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description: A blazing pursuit of a trauma-free future for the fat body.An enduring cultural fiction is that life begins when a fat person loses weight. Once the pounds are shed we are told does the story truly begin. You write this today with the clarity of heaven: your life began when you became fat.In 2015 Anshuman Iddamsetty decided he wanted to in his words occupy as much space as possible announcing this desire in a much-lauded essay Swole Without a Goal. At the time his journey involved serious weightlifting but what he thought if fitness hadnt been part of it? Would readers have been quite so moved if his story hadnt contained the familiar whiff of so-called self-improvement?Soon after Anshumans life changed in ways dramatic and mundane: his father a tall fit man died suddenly; Anshumans own fattening meanwhile continued apace to the disgust of his surviving family members. Amidst great personal change a family history steeped in the inherited meekness of Indias caste system and the desire for the quiet life of the model minority and within a contemporary culture where even ostensible progressives mock and ridicule the appearance of political foes like Donald Trump and Rob Ford Anshuman proposes a new way: fatness as a path forward from grief. Fatness as a rejection of the cult of wellness that in a world of great economic and occupational precariousness has become the greatest flex of privilege of all. Fatness as a challenge to the very idea that the body is something we shouldor even cancontrol and bring to heel in the first place.In riveting sexy funny and devastating prose Anshumans debut book of non-fiction blends memoir cultural criticism and journalism taking him from being the fattest person on a business trip to Fiji to posing nude for a variety of photographers to exploring the world of furries. What he ends up with is a truly radical document: a book that makes the case for the fat body as a point of pride a point of power a tool to reclaim territory and a way to stake a claim on a future that until now has only ever been promised to a privileged few.
language: None
title: Hello Pig: Notes For a Fat Future
publisher: Strange Light