Fringe published Christina E. Dent’s piece F.A.T. in the very first issue of Fringe, and this week, we’ve revived it as the first of our “Vintage” collection. Editors Lizzie Stark and Anna Lena Phillips dished with Dent about her inspiration and the fat acceptance movement.

What originally inspired you to write this story?

I know one thing that definitely inspired this piece and my MFA thesis was the realization that “fatness” is sort of the last bastion of acceptable discrimination in American society. People make and propagate fat jokes all the time. You can count on mainstream TV to make comments about fat people all the time–it’s on late night talk show monologues, it’s in sitcoms, it’s in shows like Family Guy all the time.

And while on the one hand I can laugh at the humor, there is a real part of me that keeps asking: why is this okay? If an individual were as outspokenly critical–even humorously–about different ethnic groups, or about religious groups, or about the disabled, for the most part, they would be labeled as hate speakers, or at least there would be a wide audience that found no humor in their joke. But the attitude I find most common regarding ridiculing the obese is that making fun of fat people is just funny. I don’t agree with that.

As for the writing of the piece itself, I had notes to it jotted down in a notebook for a long time. The first thing that came to me was what became the intro paragraph: I had this idea of writing a sort of gritty, crime novel-esque opening about someone skulking in a dark alley with some illicit substance in their pocket. And I thought, would it be funny, and weird, and sort of scary, if that thing were simply junk food. And then I started to imagine what that invented world would be like.

Are you familiar at all with the fat acceptance movement, and if so, did it influence this piece?

It’s funny that you mention that. F.A.T. became the inspiring story for my MFA thesis and I started writing a lot of stories that either directly focused on being fat in this society or at least addressed characters that lived in the world and were heavy and how all of those elements affected how they lived. One piece was called “The Fattest Ballerina” which is totally inspired by the fat acceptance movement. I read Marcia Millman’s Such a Pretty Face with fascination; in that book, she introduces members of the fat acceptance movement headquartered in New York City. So, on the one hand, I started researching that phenomenon after writing F.A.T., but I think those ideas were already in my head when I first wrote the story.

How do you feel about the current health care reform debate, with its suggestions of funding via a “fat tax” that would raise the cost of, among other things, soda? Is this a first step toward the world of your story?

I hope not! But I do think that Annie’s “future” world is an offshoot of our current fitness-obsessed society. Margaret Atwood said of her dystopic classic The Handmaid’s Tale that she wrote it by picking up on current trends regarding Christian fundamentalism and the Republican Right and followed that thread to its most extreme conclusions. I wanted to do the same kind of thing with F.A.T.–follow the obsession we have with body and being thing and pretty and seeing what kind of a world that could lead to.

How this relates to health care reform and things like the “fat tax” is more complicated. On the one hand, I do not think that it’s in any way acceptable to punish or discriminate against someone simply because they are fat. For instance, Southwest Airlines’ policy of making overweight passengers purchase two seat fares is horrendous. But at the same time, if taxing soda means we drink less soda, that can be a good thing. That probably sounds contradictory, but I mean it in the sense that things like soda, junk food, etc. are all marketed to us in such pernicious ways. Reading David Kessler’s The End of Overeating has been a huge eye-opener for me regarding this. We can get addicted to junk foods just like people get addicted to drugs. So if taxing soda in the long run actually punishes soda companies–because maybe we buy less of their products–then I can see benefits to that.

Why did you choose to make this a piece of speculative fiction, set in the future?

Setting the piece in the future allowed me more creative freedom. I really wanted to play with a world where body image obsession had really gotten out of control. It also allowed me to be humorous, if you can believe that. I mean, how in straight time could stealing a Hostess cupcake be funny? Interestingly, I think setting it the near future also helped me connect with the past, and history, in ways that I hadn’t explored. Annie’s flashbacks of her early life in the fat camps is intended as a herald to groups that have historically been victimized and marginalized: refugees, internees, even Holocaust survivors.

Are there other writers who are exploring similar issues whose work you particularly like? Any favorite stories or other pieces come to mind?

Margaret Atwood has always been a huge inspiration. I just finished reading Oryx and Crake where she explores another dystopic future, much like she does in The Handmaid’s Tale, and she’s amazing. I’m reading her new novel now–which picks up where Oryx and Crake left off. She doesn’t focus on weight and food and size, but she is the master of dystopic fiction. I’ve also been fascinated with Mary Gaitskill’s work, especially Two Girls, Fat and Thin. I love reading about characters that exist outside of the pretty, petite cookie cutter image.

Join the discussion by posting a comment on F.A.T. or on Christina Dent’s interview below.