Dietland

The trauma of becoming a woman

Pretending to be interested in a display of blushers, I picked up a compact of pink powder. I had always associated blushing with shame and embarrassment.

was fat, and if I no longer saw it as a bad thing, then the weapon they had used against me lost its power.

All makeup is drag

with the laces undone

From the time we’re little girls, we’re taught to fear the bad man who might get us. We’re terrified of being raped, abused, even killed by the bad man, but the problem is, you can’t tell the good ones from the bad ones, so you have to be wary of them all.

“You’ll grieve for her,” Verena said, “and then you’ll move on.”

couldn’t stand hunger. Hunger is what death must feel like.

An early and important source of inspiration for Dietland was Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk’s novel and the film adaptation directed by David Fincher. I would like to think that Dietland would exist even if Fight Club hadn’t provided that initial spark of an idea, but I’ll never know

The Virginia Woolf line “It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality” appears in her essay “Professions for Women.”