am In Friend-Love With You, written by and illustrated by Yumi Sakugawa

So I wrote this book. It’s this book here, in fact (coming March 2013! Available for pre-order now! Etc!). Primarily it’s about the myth of weight loss as a magical fairy tale dream come true, and struggles with body image, and weight loss surgery. It’s about how I was fat and getting fatter, and how I thought that was what was wrong with me. It was the source of all my problems. It was the reason I was unhappy, and my relationship at the time wasn’t perfect.

I thought it was the reason I was a bad friend. I thought being fat was why I was so difficult to love, and difficult to deal with, and too deeply unhappy to manage the necessary and varied upkeeps of friendship and too sad to keep my promises. I lied a lot.

So weight loss surgery cured me of all that! Now I am a glorious glimmering beautiful blessed angel with happiness in my heart shining brighter than the sun! Except not really. I lost a ton of weight, and I found that, expectedly, it is easier to be on the skinnier side than on the fatter side, both socially and in a concrete physical sense, in terms of actually fitting in the world. But it didn’t make me a better person.

Man, was I pissed.

My friends there, in San Francisco—they are amazing women. But I was still a crappy friend, and a depressed person, and I didn’t know how to mend everything I had broken so badly. In fact, I was pretty sure I had broken everything so thoroughly and so well that it would never be fixed and they were too polite to tell me. I am fully aware that part of the reason I agreed to move to Utah, when E and I discussed who should make a break for it so we could have a relationship in the same state, was escape. Escape from having failed so badly, and having made so many mistakes with no idea how to fix them. From people I wasn’t sure how to apologize to, or if they even wanted me to because it would all just be terribly awkward and weird. I am, it should be noted, a generally awkward and weird person. It is a gift and my burden. It was not cured by weight loss surgery either.

So I fled to Utah, and I was terribly lonely for a very long time, and ashamed of all the messes I had made. I had E and his roommates and they were wonderful, but they weren’t exactly precisely my friends with whom I’d have adventures because they were all boys and they smelled kind of funny. And I was still broken and sad and weird and I still hadn’t figured out how to be the person I wanted to be, who was strong and reliable and worthwhile.

But achingly slowly, painfully gradually, things started to click. I started to really understand how and where and what I wanted to be. And I had the people that are far away but have always felt tucked behind my heart for good, who supported me hard and lovingly from a distance that the Internet makes so much smaller.

And then I started to meet people here. Emilie was my first real friend in Utah, I think, and she is lovely and smart and mature, stalwart and responsible, an amazing woman, and I was grateful for her and I knew I wanted to keep her and I thought maybe I was starting to get this friendship thing.

The incredible women of Indie Ogden and their beautiful faces and beautiful hearts, they are true friends. The amazing people I work with—I am lucky to know them. Sarecakes and cocktails and an amazing Thanksgiving dinner. Amy and all the wine and IKEA couches and ehrmergherd sci-fi feminism. They are the kind of gorgeous, astonishing, honest and true people that make you feel like you could be astonishing, honest and true. That you could be a person that works hard to make your friends always know that they are loved and cared for. That you could keep your promises, be steadfast and honest, trusting and trustworthy. Feel feelings. I am feeling feelings right now this very second. I am very lucky.

I keep coming across new, heretofore unimagined reasons why breaking up sucks. There’s the usual—heartbreak, misery, loneliness, all the wailing wreaks havoc with your complexion, suddenly it’s left to you at 3 a.m. to go beat housebreakers to a pulp with the toilet plunger. Those are the classic ones.

The ones I didn’t expect, they keep piling up—it is deeply disappointing to not have anyone around when you really deserve a double high-five and a fist bump. Your success suddenly doesn’t feel nearly as successful when it’s not capped off with celebratory hand gestures, you know? And then there are the totally honest, hold-nothing back frank evaluations of your butt in those jeans. You know your butt is awesome in those jeans—and he’s always agreed as is right and good. But sometimes you are—no, not weak. Not vain. Not lame. You are just in the mood for a little validation, and by god, there is nothing wrong with that.

(And by god, you are way too old to post a picture of your ass to Facebook and quite frankly you’re not sure who you are anymore, that that idea even occurred to you, and so you must suffer in uncertain silence.)

The gallons of milk you keep buying go bad, because who can drink a gallon of milk by herself in a week? You keep checking to see if the toilet seat is up, wasting precious seconds of your life because of course it isn’t any more. You forget exciting new puns you have made up in your head because there’s no one to turn to and make suffer with them. Etc.

Today, today it’s the tree in the basement. We bought a tree last year—an artificial noble fir, pre-light, huge. He is tall; he wanted a tree that towered over him. It was an expensive tree, and for some reason it came with a CD that combined installation instructions and odd selections of holiday music. We set the thing up in the corner, and we plugged it in, and we realized how very naked it was. Instead of buying vast buckets of holiday balls (holiday balls!) we decided to institute a tradition: the ugliest ornament. We’d each select the most horrible ornament possible, and exchange them as loving gifts. I won last year, with my melting-demon-spawn from the deepest pits of the most sadistic hells (I think it was supposed to be a jolly snowman).

We added dinosaurs and Star Wars ornaments and tinsel and it was our first real Christmas in the house we bought together and a beautiful tree, but now it is folded up in the basement and he is gone and I guess you can’t really call it a tradition if it only happened once.

All of it is in a box downstairs, and it’s December 1st, the only acceptable day to begin decorating for Christmas, and somehow I cannot get off this couch to go down there and pull it out and look at it all. I spent—I spent a lot of money on Amazon just now instead. A white tree, and a bucket of hot pink ornaments and a disco star for the top. Nostalgia-free and history-less and memory-unhampered. Slightly insane. But I wanted a double high-five after placing my order.

I don’t know what to do with the tree in the basement. I’ll offer it to my ex, maybe. Donate it to a shelter. Let it sit there like Ms. Havisham in the dark. Let it stay because I loved that Christmas and that tree and everything about our first real Christmas together and that won’t change. Unless I discover the satanic snowman is no longer in the box but is instead somewhere in the walls, slowly making his way upstairs to steal my breath and crush my heart in his pulpy, misshapen hands on Christmas Eve.

There is a picture of me from when I was maybe eleven years old. I am wearing small red shorts and a very tight aqua polo shirt. It’s a picture of me from the side—I’m staring up and laughing at something my little brother is doing. My body is slouched in an S-shape, with my belly sticking out one way and my butt sticking out the other way and I am the very picture of the incredibly awkward, pudgy dorky kid.

I’m not fat yet—that happened around adolescence, when hormones kicked in and genetics woke up and remembered that I should have a weight problem because it runs in the family. But in the photo I’ve got some pre-adolescent awkward chub going on.

It’s a picture that makes me cringe. Not because I look so dorky and awkward—I mostly find that hilarious. I cringe because I remember my reaction the first time I saw it. I was a weird little eleven-year-old girl who genuinely had no idea what she looked like because she never thought about those things, not yet. But when that eleven year old girl looked at that photo, everything changed.

It struck me that I didn’t like how I looked. I didn’t look like any of the girls in my school. I had these drumstick thighs and a chubby face and that belly. No one had a belly like I did, round and soft and poking out like a mound of vanilla ice cream on a plate.

That’s the first time I remember ever thinking something bad about my body, my size, my shape. That’s the first time I remember realizing I didn’t look like other people. That was the first time I started to dislike—even hate—myself for not looking right. That was when I started to become self-conscious of my belly.

Adolescence struck, and so did the weight—I was a kid who ate a lot of junk food, and while my brother and father could get away with that without obvious physical consequences, the sugar and fat stuck to me in lumps. I got fat, and then fatter. And I knew I wasn’t supposed to look like that because no one else did, and because people told me it was gross, because that is their job.

But it was my belly I was most conscious of. The pooch that I couldn’t seem to hide. That looked horrible in my gym uniform. That made me hate getting undressed in the locker room. That made me hate going shopping for school clothes. “It looks good except for how it shows your gut,” my father said outside the girl’s dressing room at K-mart, and I started wearing only giant t-shirts instead.

I was ashamed of being fat, but I was most ashamed of my stomach—its size, its shape, how it made clothes fit me funny, how I hated wearing pants because you could see it. Through my teen years, all the way through my twenties, I obsessively searched out those giant t-shirts, tunic-length tops to pull down over my gut, to drag down over my butt, because I thought camouflage was my only, best option. I thought it was totally successful, too—no one would have ever guessed I had a fat stomach.

All those years I gained and lost, gained and lost. Sometimes, sometimes I was able to accept my body, to think I was reasonably attractive, to believe that I was worth love and attention. But I never stopped hating my stomach. For twenty years I hated my stomach—the way it mounded out, the way it hung down. Do you know I actually stood naked in front of mirrors and cried because I thought it was repulsive? That is drama. That is genuine loathing. I wouldn’t let any one see me naked and standing up. I wouldn’t let anyone touch me there, especially in bed.

I got weight loss surgery when I was thirty-three, and I lost a massive amount of weight. That was thrilling to me—the whole idea of being the size that the world is designed for. Of dumping this loathing and exhausting obsessiveness about my weight and my body and my size off my plate. Getting to walk away from all the angst and anxiety being fat caused me. I couldn’t wait to flee Torrid and Lane Bryant and failed diets and body shame.

My body looked normal, almost. Not perfect. I was never going to model bikinis. But I thought, hesitantly, that I looked pretty good. Except, of course, for my stomach. I knew losing all that weight wasn’t going to change my gut—if anything, it would be left behind like a deflated balloon. Even when I was skinny—too skinny—by anyone’s definition, I had this soft, loose curtain of skin spilling down, and to me it looked worse than ever.

I’ll tell you right now—control-top panty hose only get you so far. And only when it’s not a hundred degrees out.

Many weight loss surgery patients assume they’re going to have full-body plastic surgery reconstruction after they’ve lost all their weight. I read testimonial after testimonial about how the weight loss surgery was just the beginning—it was the plastic surgery that changed their lives. I couldn’t understand why anyone would volunteer for more surgery, would want to be a patchwork of scars, would think they could just cut out every part of their body that offended them.

But I ran into some before and after photos of an abdominoplasty—really remarkably similar to how I ran into before and after photos of weight loss surgery for the first time—and I was astonished. She didn’t look like the same person. She had had a belly that looked like mine—maybe worse than mine, more skin, more flesh, more rumpled and strange. And then she had—a flat belly. A charming belly button and a flat, muscled stomach and some faint lines circling her hips and I was struck by a longing, an overwhelming, desperate jealous longing. I could do that. I could. I could be fixed.

Again, shades of what made me rush headlong into weight-loss surgery.

I don’t regret getting wls, I don’t. I can’t. But I do wish I had been a stronger person. A braver person. Someone who could learn to love her body and say fuck the haters and work fiercely and tirelessly and bravely to change a hateful, prejudiced world and promote self-love and positive body image and health at every size. But I ducked out the back door instead. And I was afraid of doing that again. I was afraid of chickening out again. Couldn’t I just learn to be proud of my body?

I hated my stomach for six more years. I daydreamed for six years about a tummy tuck. I set money aside. I quietly saved—just in case I decided to do it. Just in case.

Two weeks ago I had a consultation and the doctor was elated to see me. “You’ll have amazing results!” he said, grabbing wads of skin and tugging them up and in. Vertigo, how much shame I was filled with. Panic. Nausea. “Look,” he said, and I looked in the mirror and I could see what he was talking about. “Look at what this will do.” I looked at what it would do, and I could see how it would change my whole body—but not really change it. Reveal it. Dig it out from under this stuff. Dig me out from under this embarrassment I could never entirely shake.

In the hospital’s parking lot I sat in the car and looked down at my stomach and wondered what it would be like to not feel like I had to hide my gut all the time. To not have this. I prodded at it. I picked up my cell phone and called the front desk and said, I want to schedule my surgery.

I paid a breathtaking amount of money. I signed an epic amount of paperwork. I’m scheduled for this Friday.

“You must be so excited about your book coming out,” people say, and of course I say yes. Because yes. Because it’s amazing. Here’s this book I wrote, and it’s being published, and then there’s me getting to say hello, I’m an author, for I have written a book and these nice people have put it into covers. You guys, it’s the dream I’ve had the longest, it’s the biggest dream I’ve ever had, and look at this, look at how it’s coming true. My faith that I’ll see my name lasered into the side of the moon one day has been renewed.

But here’s me feeling like an ungrateful ass because sometimes—often—frequently—I want to take it back. I want to say no, never mind, I just realized what it is I’ve done and how completely nuts it is. I dislike—very, very strongly dislike—this oily rolling feeling in my stomach when I think about how I have gone and written a book entirely about myself, and I am asking people to read it. I am asking people to like it. Because a memoir is like a book-length persuasive argument. I am, essentially, presenting a case for myself: This is who I am, and I hope you understand it. And I hope you like it. And I hope you like me.

Dear god what have I done.

Obviously, clearly, I thought the book was worth writing. Clearly I thought I had something to say and something I wanted other people to read, since I wrote the damn thing. No one twisted my arm up behind my back and hauled me up on my tiptoes, hissing write the book. I am sorry to report that not a single villain held a tiny spear gun to my goldfish’s head and snarled “Find an agent or Bishop Desmond Tutu gets it.” In the middle of the night a masked individual did not hang suspended from the ceiling over my bed, holding the very tip of a taser only centimeters from my eye, and whisper, “You better be signing that book contract.”

I charged gleefully toward every single step and every single goal and milestone. I said Yes and yes and yes and I knew what I was agreeing to, in theory. A book, right? Woo! Books! My name on the cover! I am totally going to my high school reunion or something! But oh I am so good at pushing actual facts and consequences aside. I am terribly gifted at pretending the future doesn’t exist because now is just so goddamn awesome. I do know I never sat down and seriously considered the reality of what I was agreeing to.

It’s harder to forget when I’m looking at the book all laid out—it’s a real thing. It will be held. It will be opened. Maybe someone will even read it! Jesus Christ.

And if I am lucky enough to get reviews, I will not read a single thing anyone writes about it. Me. My choices. Or my prose, my narrative structure, my pacing, my characterization, my clear and painful cluelessness, my persistent silliness. “We’ll read you the good ones,” friends say, and I don’t want the good ones. I mean, I kind of do. But I think the safest thing is just to have it exist in the world and have people thinking all things about it, all they want, and me just figuring it’s all going to be okay in the end, the way I do, and hope people understand what I tried to make.

It’s how anyone manages to do anything in this world, I think. You believe (or fool yourself into believing) that what you say is worth saying, and what you do is worthwhile, and who you are could change someone’s life.

I don’t remember the year or the date, and I’m not entirely certain of the month, but I remember this: I was about 200 pounds when I met E. That was the first time I had ever weighed that little—it was the first time I was anywhere near what all those charts call a normal weight. Me and Oprah, we were the same weight! I was delighted by the idea.

And I was starting to accept the idea of being a normal weight, and a normal girl, and person who fit in the world, quite literally: in chairs and bus seats and roller coaster rides and clown cars, through turnstiles and down narrow aisles on the plane, on the way to Chicago, where I’d meet him.

It was still an uncomfortable feeling. A strangeness. Not just that I wasn’t over-the-moon thrilled, which clearly I ought to have been, ungrateful girl, but because it felt like the world had transformed just for me into something beautiful and reachable. I didn’t know what to do with that idea—I was the one who was supposed to have changed. To have emerged from my cocoon of fat with a set of instructions and directions, and then go charging off into the sunset, off to do whatever normal people who weren’t afraid of the world were supposed to do next.

When E and I met and he smiled at me, I thought, “Oh. Oh, this is what I’ve been missing all these years.”

It was a sense of power, a sense of agency, a sense of understanding that I could affect someone physically, emotionally. That I could move someone, and be moved so thoroughly in return. That someone would look at me and want to touch me—that was astonishing. My god, was it a miracle. Everyone I had dated before—never had I been really deep-down convinced that they wanted me. I had never been completely sure that it could be true until he kissed me. And it was something that changed my life.

It wasn’t the only turning point, the single emotional touchstone, the catalyst that changed everything for all time amen. Those had been happening for awhile, a series of tiny spark-bright epiphanies about myself and my place in the world—physically, emotionally. But it’s the one I remember most clearly, the one that burns the brightest. Because it was the first time I accepted that other people would look at me, and they would see me, and that didn’t have to be a terrible, raw-rubbed feeling. It didn’t have to be a moment of panic and hoping they’d like me despite my size or my shape. I didn’t have to hide because it had just never stopped hurting when I saw someone clearly, unmistakably dismiss me after a glance. Not just romantically, not only sexually. But as a person, wiped away.

We dated. We fell in love. I moved to Utah, and fell in love with Utah too. And years passed and we were happy, I think. I became more myself, when I was with him. But somehow, I fell back asleep. We both fell asleep. We forgot to be in the world, and we forgot how to be together. We loved each other but—oh, clichés, you are so useful—sometimes it turns out that’s really not enough.

So one Saturday morning we woke up and instead of going and getting pancakes, we had a long, quiet conversation, and we agreed. And it was the hardest decision we had ever made. He kissed me goodbye, and we were done.

Now, now I’m back to figuring out how I fit in the world and where I want to go and be. He helped change the whole of my life. He brought me so much closer to being the person I think I want to be. I hope I did the same for him, because that would be rude, otherwise. Because that’s what I want for him.

I’m just as scared as I was five years ago, but here’s the thing: I’m a whole hell of a lot stronger. Slightly smarter. Just as socially awkward and dopey, but with better shoes. I think—I can’t swear to this, but I think I’ll be okay.

It is a one hundred percent undeniable, holy-crap fact that I’m lucky. I have an enthusiastic and very attractive agent, my memoir is coming out in the spring, and I have been grateful. I mean, this is what I’ve wanted my whole life, right? A book on a shelf and my name on the cover and the opportunity to totally freak out about the inevitable bad reviews and the imaginary things people may or may not be saying about the quality of my story, my writing, my life, my moral character and my general level of deservedness. Fun times!

Really, truly: I am excited and thrilled. But the book release is seven months away, and that’s a lot of time. It’s even too early to seriously start thinking about publicity (though my publicist has been very patient with my anxious questions) or start worrying about things like interviews and what to wear and how to stick with my resolution to avoid imaginary reviews that have not and may not happen. It’s too early to even fantasize, since I’m still asking questions like, “Uh, so, how do I review the layout?” and “Is a layout the same thing as an ARC?” and, “Am I pretty? Seriously. How pretty am I, on a scale from one to awesome?”

To combat the inevitable creeping panic I’ve been working on a novel, which made of fiction. It’s been my antidote to the entire process of writing a memoir, which as far as I can tell involves a lot of shame and embarrassment and self-loathing. Which experts tell me means I wrote an awesome memoir, so I have that going for me.

Anyway, this book. It’s YA. It’s totally fictional. It was a blast to write, unlike some memoirs I can mention. My agent knows I’m working on a book, but she’s under no obligation to be interested in it. There is not a reason in the world it should exist, or has a life beyond this draft, but I so desperately, earnestly want it to. I have wanted to write fiction since as long as I can remember.

I am thrilled, excited, grateful, that I’ve got this memoir coming out—but I don’t want to be just a memoirist; I want to be a novelist. I want to write fiction. I’d love to make a living as a novelist—I’d love to buy my agent a summer home on Fire Island. But if publishers would just keep buying my novels and people would read them, that would be okay too. I’d be happy with that. I would die happy with that.

So I am freaking out because I am struggling with this fiction-novel-book-thing. I wrote a first draft and went through critiques and was happy with it and proud of it and excited about it. Quick and dirty restructuring draft—still happy. And now I’m line editing, and I have become convinced that the book is a nightmare, and I am a one-memoir-wonder.

It is exhausting and frustrating and embarrassing—I don’t want to whine about this book, because aren’t I a lucky writer already? I am lucky. And I also want to write more. I want to write interesting things. I want to have a career, not just one book. Maybe that is greedy. Maybe it’s just ambitious. I don’t know. But in the end, all of it is hypothetical right now—I need to go finish this draft. And then we’ll see what happens, and exactly what kind of wonder I am.

This weekend I found my MFA thesis—a novel. An excess of novel, actually. It’s 465 pages long. It overflows with metaphors and is jam-packed with quirkiness and sticky with meaning and it’s got my greasy thumbprints all over it and it’s just pretty much an embarrassment to everyone involved. By which I mean “me.”

This was the book that I thought was totally going to launch my literary career. Because a literary career was the kind where you wrote important literary novels about important things like Adult Relationships and blowjobs and the like, and that’s what I did!

Readers said, “it’s good!” with a strained kind of enthusiasm in their voice. Then they said, “But…” And I did not listen, because surely some literary agent with a Vision would see through the flaws and pluck me from the firmament and settle me on a throne made of melted-down Pulitzers and lined with lucrative six-book contracts and tell me how pretty I am.

That—didn’t happen. My query letter was a MASTERPIECE. It garnered me some interest in seeing pages! My pages were not found impressive. I thought probably I’d die in obscurity and then they’d be sorry! If they ever found out what happened to me, which was unlikely because of the obscurity.

I tried to revise but I was overcome with horror of my own prose and face-melting shame, so I threw it away from me and fled, weeping. I stopped writing fiction, because fiction made me sad and not having a literary career that was super-easy made me sad too. I was blogging about being fat. Then I got weight loss surgery and blogged about being less fat. Then I started blogging for Conde Nast about being less fat.

Then I thought, I’m really, really, really tired of the sound of my own voice. But maybe I should write a memoir about this. I don’t think there are weight loss surgery books in the world yet; I am not sure there is much in the way of books about weight loss that aren’t about The Triumph of Being Thin but are more about The Terrifying Sensation of Not Recognizing Your Own Face in the Mirror and Realizing Your Life Isn’t Perfect Now That You’re Not Fat Anymore.

I will tell you, I was delighted to find out that you can technically sell a memoir with just a proposal and sample pages. I made those happen; agents wanted it. I selected agents. I had agents! They ruled! But I wasn’t a fiction writer. I was a memoir writer. How the hell had that happened? This wasn’t how it was supposed to go at all. I didn’t even know if I could write a memoir. I didn’t think it would be much like blogging. (Spoiler: It really, really isn’t.)

It took me two years to write it. Two years! I wrote down every awful thing I ever thought and did. I ripped the ropy veins from my arms and wrung them out over the page! But also told some hilarious jokes, because comedy.

And of course the first draft was genuinely terrible and, again, huge. Because I have SO MUCH TO SAY. But this time I couldn’t run away weeping with my silken hair streaming out behind me. This time I had to revise the damn thing. I brutalized it down to an acceptable length. I added even more Pain. I felt embarrassed to read it. I figured I had done something right if I was embarrassed for the narrator.

I sent the copyedits back to my editor last week or possibly the week before, and I think it is a damn fine book and an honest one and when I think about people reading it, I shudder a little. When I daydreamed about being a fiction writer I imagined that maybe somehow I’d be reviewed by The New York Times Review of Books; now the idea sends me into a panic.

The idea of a book I wrote being in the world is the most wonderful, amazing, bizarre thing. The idea of such a personal, incredibly painful book in the world is also a hideous prospect. This is not what I expected to happen or how I expected it to happen. I am simultaneously delighted and terrified. I am proud and afraid. I can’t wait to talk about it; I am scared what of what people might say. I am only writing fiction from here on out.

It was in Target, in the women’s clothing section—the teen section, actually, directly adjacent to the designer capsule collection display. I remember this very vividly. There was a cardigan that I thought was very charming. My phone was in my hand, and I heard the email tone chime. I pulled up my inbox and there was an email from my agent. The preview said “HOORAY JE…” my heart spasmed, pulled free, spun a loop, hung suspended for endless moments while I waited for the whole email to load. And I read, “HOORAY JEN.” And some stuff about checking with other editors. And it took me a moment to scroll down to the part where the editor said, “We do want to make an offer.”

I read that again. “We do want to make an offer.” I read it again. It still said, “We do want to make an offer.” I thought, “Oh. Oh, my memoir. My memoir is being purchased. My memoir is being purchased by a publisher I admire. My memoir is being published by a publisher I admire and I—” stopped thinking, because I had fallen down. I was on my knees, in the middle of the teen’s clothing section of target, and I had dropped my phone into the little shopping basket I had been carrying over my arm, and I was sobbing. Shaking. Having trouble breathing. Realizing my sobs were audible and maybe I shouldn’t be gasping for air and howling on the floor of the Target women’s clothing section with my face on the carpet and my arms wrapped around my shopping basket.

“Oh my god,” a woman said, and I looked up. A Target employee, terrified that she was watching someone die in a terrible way. She said, “Are you—are you okay? What’s wrong, are you okay?”

My face contorted into a horrible rictus grin and my skin was tight and my eyes felt like huge skinned grapes and I gasped, “I’m—I’M SO HAPPY!”

She disappeared back around the rack of cardigans and I sobbed a little more quietly until I realized that the carpet of the Target women’s section was no place to be sprawled out overcome with emotional emotions.

I dragged myself up and I staggered around the halls of Target, wide-eyed and full of a feeling I couldn’t identify—terrorjoy? Happyfear? BLINDENTHSUSIASTICPANIC. I started calling people and I couldn’t stop crying (“I’M SO HAPPY!”) or shouting, and I thought maybe I should leave Target before they called the police.

Ten more minutes I cried in the car, before I managed to drag myself home.

And that is the story about how I learned that my childhood dream—my lifelong dream. My only real, true dream except the one about lasering my name on the moon—had come true.

Sometimes it felt like it took far too long—why am I so old before I have a book come out, when all I’ve ever wanted to do was be a writer? Sometimes I can’t believe I’m as incredibly lucky as I was and am, and that it was too easy and what’s the catch. Most of the time I can’t believe I have a book coming out.

I always thought that if I ever published a book it would be An Important Literary Work of Fiction. Somehow, I’m publishing an incredibly personal memoir that I hope talks about important issues surrounding body image. Someday I’ll publish novels. Young adult, or literary fiction, or science fiction or non-fiction or anything. I want to write. I hope people like what I write and want to read it. I’ll keep writing whatever happens—but you know this is a hell of a kick in the pants.

You guys, I have a book coming out! The cover is beautiful and my editor and publisher are utterly amazing and my agents are awesome and I am so very lucky and happy. It’s coming out February 2013. You can pre-order it if you like! An e-book edition is coming soon! And every day I go look at my page on amazon and think, holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap! Amen.

My mother, in her housecoat on a Sunday. She is trying to quit smoking. She tears open a package of plain M&Ms and pours them into her pocket, and it’s an ingenious idea. Candy on your person, for any kind of emergency that occurs—nicotine craving or chocolate urge, need for candy or desperate desire to replenish dangerously low sugar reserves.

My mother eventually quit smoking, and I am sure the M&Ms cured her. As far as I know, she never poured candy in her pockets again, but ever since then, I have thought about it. I have thought about just carrying M&Ms and Goobers and Raisinets with me wherever I go. I have considered lining the insides of all my coats with Hershey’s bars and pouring hot cocoa in my shoes and padding my bra with Almond Joys.

I get a little worried when I realize there’s no chocolate in the house. I get a little panicked when I think that I have no access to something sweet, and no way to fix that. I get emotionally fraught when there’s no candy at hand and no one wants to give any to me; when it is offered, I sweep up huge armfuls like there is a candy shortage and the person who gets the most stuffed inside their face wins.

As I understand it, this isn’t regular, ordinary everyday behavior. A large majority of people don’t have deep emotional attachments to sugar. No one understands candy the way I do. So probably you should all give it to me so that I can take care of it.

Or probably me and candy need to take a break. We need to step back and re-evaluate our relationship. Our terribly, terribly troubled relationship. Our desperate, desperately one-sided love affair that only leaves me feeling sick and greasy and bad. My rerouted digestive system, it doesn’t like candy. It reacts poorly. It rebels and the world is a worse place for it, particularly the world in a small radius directly around me and my sick stomach, and I still can’t stop. Part of the Wonder of Weight Loss Surgery is supposed to be the Pavlovian-style relearning that takes place—eating X makes me sick. I will no longer eat X!

I eat a lot of X. Am I stubborn, or stupid? Don’t answer that.

I don’t want to do it any more. I don’t want to eat candy. I mean, I want to eat candy. I want to eat all the candy. I want to swim through a sea of Hershey’s Kisses and shower in a waterfall of Reeses Peanut Butter Cups. I want my pockets to always be overflowing with Kit Kats and Nestle’s Crunches. I want the glorious bounty of bad chocolate to always be inside me.

But I also need to stop. Just—stop. I am tired of being a mess. No—let’s be excitingly positive about this. I am eager to be well. I am excited to be healthy. I am super-glad to have my (relative) youth and general well-being ready to spend it on being happy and feeling good about things. All the things. All the things inside my head and all the things in the world, all the things that are good. Feeling guilty and gross and sick is surprisingly not good. Will I be able to function? Will I even feel like myself? What will I fill my pockets with, if not candy? I am thinking ponies.