The Burnt Toast Podcast

You’re listening to Burnt Toast!I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. Today I’m chatting with Melissa Walker, head of Giving Circles at The States Project about how to save democracy.And yes, it’s July 4, so we are technically off today—but it is also America’s birthday and a very, very scary and complicated time to be an American. We recorded this conversation before last week’s debate dumpster fire and this week’s horrific SCOTUS rulings — but I promise, it’s still the reassuring action plan you need right now.The States Project works to flip state legislations blue around the country. In 2022, Burnt Toast raised over $28,000 to hold ground in the Arizona State Senate. Last year we raised over $15,000 to elect majority making candidates in Virginia, where we defended the State Senate and flipped the House of Delegates to put a wall in front of Governor Youngkin’s right wing agenda. I know November is looming, and many of us feel paralyzed with fear about Trump, and not so great about Biden. So Melissa explains why state legislatures are where we can focus our energy and do some real good—even if Trump wins again.I’m setting a goal for the Burnt Toast Giving Circle to raise $20,000 this year, and I fully expect us to hit that, and exceed it. After you listen to this episode, be sure to vote in our poll for the state you want us to support. You can also start your own Giving Circle to support the state of your choice!Join the BT Giving Circle!Happy birthday, America! You’re a mess. But we’re trying to form a more perfect union here. Or honestly, anything even a step above dumpster fire would work.PS. If you’re enjoying the podcast, make sure you’re following us (it’s free!) in your podcast player! We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts! And while you’re there, please leave us a rating or review. (We like 5 stars!)Episode 150 TranscriptMelissaI’m Melissa Walker, I am the head of Giving Circles at The States Project. We focus on shifting the balance of power in state legislatures to elect majorities that are focused on improving people’s lives. VirginiaAnd you were on the podcast in 2022, when we first launched the Burnt Toast Giving Circle.It's Time to Stop Panic Giving.Virginia Sole-Smith·March 10, 2022Read full storyAnd I asked you to come back because, Melissa, everything feels bad right now. It truly seems like Trump will win in November. And I feel like we’re not even talking about it because we’re all just burnt out with fatigue. But you are this voice of reason in my life who’s always like, “This is what we focus on. This is what we do.” So can you talk us off some ledges, please?MelissaYes, I can. First, I want to acknowledge the fatigue, because it’s very real and we all feel it. Your fatigue is definitely a feature, not a bug, of a right wing that wants to dismantle our democracy. So if you’re feeling it, know that that is perfectly normal and we’re all feeling it to some extent. But also know that the helplessness and the isolation paralyze us, and that can cause some really bad things. I am lucky enough that I found a political path for me in December of 2016 when I heard New York State Senator Daniel Squadron speak about state legislatures. What I started to understand was that there were these 50 mini-congresses in our country where the right wing had been building power for decades, and where it turned out, I could have an impact. Being able to walk that path since 2016 has been therapy for me.I think that gathering people in community and taking action in whatever form you do, it is the antidote to despair. It is also the only thing that has ever worked to move a democracy. As Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”And I really believe in that. VirginiaAnd it’s what the other side has been doing for decades, as you said. They’ve been changing the world for the worse. So now we need to be that small group of committed citizens.MelissaThat’s correct. VirginiaTell us a little bit about how The States Project works and what you’re focusing on for 2024.MelissaState legislatures are the places where everything that we care about domestically is decided, from education funding to environmental policy to health care to civil rights to abortion to the course of our democracy, voting rights, and gerrymandering, the drawing of the district lines that decide who goes to Congress—it’s all happening in the hands of state lawmakers. These are not folks who people will have heard of. They are not going to be the spotlight races or the names on MSNBC at night. But they are the people who are deciding state by state by state what rights Americans have and get to keep. It’s an incredibly important power center. So The States Project does a 99 state chamber analysis every year—it’s 99 because Nebraska is unicameral. We figure out where we can target to try to shift power to elect majorities to improve people’s lives or break a right wing supermajority or defend against one. We figure out which races we need to go into to support with tactics and resources to make that happen. This is where the right wing has been building power for decades, no matter who’s been in the White House. And a lot of things that I think people remember, like the bathroom bill, the Stand Your Ground gun laws, the Flint, Michigan water crisis—those are all things that happened under an Obama presidency because the right wing had taken over state legislatures. This is where the rubber meets the road on policy and where we have to focus if we want to build back our democracy.VirginiaI mean, that’s weirdly reassuring because if those horrible things could happen under an Obama presidency, it means another Trump presidency wouldn’t necessarily have the impact that we’re all fearing, if we can make this progress in the State legislatures.MelissaYes. States will be a best line of defense if Trump is to win the presidency. Because states are the places where we can protect a lot of our rights and even advance them. Michigan ’22 is a great example. Michigan is a state where The States Project has been working since 2018 and making gains each year. But in 2022, we were finally able to help flip the State House and the State Senate—both of them flipped by one seat. Both of those seats were won by fewer than 400 votes. And with that trifecta—meaning Gretchen Whitmer in the governor’s mansion, and majorities in both the State House and the State Senate—Michigan has been able to codify the right to abortion, pass free breakfast and lunch for public school children, end right to work laws so unions can be strong again, and they passed the strongest climate bill in the country last fall—stronger than New York’s or California’s. All of that is because of one seat majorities in the state legislature. And again, not with politicians you will have heard of, but with that power shift comes real policy shift that changes people’s lives in Michigan and becomes a model for the rest of the country about what is possible when we elect people who are focused on improving lives.VirginiaSo tell us which states you’re focusing on for 2024. We’re going to put a poll in the show notes so that we can vote on where our Giving Circle should focus our energy.MelissaGreat. Yes. So we will be in Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania to defend new majorities that we recently were able to win.All those majorities won on very slim margins. In fact, the ones that I just mentioned in Michigan were the largest margins of those three states. In Minnesota, we were able to flip the State House by 191 votes. And in Pennsylvania, the State Senate, we flipped 12 seats, and the last one was won by 63 votes. VirginiaOh my gosh. MelissaSo what I really want to tell the Burnt Toast crowd is that each Giving Circle really matters in this work. If every piece of the basketweave isn’t there, these are the margins that we’re winning or losing on. So we’ll be back to defend in those states.And in addition, in Pennsylvania, we’ll be working on the Pennsylvania Senate as well to try to get to a tie there. Only half the seats are up so we’re looking for a tie in 2024. That will help us set up for 2026 flip. We’ll also be in Arizona to try to flip both chambers. We are two seats away from a flip in each chamber, one seat away from a tie. And that margin has held for the past few years. We are really, really close to flipping Arizona. There’s a Democratic governor. It’s an incredibly important state, obviously. All the states are important, but it’s a presidential swing state, so we’ll be in Arizona. We will also be in New Hampshire to try to flip the State House and tie the State Senate. That’s another, of course, swing state. And then we’re in a few states to try to break right wing super majorities. So we’re in North Carolina today to break a right wing supermajority. We just need one seat in the State House to do that. And we’re in Kansas to try to break a right wing supermajority for a Democratic governor Laura Kelly. Breaking those super majorities means that a Democratic governor has veto power which is incredibly important. One illustration of that is in Kansas where we saw voters come to the polls in Kansas and reject abortion restrictions, but the state legislature passed them anyway. When the governor vetoed them, they overturned her veto because of the supermajority. So if we’re able to break that supermajority those vetoes can stand and that’s a really important power shift that needs to happen in Kansas. Especially because the will of the voters is being completely ignored. We will also be in Nevada to try to build a supermajority against a right wing governor who vetoes everything. We’d love to be able to overturn those vetoes. And then in Wisconsin, we are going to be working to flip the assembly, which is what they call their state house. And Wisconsin has new maps and this is the first time that we actually see a path to shifting power there because of those new maps that are fairer than they’ve been in years in Wisconsin. So that’s a big lift, but an exciting new state for us to be in.VirginiaEvery state listed above is linked to its page on the State Project’s website so you can read up on them if you like. It turns out that Substack’s poll feature only lets me list 4 options, so here’s a Google Poll everyone can use to vote!Which state should BT support?If your state doesn’t get picked for the Burnt Toast giving circle, however, you can start your own giving circle to raise money for the state that you are most focused on. Melissa, tell folks how they do that.MelissaSo I should say a couple of things about Giving Circles. One is that it is often cheaper to change the balance of power in an entire State Chamber than it is to win a single competitive congressional seat. Congressional races cost millions and millions of dollars and state legislative races do not. So, if you think, “Well my Giving Circle won’t be big enough to make a difference,” I beg to differ. Because dollars at this level go so incredibly far. Whatever you are thinking about investing politically this year—because I know everyone is looking for a place where they can really have impact—think about having that impact and then inviting 10 other people to come in and match what you gave. You’ve just given 10 times what you individually are able to do. And that’s the beauty of Giving Circles. It’s the community coming together for collective power. I think it’s a real antidote for that isolation and helplessness that a lot of us tend to feel when we watch what’s happening on the national scene. I should also say this, because I think it’s really important: Last year, Congress passed about 30 bills. Michigan, with that new trifecta, passed 321. This is absolutely where things are moving. If you care about Congress, you should care about state legislatures, because state legislatures draw the district lines that decide who goes to Congress in 70 percent of the country.If you care about the Supreme Court, you should care about state legislatures because the Supreme Court doesn’t write laws, they rule on laws that are coming out of state legislatures. It was a Mississippi law that took down Roe and if that one hadn’t done it, there were 16 other states that had queued up abortion bans right after Kavanaugh was confirmed with the explicit purpose of rising up to the Supreme Court to challenge Roe. Those laws are coming from state legislatures. If you care about the presidency, you should care about state legislatures because not only do state legislators decide who can vote and when and how and when to purge the rolls or close polling places, but also because the path that the Trump team tried to steal the presidency and 2020 ran directly through state legislatures. It wasn’t senators or congresspeople that Trump called to the Oval Office in December of 2020, it was state legislators from Michigan and Arizona and Pennsylvania. He was asking them to change their electoral college votes because state legislatures are in charge of their state’s elections. And what I say to everyone who starts a Giving Circle at any level is that they’ve turned on the porch light for strategic political giving and that is a gift to everyone in their networks—their friends, their families and their neighbors—because everyone is looking for that right now. So I really appreciate the Burnt Toast community having a Giving Circle. I hope folks will join. I should also mention that in 2023, the Burnt Toast Giving Circle helped us focus on Virginia where we were able to defend the State Senate and flip the House of Delegates, so that there is a wall in front of Governor Youngkin’s rightwing agenda. There were a lot of articles about Governor Youngkin and his national ambitions and his plan for an abortion ban in Virginia last fall. But you haven’t read much about him lately and that is because the legislature has blocked everything that he’s trying to do, and that was partly because of the Burnt Toast Giving Circle. VirginiaGood work us! Yes, yes.MelissaStart a States Project Giving circle at statesproject.org if you’ve got your own crew, and just don’t give into the helplessness and despair. We do not have to be witnesses to what is happening in our country. We can absolutely be active participants to make it better. VirginiaI mean, I feel so much better when I talk to you about this. There is a clear path, this is a thing we can all do. It’s doable. We can do this and we just need to come together and make it happen. Thank you so much for hopping on to talk about this. I’m excited to see which state Burnt Toast picks to focus on (vote here!) and to hear from everybody starting their own Giving Circles. Keep in touch. We want to know what you’re doing and what you’re focusing on.MelissaAmazing. Thank you so much. VirginiaThanks, Melissa.---The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay who runs @SellTradePlus and Big Undies—subscribe for 20% off.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!56

You’re listening to Burnt Toast!We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it’s time for your June Indulgence Gospel! We’ve got an old-fashioned listener Q roundup today, including:How should we think about breast reductions—are they medically necessary or diet culture or both?How are we solving chub rub this summer?Do they make fat-friendly toilet seats? (Corinne says yes!)And so much more!This is a paywalled episode. That means to hear the whole thing you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber.

In this engaging discussion, Angel Austin and Ani Janzen from the Association for Size Diversity and Health share insights on the 'health at every size' (HAES) movement and challenge anti-fat bias in healthcare. They highlight the importance of inclusivity and the evolution of fat activism. Listeners will appreciate their personal anecdotes about reclaiming joy through tea, fantasy books, and cherished recipes like carrot cake, all while advocating for compassionate care and community support in health.

Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark!🧈🧈🧈It’s time for your June Extra Butter! Today we are giving you a behind-the-scenes look at how we make Burnt Toast. And yes, finally addressing some of the butter-related Internet rumors about Virginia’s personal life. 🧈🧈🧈To listen to the full episode and read the full transcript, you’ll need to join Extra Butter, our premium subscription tier. Extra Butter ensures that the Burnt Toast community can always stay an ad- and sponsor-free space—which is crucial for body liberation journalism. Join us here!(Questions? Glitches? Email me all the details)Extra Butter Episode 4 TranscriptCorinneToday is a really special episode of Extra Butter because we are celebrating three years of Burnt Toast. Virginia, can you believe it has been three years?VirginiaIt feels like it’s been forever and also no, not at all. It’s wild.CorinneHow are you celebrating?VirginiaProbably buy a plant. CorinneOh, yeah. I was going to say brownies. Or cake. VirginiaOh, I should see if my mom wants to make me a butter cake!CorinneOh my God. Yes!VirginiaFor people that don’t know, my mother is an amazing cake baker, and we have a family tradition where she takes requests to make elaborate cakes for many occasions, including the dumpling cake she just made for my sister’s baby shower. CorinneIt was extremely cute.VirginiaYeah, so three years is very cool and weird. We have definitely grown in ways I could not have predicted when I decided I was going to turn on paid subscribers. We had 700 people on the list. Now there are over 54,000. I have to not think about the numbers too much sometimes. It’s a big stage. But it’s it’s exciting! And I’m excited to dish a little today about how we make it happen. So we’re going to talk about how the podcast is made, we’re going to reflect a little bit on where we started, where we’ve come from, the journey of Burnt Toast. And we’re going to talk a little bit about the recent New York Times profile. 

You’re listening to Burnt Toast!I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. Today I’m chatting with jenn romolini.Jenn is a longtime journalist and magazine editor. She co-hosts the podcast Everything Is Fine with Kim France and writes the Substack extended scenes. And Jenn’s new memoirAmbition Monsteris just out this week! Ambition Monster is a deeply personal memoir about workaholism, the addictive nature of ambition, and the humbling process of picking yourself up when the world lets you down. It’s an anti-girlboss tale for our times. And Jenn writes quite a lot in the book about her years in women’s magazines. So I asked her to come on so we could process some of our trauma together. We get into the very specific intersection of diet culture, perfectionism, and workaholism that we survived working in women’s media in the early 2000s and 2010s—which may feel like ancient history but a lot of that stuff is still with us.Ambition Monster is available in the Burnt Toast Bookshop!Don’t forget, you can always take 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk from Split Rock Books! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)PS. If you’re enjoying the podcast, make sure you’re following us (it’s free!) in your podcast player! We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts! And while you’re there, please leave us a rating or review. (We like 5 stars!)JennI’m Jenn Romolini. I’m a longtime writer and editor. I was at one point a Chief Content Officer. I’m former tech executive. And I had a professional crash in 2018, reassessed my entire life, got myself off the ladder I’d been on, and wrote a book about it called Ambition Monster. And now I am a podcaster and a writer. And that’s me. VirginiaYou co-host the Everything Is Fine podcast which is my every Monday morning “walk the dog and listen to Jenn and Kim” hour and I love it so much.JennI love it too. It’s a very fulfilling project. I think it’s fulfilling because that’s all we want. We just want it to be fulfilling, you know? That’s part of reassessing your feelings about work, what actually lights you up. That’s one of the things that lights me up.VirginiaThat’s something I’ve thought about a lot as I’ve listened to it over the years, both you and Kim both had these huge careers, you had visibility in lots of different ways. And every week it is the just two of you having so much fun together—like the way you crack each other up. You’re being so generous by inviting all of us into your friendship in this really beautiful way. This is what we want to be creating now. Fuck the ladder.JennExactly. And fuck looking for external validation, too. We don’t even really imagine that people are listening to the podcast, we’re doing it for us and then we’re happy that other people have come along. That’s a huge shift. And I think that’s a shift that only could have happened with age and experience.VirginiaSo tell us a little bit about Ambition Monster. I inhaled this book. I ignored my children. I was cooking dinner and letting things burn to keep reading—it’s that kind of reading experience. JennI’m happy to hear that you devoured it. I didn’t mean for you to burn dinner, but I’m happy to hear that it hit you like that. I want this to go off like a bullet. I want it to be fast because I wanted it to feel like an addiction memoir, and I wanted it to have the stakes of an addiction memoir and be building in that way, because that’s the way work felt for me. It was very toxic. I had a relationship with work that was really problematic, that sort of blotted out everything else in my life. And it was starting to ruin my life. It was ruining my relationships, it was ruining my health. It felt like an addiction like any other. So, I intentionally wrote it in that kind of pace that to feel like you feel when you’re in the throes of an addiction.VirginiaIt feels that way. You also take us into your whole family history. We’re right there in Philly, in your childhood.JennI didn’t want to have to expose so much of my personal life, but as I started writing about workaholism and ambition, it became very clear to me that I had to tell an origin story. I had to name the source of never feeling like enough and never feeling good enough, and the connection between childhood trauma and perfectionism. And just all of the lies we were sold about having it all. The big, fake, fairy tales about men and that you could build this life and then it would somehow be in balance. It was it was an impossible lie. And it was very much sold to us by our mothers who were part of the Women’s Liberation Movement. They were like, “Okay, this is it. Now we just step into it.” And we were really ill prepared for how many ways it could go wrong.VirginiaWell and for how much “having it all” means still doing work on the terms of the patriarchy, and on the terms of these systems of oppression. It wasn’t about reinventing work. It was about women playing the same game. Don’t worry, we can do it all.JennWe can do it, too. And then also do all the other stuff, we can do it, too. We can do it just like them and do everything else, too. It was an impossible dream. And it didn’t hit me until I reached the height, the peak, because you keep raising the bar. You’re like when I just get there, if I just make a little more money, if I just get this title, if I just, if just, if I get married. If I have a kid, this certainly is going to be it. And when I had reached the point that it looked to the outside world like I had it all—like literally Cosmo was writing an article about how to get my life. I was like, this feels awful inside.VirginiaDon’t get this life. JennYou don’t want this at all! Get away from it!VirginiaWell, and I think you tell the personal story with so much love. I really felt the love for your parents and for your extended family. I can imagine how complicated it is to write that stuff, but it felt honest and vulnerable and full of love in a way that I really admired.JennI’m glad I worked really hard on writing about my parents because I love them so much. And I understand what happened. I understand what my mother did. You know, they were teenagers when they had me. They were having to survive. I understand what happened. And in some ways, they’re heroes. I wanted them to come across as heroes. I wanted to talk about generational trauma and I wanted to talk about parenting and how parenting is just so hard for anyone but especially for people who had no models and no tools. VirginiaAnd who are so young. Your mom was so young. Just thrown into it. JennExactly, just thrown into it. I mess up all the time and I didn’t have a kid until I was 37 and had lived a whole life. I really wanted to be compassionate and empathetic while also not hiding the story because I had hidden it for so long trying to protect them. I’d really taken it on and kept it a secret. It felt very, very liberating to air it out. VirginiaSince you mentioned the Cosmo story, the other piece that you spent a long time on in the book is your experiences in women’s magazines and New York City media more broadly in the early 2000s. And you and I are both survivors of that world.JennWhat a mess. VirginiaIt’s like that meme: The kids today would not last an hour in the asylum where they raised us. Jenn, they just wouldn’t.JennNo way. I still don’t know if I’m over what happened in that situation. The other thing that the book is about is class, right? It’s a lot about class and Conde Nast was a shock and I spent a lot of time in Conde Nast both as a fact checker and as an editor at Lucky and I was at Allure for a minute and I was at Glamour for a year.VirginiaOh, I’m sure. JennIt was just okay for somebody come up and call you portly. It was just okay. I was called portly. I was a size 8 or 10, it doesn’t matter. But it was just like—I was called portly. VirginiaYeah, that word specifically, too.JennPortly. And not to mention the stories I wrote and how the subjects had to be conventionally attractive or they would kill the story. I remember fact-checking two stories, one about breast cancer survivors, and one about 9/11 widows. I remember the editors saying, “can we get more attractive people?” About the 9/11 widows. And then on the breast cancer survival story: “She’s chubs, we’re going to have to cut this one.”VirginiaI have a feeling the listeners are imploding right now. So, just to give some historical context to that, women’s magazines in this time period were very big on these Real Women Stories. They would always be about the serious issues: Breast cancer, date rape, all these pressing issues that were that are actually incredibly important to women’s lives. And they would want to tell them through real women, often as “as told to,” first person essays. And so the editor or the writer assigned the story would literally have to cast these pieces with the right mix of real women for the top editors to be okay with. None of the women were ever real because they were so carefully slotted in. I can remember age was another big one. If you wrote for a magazine whose demographic topped out at 26, God forbid you show them a 28 year old. JennOh my God.VirginiaThey wouldn’t know what to do with it. JennI mean 40 was just like, can you imagine?VirginiaAnyone over 40, forget it. JennIt was a nightmare. Unless it was a model and you were making this big deal about it. I just think about how complicit we were in our own subjugation. Because this was a time where the tabloids were circling cellulite. Remember? Like, it was just like such a “gotcha!” moment. VirginiaYes, Jessica Simpson was “fat.”JennOh, remember that? Oh my God, yeah. It felt sickening to be in it. I was married to a writer, he worked at men’s magazines. It was totally different game. Didn’t matter what he wore to work.VirginiaNo mandatory pedicures.JennNo. Exactly. The money we spent just to work there, just to keep yourself groomed. I could have retired on that!There were so few jobs for women in publishing at the time that were outside of women’s magazines. And, the women’s magazines paid the best. Because I actually had a job I loved at Time Out New York, but I made $35,000 a year as an editor of a full section. So it was like, at a certain point, the lure of survival brought you there.VirginiaIt brought you there and then you were trapped there. You couldn’t get your pitches read by editors at a men’s magazine, or even a general interest magazine, because you came from lady mags.JennExactly. They wouldn’t even look at your pitches.VirginiaIt was a fancy prison.JennIt was a fancy prison. That’s exactly right. It was a fancy prison run by skinny, wealthy, white women. Like, Mayflower white. Because it was also a very particular kind of white lady who was acceptable in those worlds. That was the class culture shock for me, too. I come from working class, like I’m fully self-made. I had no money. I really had no money. I was in such terrifying debt. I remember talking to somebody on the fashion team—I’d written something about a $150 dress—and she was like, “that’s a budget dress.” She was like, “you can’t get a decent dress for less than $500.”VirginiaAnd this was in early 2000s money, people! JennYes, exactly. It’s so shocking. Lucky for me I found a workaround. I was one of the first people on eBay when eBay came out. In the early days of eBay, you could really find steals. So I would look through what was coming up, like spring fashion or whatever the next season was, and I would find dupes on eBay. I had an incredible vintage wardrobe. I was very proud of it. But everything was like $30 that I bought. So I just was able to pass. Because I was just hoping to pass in that world. I remember going to a meeting and I had a weird hairstyle that day—I put my hair and braids on top of my head, you know? And somebody said, “It’s hard to make a pretty girl ugly, Jenn, but somehow today you’ve managed.”Virginia Wow.JennIn a meeting! Out loud! In front of other people!VirginiaAt work. Where we’ve all come to do our jobs. JennYes, I mean, The Devil Wears Prada is a true accounting of what this shit was like. VirginiaIt’s pretty much a memoir. I remember, either as an unpaid intern or a very poorly paid editorial assistant at Seventeen, getting roped into being one of those real women on a photo shoot. And none of the things zipping up the back and everyone just kind of standing around being like, “well, I guess we can make it work…” And just picking your body apart. That’s super scarring. Another time, we did this photoshoot at Seventeen where we had all these real girls doing workout gear. And they’d brought in one size 12 girl to check that box of “we have one real body!” I still think about the girl because they were legit teenagers. And she was gorgeous. So I hope she went on to feel really great about herself, but it was a not positive experience that day. JennWell, this was also part of the thin privilege because the sample sizes were 0, 2 and maybe 4. The people who were those sizes got free clothes all the time because they could fit into those clothes. So they got anything that came in sample that we weren’t sending back. I would never fit into those clothes.VirginiaNo, definitely not.JennSo they would get very expensive clothes for free. And you were just like, oh no, I have to buy everything myself. VirginiaBecause the expectation was still there that you’re going to dress at that level despite having no access.JennExactly, exactly. We haven’t even gotten into the photoshopping and airbrushing. I remember there was a picture of Christina Applegate at one of the magazines I was at. I saw the proof on the art director’s desk and everything had been circled, like lift breast, do this, thin arm, and then on the bottom, the art director had written “make beautiful.”VirginiaI mean and what’s outrageous about that is—I mean, it’s outrageous for her experience, of course. But if that is the standard? How outrageous to everybody who is bigger than Christina Applegate. Everybody is made to feel less than, because if that isn’t good enough, what is? That’s how these standards become so insidious. JennRight. And like, this is the only way clothes are supposed to look. This is the only way that’s acceptable to be, because this is the only thing we’re showing you. I mean, let’s not even get into the fact that everything was so white. There was one month a year, January, when you could put a woman of color on the on the cover of a magazine, which is also fucking crazy if you really think about that. VirginiaAnd they would always talk about how it didn’t sell well. Hmm.  JennYeah, exactly. Put them on the cover the month of the year you know sells the least and then talk about how it didn’t sell well. VirginiaMaybe give them September? Just a thought.JennI interviewed cover models, like the celebrities, the actresses, at the cover shoots. That’s where I would do the cover shoot interviews. It was so weird to watch them being put in clothes and how uncomfortable they felt. It wasn’t like playing dress up. It didn’t feel good to them either. We were all part of this machine that was just perpetuating all this toxic information, you know? I’ve worked for famous people and people who say to me, well, you can wear two pair of Spanx. And it’s like, who the fuck wants to wear two pair of Spanx? VirginiaYeah, no thank you. JennI don’t ever want to wear Spanx. But, like, the Spanx were a godsend, right? VirginiaThey were our salvation. JennThank God for shape wear. I mean, I hate bras. I hated it all. It’s weird to think about it. It’s weird to think about why we didn’t just walk away.VirginiaI mean, I don’t think we could see it at the time! Going back to the breast cancer story example—I think I felt really proud to be working on some of those pieces. I was like, “Well, this is the game I have to play to get the story told.” I finally convinced them to care about this issue, so I can find five women who are all between the ages of 24 and 35. And there will be one black woman, but no more. And everyone will be thin and beautiful. Somehow I’ll make that happen so I can tell the story. Which is of course not really telling the story because you’ve manipulated it so much. But it was that or not having the piece in the magazine at all.JennRight? And also those stories wound up shrinking and shrinking. I don’t know if you remember, they wound up being like one column. You’d start out with like a 3,000 word piece and it would just get whittled and whittled. It was like a caption by the end.VirginiaOne of the editors I worked for at Seventeen went into the art department during her first week on the job and said, “I hate words and girls don’t read. So make the pictures as big as you want.” And basically everyone in the features department was like, “So we start looking for jobs?”JennI think I know who that editor is and yes, that was the pervading philosophy. Girls don’t read. I remember being like, why can’t there be a women’s GQ? Why can’t there be a women’s Esquire? Why are we stuck in this?VirginiaI felt so frustrated because I knew I didn’t even want to write for Esquire and GQ, because they were not going to do the stories that I wanted to write. I was never going to get an editor at Esquire interested in feminism. Like, it’s a non-starter. I was just always like, I don’t know where else to go. Because the places that do the “good journalism” don’t want these stories. And then the places that will do these stories will only do them if I squish them into this box. Why is this entire genre of media so pandering? Why is it assuming women are so stupid?JennIt was funny because I did that podcast last year Stiffed which was about Viva Magazine, which was a feminist porn magazine from the 70s. The reason I wanted to do it was because I really wanted to talk to all these old time female writers and editors. I wanted to know what their experience had been like. An they were saying the same thing. They wanted all the same things. That’s why they like held their nose and went and worked thre. They were all smart, Harvard-educated people. And they went to go work for Bob Guccione because they were like, “Well, maybe we’ll get to make like not a totally vapid publication.” And they did. They did for years, next to all these naked dicks that they didn’t care about at all. They didn’t have any interest in the porn. He was pushing the porn, but they were doing all these really interesting feminist stories about sex and marriage and work and all of these things that they couldn’t get placed in other publications. There were people like us who wanted something better and bigger for women. And nobody would let us do it because they just wanted us to write about eyeshadow and pedicures. VirginiaI want to be clear: There were so many brilliant editors I learned from at women’s magazines. I remember the head of fact checking at Seventeen had been there for like 30 years. She was just a brilliant, quirky, long-time journalist. There were so many people you could learn from. It was the corporation forcing us into those parameters. The individual features editors, or the researchers, we were all like “How do we do this?”JennNo, not all of the editors. There was some true monsters.VirginiaYeah, I mean, the editor-in-chief is a different conversation.JennConde Nast used to make their editors-in-chief go through a full head to toe makeover—including they had to go to a diet doctor to slim them down, before they got on the job. VirginiaJesus Christ. JennJust think about that, you’re like a walking marquee for this whole idea of femininity.VirginiaSo curious if they did that to the male editor-in-chiefs, too. Did David Remnick have to do that?JennCome on. You know the answer to that.VirginiaHow do you feel the rigid body expectations—and this idea that your whole body has to be your work—how do you feel like that fit into your workaholism? Because I do think they’re very related.JennI mean, I think Conde ruined me. I was kind of messy when I went into Conde, you know. I didn’t know from a blowout. But that perfectionism pervaded all parts of my life.I started setting unrealistic expectations for myself in all ways after that experience, but particularly in the way that I looked. It was funny because then when I started working in tech, I showed up immaculate everywhere. I wouldn’t have said at the time, but I really worked to keep my weight at a certain level. And when I would show up for these tech interviews, I was way too done. I had become so polished and way too done. I was cosplaying as this sleek professional and it wasn’t who I was, in any way. But the Conde makeover was particularly brutal. I don’t think you can really escape it working there. Especially not in the position I had. I was the deputy editor. I don’t feel like I could have escaped it.VirginiaI don’t think you would have gotten the job, or kept it. without playing that game. There was a degree to which it felt like armor, if we dressed this way.JennIt was like a secret handshake or something, right? People being able to identify the the labels you were wearing and the bag you were carrying and that your manicure was immaculate. That really messes with you. VirginiaI was insulated in a way because I went freelance pretty early. I was a freelance writer from 2005 on. But anytime I’d have an editor lunch at Conde or at the Hearst cafeteria, I would take the entire day off work to prep. To go into that lunch, to just to be in the lobby of those buildings, it felt like you have to arrive in a certain way. I didn’t understand how my friends who were editors managed to eat in those cafeterias every day.JennOh, the cafeteria! I mean, talk about disordered eating. I have like a whole run in the book about how skinny women ate in the Conde Nast cafeteria, which was wild to me. I think that sort of Conde Nast ethos fit into what I got into later, which was like a whole Girlboss thing, which was lwhen all of those books about making it all had stilettos on the covers. It was like, you have to be pretty to make it. I tried to disrupt that narrative with my first book, but nobody wanted to hear about it. Nobody wanted to be messy. Everybody wanted to pretend like it was all going great. If you look at any of those books from that time, the women who are on the covers all look exactly the same. And if you dig a little further, they all come from wealth, or all had wealthy husbands. Their stories of making it were all about like, “Well, actually, I just started out great and then I had a leg up. And then I built this quote business.”Virginia“And I can afford a nanny and a housekeeper.” And even then, it’s still not quite working, but they can give the veneer of it. JennYes, exactly. All that grooming, and all that presentation, of what a successful woman looks like.VirginiaIt’s something I have also really had to untangle. It’s hard because we survived our women’s magazine years and now we’re in the era of social media where there’s still an expectation that your face is going to be out there all the time and that you’re going to be able to be on camera very easily. It’s not the editor-in-chief who has to be ready to go on the Today Show at a moment’s notice, but we’re still performing our bodies, and performing how we look, in the service of work.JennYes. I thought about that a lot, because I really wanted to hide for a long time after feeling so exposed for so long and performing for so long and performing an identity that wasn’t really me. Becoming inauthentic in a lot of ways and caring about things I didn’t really care about, et cetera, et cetera. So I went into podcasts and then suddenly podcasts were like video. I was like, wait, wait, wait. Even promoting this book, a lot of things have come up for me about, like, do I look okay? Are my outfits okay? Because it can’t just be about the work for women, ever. I understand the game because I was right in the fucking disgusting dirty middle of it. I was in the gross molten core of it. And I think about it a lot. I wrestle with it, you know? Ultimately, you just have to learn to disentangle the two. I think it’s one of the hardest things women will ever do.VirginiaIt’s so complicated because if you step back from some of it, there is a cost, right? There’s a cost. For every beauty standard you divest from or every bit of beauty work that used to feel essential that you’re like, “I’m gonna say fuck it to that,” that has real consequences for women. And the more marginalized you are, the more consequences you’ll have. I do think there’s some power in just recognizing this is a game I play. I just wrote an essay about body hair because I still fucking get bikini waxes even though, as a feminist, I think it’s bullshit. But I don’t have the energy to opt out. And, I mean, we didn’t wear bikinis to women’s magazines and yet, there was still an expectation that you did that. JennOh my God, like I said, the amount of grooming! The waxing and the plucking and the nails and the hair. And the hair, the hair cost so much money!VirginiaThe blow out bars.JennThe highlights. And they they knew they had us. No men were paying $500 to get their hair highlighted. Come on.VirginiaI know and those New York City salons that could charge those prices and not because they were paying their workers particularly well. But there would be the one dude celebrity hairstyles that everyone wanted to see. I remember one time getting one of those $500 haircuts and being like, What even was that?JennBecause they’re not nice to you! And it’s what you’re supposed to aspire to. All of that was really what I was wrestling with with this book because the only way to liberation is to stop caring about what other people think. It’s the only way. To be motivated internally by what do I want? How do I feel? And then that’s even confusing. I let my armpits grow for a long time—speaking of hair, because I was like,”I don’t want to teach my kid that they have to shave their armpits.” Eventually I was like, “this is kind of uncomfortable.” Eventually, I came to like, oh, my armpits stink more. But I went through the whole journey with my armpits so I could really figure out how I felt about them. How much of this is internalized misogyny and how much is my own free will is the thing I think about a lot.VirginiaIt’s really hard to know because it’s always in there. The misogyny, the anti-fatness, we can’t escape it. I feel like all you can do is try to name where it’s showing up and then decide is there something that I get out of this as well? Or is this beauty work that only costs me. And it’s going to be different for everyone. JennAnd as a parent, no matter how well you do it in your house, the outside world is still awful and cruel. I mean, we’ve talked about this a lot—my kid lives in a bigger body. My kid is bigger and they experience so much bullying. It’s so painful because I worked so hard to not give my kid what I had. And they’re still suffering.VirginiaYeah, the world is still shit. JennThere’s just no good answers for any of this except that we just keep trying to evolve and understand ourselves better and not participate in anything like we participated in in the 2000s. VirginiaI think we’re doing better now. We can confidently say we can feel much better about the work we do today. JennAnd you know what? I don’t think that Jessica Simpson would be called fat today.VirginiaNo, I don’t think so.JennI mean, now she’s on Ozempic. So who knows. Fucking Ozempic. VirginiaShe won’t be called fat because she’s doing everything to not be called fat. JennExactly. But in the body she was in then? I don’t think so. I do think that is some progress. Though Ozempic really terrifies me.VirginiaI mean, the media in particular has done such a bad job on this. Because every interview request I get about Ozempic, which is multiple times a week, I’m asked to talk about it. I just say no now, because I’m like, there’s no point. You’re all doing the same story, which is, “Now we have Ozempic so I guess we don’t need body positivity anymore.” And no, you still have to treat fat people like human beings, which by the way, is more than body positivity.JennI’m starting to really see it with women in midlife, because our podcast’s audience is all women in midlife. Your body changes in midlife and sometimes you hold weight and you never held weight before. So you have to adjust to who you are and getting comfortable with your body, right? For maybe the first time ever, right? You had thin privilege your whole life and now you don’t. We used to have models for women being in bigger bodies as they got older but now with Ozempic—like I was looking at Kris Jenner the other day, and I was like, oh my God, you’re whittled down to nothing. It’s sad.VirginiaAnd it’s so difficult to know how we get more of that representation if every time we get like a little bit of it, it has to be the entire personality of the person. That would be the same for an older celebrity. To be like, I’m not going to do Ozempic. I’m not going to do various types of work that most of them get done. Because then that would be all they’d ever talk about in an interview. I understand why they don’t want that to be the conversation. They want the conversation to be their work. So again, it’s the armor. It’s playing the game so that you can do the work. JennIt is playing the game. I’ve had friends in Hollywood say, “We just need one person to stop doing this and then we can all stop it.” And like, no, that’s not it. It’s not going to just be one person that can just stop. It’s too systemic.VirginiaYou mentioned your armpit journey, which I love. Is there anything that else that as you have done all this work of divesting from workaholism, any other ways that how you relate to your body has changed? JennI don’t have a scale in my house anymore. I used to be a real weigh-er, you know? And I don’t have the scale in the house. I really try to only care about being strong. That’s the only health thing that I really care about is like, can I still touch my toes? Can I lift this six gallon bottle of water? I’ve really tried to change those relationships and I try not to look in the mirror. I’ve tried to buy the size that I am, to not ever try to put myself into a smaller size if I’m not that size. Like I’ve just tried to not make it be a thing, if that makes sense. And it’s hard. VirginiaIt definitely does help to reframe our bodies that way. My big one is like, I still want to be able to get up off the floor. JennOh, I do that every day! VirginiaIt’s been getting harder since I turned 40! And I’m 43, so I feel like it shouldn’t be this hard yet. And it’s already pretty hard. So I need to keep doing that. Every day I’m like, get down on the floor, get up off the floor.JennI really practice. That is one of my practices every morning where I get up and down off the floor. I don’t want to hate my body anymore. It’s been too long, it’s been too long of hating it and comparing it and feeling uncomfortable with it. Now there’s a whole new set of issues. There’s crepey skin and saggy skin and everything is different. Yesterday I was doing yoga and I just saw there were these weird new veins on the front of my knees. I was like, wow, that’s weird. That’s new. Just being like, alright, well, it still works. Just being really grateful for the fact that it works. That’s where I’m really trying to be. VirginiaThe aesthetic part is not the part that keeps you being able to get up off the floor now. That’s not the most critical piece of it. JennNo, because if you start fixating on all of those things—and believe me there’s a plastic surgery for everything. If you start fixating on your ugly old hands or your saggy arms or whatever, it’s never going to end. Because we are declining. This is what’s happening. Our bodies are rotting. It’s what’s happening is a slow rot. And like, you just have to be like, alright, you’re still working. I’m still able to move through the world. That’s what I’m really focused on now more than anything else, more than the clothes I can wear, more than fucking anything. I don’t care besides just being able to be be alive and be able to be present and not hurt too much. You know?VirginiaI think that makes a lot of sense. ButterJennThere are two things that I’m obsessed with. I just realized today going through my drawer, the first one is, I think I have seven pair of Big Bud Press pants.VirginiaI’ve heard that’s a very addictive brand because you can get all the different colors. JennThey make the best pants and I’ll tell you why they make the best pants. Because they’re like a tailored pant. They look totally normal, like a normal pant. They don’t look like sweatpants. But they have elastic in the back. They just flex for you, you know? And they’re super size inclusive. They have so many cool designs and I’ve been wearing them for like five years and again I have seven pairs.VirginiaTell us which you like the best.JennI like the work pants. I really like the work pants a lot. They’re also really well-made and it’s a small company out of California and the cotton’s really good. It’s a high quality pant. I’m very hard on clothes and they’ve lasted me for years and years. They’re just a really good brand. I buy them for my kid, too. It’s a good brand, solid brand. VirginiaFor listeners, they go up to 6x. I will say I tried their jumpsuit once and the sizing was a little—it didn’t end up working for me. But I’ve heard their size charts have gotten much better. JennTheir size charts have gotten much better.VirginiaSo they’ve been on my list to try again. And the measurements for 6x is a 61 to 67 inch waist. So that’s pretty generous.JennI think they’re good pants.Then the other thing I’ve been doing—and you will look like a dork—but I got a weighted vest.VirginiaI’ve heard you talk about this. I’m so glad you’re bringing this up because I have many questions about the weighted vest. Okay, first, tell us what it is. JennA weighted vest is exactly what you think. It’s a vest with weights in it. It has about 16 pounds of weight in it. Because I’m obsessed with being strong and because also I hate running and I hate cardio. It’s the worst and I don’t want to force myself to do it. I will say I sweat more and I feel like I’m out of breath more with the weighted vest on. But it’s also distributed. I tried the backpack with the pounds in it. And I was like this is just killing my menopausal shoulder. I can’t live with this.VirginiaThat feels like a great way for me to have a neck injury. JennExactly. I was like no, no, no. But the weighted vest, I feel like it makes a low impact workout higher impact. VirginiaOk, I’m intrigued. JennI think it is supposed to help the strength of your bones. I just like it because it’s a lazier workout. I’m never going to join CrossFit. But I will say there’s no way to look cool on it.VirginiaWe’ll put a link in to the one you have. And I’m curious to hear if other folks have tried them. When I walk in my neighborhood, my neighborhood is very hilly and I’m already very out of breath. So this doesn’t feel like my journey? My walks are already hard enough. But I can definitely understand the appeal. I mean, all they tell us is strength training, bone density, blah, blah, blah. Any way to get more of that seems useful.My Butter is this book I just listened to all last weekend while I was gardening which was so blissful. And it’s called The Mother Act by Heidi Reimer. It just came out and it made me think of your book a lot. I think you would really love it. It’s told from both the perspective of the mother and the daughter and the mother is this super successful memoirist, a giant feminist personality who’s gone on to do talk shows and become a giant celebrity. But she’s written about her motherhood in a lot of detail and about how much she hated motherhood in a lot of detail. So she has a very complicated relationship with her daughter, who is the subject of all of this content that she’s made about hating motherhood. Both characters are a really wonderful exploration of women’s ambition and the character was raised in a fundamentalist Christian family that she had to kind of break out of. But then she ends up in this other fancy prison, like we were talking about. I really could not stop listening to it. And the audio book is excellent for audio book fans.JennOh, I want to get that! That sounds exactly right up my alley. I very intentionally did not write about my child in this book. Kimberly Harrington has written about this pretty well, like, it’s not my story. But also I didn’t want to regret that. I didn’t want to betray my kid. I’ve really considered that a lot. That’s a tough position, you know.VirginiaAs someone who’s done it some and is now navigating some conversations with my kid about it, I’m glad I didn’t do more. It’s hard. It’s where your story overlaps with their story and it’s hard to figure out. JennMy kid one time found a tweet of mine that said, “motherhood is a scam,” and I was like, “oh, it was just a joke. Sorry. I don’t mean it.” I mean, but I kind of do. VirginiaThat’s a whole conversation we have to have. Let’s have it when you’re 30. Alright, Jenn. This was fantastic. Thank you so much. We could relive our magazine trauma for days, I think. But this was healing. JennThank you. You’re the best. Thank you for having me on. I love everything you do. I love your work so much and I respect you so much. I’m so proud of everything you do.VirginiaThank you! Okay, everyone needs to go read Ambition Monster. Tell us how else we can follow you and support your work. JennYou can find me on Substack at jenn romolini and I’m on Instagram and everywhere at Jenn Romolini.---The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay , who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies. The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

You’re listening to Burnt Toast!I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. Today I’m chatting withEmma Copley Eisenberg.Emma is the author of the hybrid nonfiction book The Third Rainbow Girl, which was named a New York Times notable book and Editor’s Choice of 2020. She also writesFrump Feelings by Emma Copley Eisenberg. And Emma’s new novel, Housemates, just came out on Tuesday!Today we are going to talk about Emma’s new book, but we’re also going to talk a lot about my favorite new trend invented by Emma (so says me): Frump Fashion.Both of Emma’s, including Housemates, are available in the Burnt Toast Bookshop!Don’t forget, you can always take 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk from Split Rock Books! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)PS. If you’re enjoying the podcast, make sure you’re following us (it’s free!) in your podcast player! We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts! And while you’re there, please leave us a rating or review. (We like 5 stars!)This transcript may contain affiliate links. Shopping our links is another great way to support Burnt Toast!Episode 146 TranscriptVirginiaFull disclosure: We should let the folks at home know that we do share a literary agent. EmmaTrue. VirginiaNothing about this interview was compromised by that fact, I don’t think. We just both love and admire our agent and have that in common.EmmaIt’s true. Good conflict of interest disclosure, but I think I found you totally independently of her! I think just from Burnt Toast. So it was a fun coincidence. VirginiaSuch a small world. Okay, so tell folks a little bit about yourself!EmmaI am a writer and a fat person living in Philadelphia. I write across the genre spectrum. I write long, rambling books. My first book is called The Third Rainbow Girl. I’m a novelist at heart and a fiction writer, and my book is coming out called Housemates. I’ve also written journalism and articles about the intersection of crime and queerness, about the intersection of fatness and queerness, and about fat liberation in general.VirginiaLet’s talk a little bit about Housemates! I just finished it at 5am because a child woke me up in the middle of the night. And I was like, well, I’m up, at least I get to read Emma’s amazing novel. It has one of the best fat protagonists I’ve read in a long time. Tell us a little bit about Leah and about Bernie, who is the other protagonist.EmmaHousemates is about Bernie and Leah who are two queer housemates in a big chaotic, messy group house in West Philly, which is close to my heart. That’s where I live. I was interested in writing a story about two people who are not just lovers, not just friends, not just making art together, but are doing all three of those things at the same time. Leah is the fat one—which is only one part of her personality, which was important to me. I’m really interested in the ways that fatness shows up in fiction, the lack of fat characters in fiction as we know. I did an analysis of the New York Times notable books over the past five years adn found that less than one percent of the Times notable books—100 each year over the past 5 years—have had a fat person in them.VirginiaOut of 500 books?EmmaLess than one percent. And that’s not just the Times, right? That’s a systemic issue in our culture and in our books landscape. So that was something that was definitely on my mind. As I said, I’m also a fat person. It’s part of my life and my experience, but I wanted to write a character who was in an interesting place with her fatness. I think there’s all this pressure if you’re fat to be unequivocally joyful and positive in your embodiment. Leah is, I would say, definitely still struggling and grappling with how her body exists in the world and how it’s treated. Particularly in queer spaces. Queer spaces can be super white and super fatphobic, as we know, as well. Leah’s moving through this queer strange bubble of West Philly, having all these experiences and thinking a lot about how she wants to leave and explore and see what else is out there and make art that is doing something that she’s not seeing in her life, in her neighborhood. She’s also tall and masc and nonbinary. She uses she and they—I’m going to use she for her in this interview because the pronouns kind of change over the course of the book. But both are fine, according to her. She’s really thinking a lot about joy and pleasure with fatness. She loves sex. She’s good at sex, which I think is rarely offered to fat people, especially fat people in fiction. She’s in love with Bernie and this exciting new relationship.At the same time, she’s thinking about how to navigate her body in spaces that are not always really safe. They’re road tripping across Pennsylvania and there are lots of things that happen that put her masc and nonbinary body in situations that are dangerous or unknown. I wanted to write a fat person who is smart, inquiring, and searching. Not fully arrived at liberation, but not deeply entrenched in shame either. Sort of in the middle, and really coming of age and coming to figure out her own body, as many of us are. Then Bernie is a kind of thin, squirrel-y, little lady who is also struggling with her embodiment. Even though she’s a thin person, we know fatphobia affects all the people. She’s someone who is really thinking about how to not be so alienated from her body. She is trying to think about how to be more at home inside herself. Rather than looking at herself from the outside, rather than feeling sort of dissociated from her own experience. She is someone who really struggles to feel pleasure, to enjoy sex, to enjoy connection. I wanted to also show that Leah is actually someone who can sort of mentor and encourage Bernie along on her body journey. It’s almost like the fat person is teaching the thin person how to be in a body which is something I wanted to play with and see. Because as fat people we think about embodiment all the time. And our friends and loved ones are sort of like what, who, where? I have a body? We can be at the forefront. Not that we must teach everyone how to have a body, but that’s a joyful gift we can give if we want to.VirginiaWell and you give her that power and authority, when fat people are so often not allowed to be authorities on our own bodies.I don’t want to include any spoilers in this episode because everyone’s going to go read the book, but there’s a really, really powerful scene at the end where Leah does something very physical. It’s a very cool, embodied powerful moment and subverts a lot of expectations about how fat people move and exist in our bodies. EmmaI wanted to show Leah getting to go on a journey and a trajectory with her body that wasn’t really easy and tied up in a bow, like she starts off the book hating her body and feeling shame about fatness and by the end she’s fixed or cured or done. I do think that there are ways that we’re constantly shifting and unlearning shame over the course of our lives. My therapist always says people heal in relation, we don’t heal in isolation. And I think there’s something powerful in the connection between these two people who are thinking a lot about art and morality and travel and America under Trump. They’re both teaching each other and growing. VirginiaI also applaud you, though, because while she is really struggling with a lot of this, she’s not actively dieting. I appreciated that you left dieting out of the book altogether because I think the struggle of embodiment is so much more than that. It too often gets reduced down to just that one piece.EmmaFor sure. Leah doesn’t diet. She’s in this place of essentially intuitive eating, where she’s like, I’m going to sort of perk up my ears and listen to what I want and what sounds delicious and what I want to consume. Especially, like, they’re on a cross country road trip. So they’re eating like delicious things like Waffle House and Dairy Queen and whatever you may find on the road. I think that’s part of the pleasure of a road trip is the eating and the consuming and seeing what you encounter. At the same time, she’s ambivalent or has questions about what does it mean to eat what I’m what I’m wanting or what I’m listening to. All those intuitive eating nuances that you discuss a lot in your work. That’s very much also true to my community and my experiences here in Philly. I did this really great fat embodied healing workshop where a bunch of us were asking: What does it mean to be eating what we want to eat, to be listening to our bodies, and also to be thinking about ways of not wanting to react against. Because I think it’s true that we don’t necessarily want to just be reacting against diet culture all the time. And it’s really hard to stop that reaction. So Leah’s thinking a lot about how can I actually be free and liberated. It’s not just reacting against, it’s finding some easiness in the middle. She’s looking for that ease, I think. And I think she finds a little more of it by the end of the book.VirginiaThe book also features this somewhat omniscient narrator, an older woman who’s watching Leah and Bernie’s lives play out. She’s a really interesting character in her own right, but there’s one paragraph of hers in particular that I underlined and bookmarked and was like, “Well, this just summed up my life to me.” EmmaShe’s an older queer woman, a lesbian of an older generation than Bernie and Leah, is I guess what I’ll say. She is speaking here. The he in this paragraph is this character Daniel Dunn, who was Bernie’s mentor and college professor, and he’s complicated, to say the least.Okay, here is the paragraph: He was one of those men who asked no questions, who just talked. He talked at me rather than to me, as if I could have been anyone which it seemed I was. This was not necessarily an uncommon experience for me when it came to men of Dunn’s demographics. There’s a thing that happens when you are either a lesbian or you become more comfortable with yourself in your late 30s and early 40s, or both, and men start to pick up on the fact that you are no longer sexually available to them. So they ignore you, treat you as a nondescript piece of furniture, you are no longer dressing for their eye, and they know it. And so they do not rest their eye upon you.VirginiaYeah, I mean, all of this. EmmaSay more. VirginiaThis is a thing that I’ve been noticing over the last several years—I mean, I’m 43. So I’m the demographic she’s talking about there. And I haven’t quite known how to verbalize because I both notice it and resent it, and also love it at the same time. Because there’s a lot of freedom to this invisibility? I don’t know, I’m curious how you feel about it.EmmaYeah, that’s really interesting. It makes me think, too, I recently listened to the Modesty episode ofArticles Of Interest.VirginiaOoh, I haven’t heard that yet. EmmaIt’s a little bit different, but modesty connects maybe to what we’re going to get into a little bit later, in the sense that if you’re slightly covered up, you have a little more control over who’s looking at you and how they’re looking at you, and especially how you get sexualized or not by men. I’m also really interested in the way that men’s misogyny and sexualization gets troubled or interrupted by queerness, by queer women.So this is Bernie’s problematic professor and he’s interacting with queer women of various ages and getting tripped up almost by the fact that they’re not sexually available to him, which is interesting.Like you said, it creates a certain amount of freedom. But I think there’s also a way that there’s just a sense of invisibility that—I’m in my later 30s, but I’m fat, so I feel like that’s sort of also part of it. Like, I’ve been starting to experience that. And like you said, I am ambivalent about it. It means you have less aliveness or electricity in a room sometimes, but you also have more freedom to just be a subject rather than an object. It’s complicated. VirginiaYes. I’m aware that there are rooms I’m in where I am not going to be listened to. Where I’m not going to be considered worth listening to because of being fat, because of being in my 40s, because of being a person on the internet who men like to hate. All these different identities. And sometimes it’s just like, what a fucking relief. Let me just not engage with that. Of course, it gets complicated if you’re remotely interested in men ever. Because it’s like, what do we do with that? EmmaYeah, for this narrator, she’s not like, “I need men to fall in love with me.” But she is like, “I need men to respect me.” Because in this situation, she’s an artist and he’s an artist, and they both have work in a show together, but he doesn’t see her. Doesn’t know who she is, doesn’t care. I definitely encounter some of this. I’m not nearly as public a person as you are, but being a writer, being an audio artist, we are in the public eye to some extent and there is all kinds of weird stuff that come from that invisibility, where people are like, oh, yeah, we’re not as interested in you in this meeting. We don’t care as much about what you have to say because you’re not beautiful anymore or maybe you’re just not beautiful in general. That’s really interesting to me. I think this older artist is really thinking through what it means to have beauty or not and what that means for men in particular and just the way she moves through the world.VirginiaThere’s just so much there. Because it’s also like, who’s defining beautiful?EmmaYes and ageism and all the things.VirginiaMy solution to this a lot of the time has been to choose communities that don’t center straight men. I think you probably feel similarly? And that is extremely liberating until you realize, oh I have to go into this other context and they’re still out there. EmmaYes. I want to be writing for fat people, for sure. Like, I really hope that fat people and people interested in body liberation read this novel. But I also want to be writing for whoever’s interested in hopefully compelling literary fiction. And whenever this book goes out into the world and I’m talking about it, like I’m lucky enough to do here with you, there are all these notions that I kind of hate facing, but are absolutely going to be put upon all of us. You know, of like you’re just not as shiny or not as interesting or not as smart. I can’t tell you how many times people have made assumptions that I’m not the author of my first book because I’m fat. Like, walking into a bookstore where people assumed I was like, a friend or something, you know? And I’m like, no, I wrote this book.VirginiaWait, wait. We have to stop on that for a second. Tell people about your first book and then why could a fat person not have written that? I don’t understand. EmmaMy first book was a reported memoir. And there were at least two times, I think, where either I walked into a bookstore or I showed up to a press thing and people were like, “Oh, like, hi?” And I was like, no, I’m, Emma. I’m the author. And they were like, oh! And then one bookseller actually said, “I saw a huge person out of the corner of my eye and I thought that can’t be the author.” Someone said that out loud.VirginiaThose words were said out loud. People do not hear themselves. EmmaNo, they do not. I think there’s a deeply entrenched belief that we need to keep examining, which is that fat people can’t have excellence or can’t be innovators, can’t be visionaries, can’t have exciting, strange, culturally relevant ideas. Like, I know people wouldn’t mostly say that out loud. But I think there is a truth to that. We know that fat people are discriminated against for job opportunities.So yeah, it was wild. And I definitely had people reach out to me in the process of publishing my book being like, what happened? Like, you gained so much weight. What happened to you? The sense that since my book was about a murder, they were like, oh, the trauma of the book must have caused you to become fat. And I was like, no, no, actually.VirginiaBodies change, guys. EmmaLike, calm down. It’s fine, you know? Yeah, people do not care. It’s wild. VirginiaI mean, I’m just exhausted and enraged.Okay, but so this invisibility thing we’re talking about segues really nicely into the other big conversation I wanted to have with you today, which is about frump fashion. So you write a Substack calledFrump Feelings by Emma Copley Eisenberg, which is an A+ Substack name. Like, really A+. As Someone who just thought of her own subject name very off the cuff years ago and sometimes wishes she’d put more thought into it. I’m like, damn, that’s a good one.So you wrote this piece back in April called Frump Goes Mainstream which I really loved for a lot of reasons. First, tell us, what is Frump? EmmaI’m still incredulous that my weird word reclamation is something that’s of interest to others, so thank you for caring about frump.VirginiaI care deeply.EmmaThank you so much. I have long been dressing myself in a way that maybe is a little bit strange to other people. As a kid I wore a lot of pinafores and ruffled outfits and I was always trying to get my parents to buy me the matching Samantha outfit from American Girl dolls, as we’ve discussed.VirginiaYou know I lived that trauma with you.EmmaExactly. There is a sort of American Girl inspired character in Housemates which is an easter egg for you. VirginiaOh, I loved it. EmmaThank you so much. I remember getting to high school and college and being like, “Okay, I’m supposed to be sexy now, I think?” Like, other people in my high school were sexy? And then when I got to college, it was like the Going Out Top. I’ve heard you talk about the like tyranny of the Going Out Top a little bit. And also our friend,Dacy Gillespiehas talked about the Going Out Top . And I was like, what is that? It was the sense that I was supposed to be putting my body on display in an appealing way. I also remember being a kid in the 90s, growing up in lower Manhattan, when the street harassment was constant and endemic and just intense. So from a very young age, I remember being like, “Actually, I think I want to cover up and put more clothes on.” Because, one, I liked them and they’re made of fun fabrics. And two, I don’t want to get on the subway and be harassed on my way to school.I wouldn’t say I’ve ever had a particularly cool or vibrant style, but I’ve always had a sense of like, I’m interested in maxi dresses. I’m interested in ruffles. I’m interested in patterns. I’m interested in many layers. I’m interested in bright colors, big shapes, clothes that often read as either little girl or old woman. That tends to be my vibe. Recently, I think it seems to have kind of exploded on TikTok with this sense of dressing for the female gaze instead of the male gaze. That seems to be something that’s really come into the modern vernacular on TikTok, on Reels, other places. Gen Z.VirginiaBless the youth EmmaThe youth are okay. VirginiaI love that they’re like, no thank you, male gaze. EmmaThe Going Out Top has gone and it’s been replaced by big pants and interesting shirts. And I love that for them. I think that it’s really interesting just to see this mass rejection of this idea of sexiness. In my manifesto about frump that I published a few years ago, I call the mainstream style that we expect from women and femme people “sexy adult woman.” And I want to be like a weird child or a grandma in the woods. Those two poles of experience are sort of where frump resides. People use the word frump or frumpy to denigrate women and to say you’re failing. Failing at the project of being sexy is to be frumpy, right? And so at a certain point, I was like, no, I want to reclaim frump and be like, this is actually not a failure to be sexy. It’s its own style that has its own goals and its own silhouettes. I also think that it has a certain vibe of a little bit of messiness. You’re generally a little less showered when you’re frumpy. Your hair might be greasy or you might have big boobs that are a little bit floppy. In My Crazy Ex Girlfriend she talks about “heavy boobs.” Heavy boobs are very frump. All of this is to say that there are certain physical realities that make being a sexy adult woman complicated or unappealing. And I was like, I don’t want to do that anymore. VirginiaI was listening to a parenting podcast, because that’s my life, and they were talking about their teenage girls going to prom and the girls are wearing sneakers to prom now. And I’m just like, yes. I mean, they’re still wearing the little dresses and all that. It’s still very, like, for the male gaze. EmmaAn aestheticized thing, yeah.VirginiaProm is built for the male gaze, right? But still. And this actually happened a few weeks ago—I went to a dance party that was all middle aged moms because it was a fundraiser for our school. And we all showed up in comfortable footwear, even if we dressed up. And I was like, why did I ever go dancing in heels? Like, I was not a club girl. I was really bad at clubbing, but I went to NYU so there was an expectation that you would try.EmmaOoh, I didn’t know that about you.VirginiaIt was a hard time for me, aesthetically. And I feel like I’m still paying the price of what I did to my ankles in those years. EmmaNow I’m like, ooh, a chunky loafer? Really risky for my ankle today. Bold move. VirginiaSo I love that even in very mainstream pockets we’re seeing a little infusion of the frump aesthetic. People are like, comfort actually matters. But even more than that, I love what you’re talking about here about embracing different silhouettes and that this has its own goals. That is so refreshing. I’m just thinking about layering frump over the mom bod conversation, which I know is not your life, but for those of us who are in our 40s have kids, there’s this perpetual message that were I to, quote, “give up,” and be comfortable, I would be just settling as a mom. The mom bod would be this big failure as opposed to just like an equally valuable way to be a human being. Frump is maybe the answer?EmmaI hope it’s part of the answer. Maybe it’s all about like, you want to have ten choices of how to get dressed in the morning instead of one. I felt like when I was in my 20s there was only one way, which was some idea of sexy adult woman. Flattering, minimizing, making the hourglass, all the things. All the things that you and Dacy talk about with a sense of creating a silhouette that’s flattering, which is really just minimizing flesh, as we know, and creating am idealized shape that doesn’t always exist for a lot of people. I’m just really excited about whatever we call it, whether we call it like frump or dressing for the female gaze. On TikTok they also call it, like, Swedish or Norwegian, film festival fashion or something. I’m very here for that. Whatever you want to call it. There are so many other styles, too. I just hope that we get like 10 or 20 or 30 options in the future, rather than one if you’re a person who’s a woman-ish. VirginiaAnd doesn’t want to just always get dressed thinking, “how do I lead with my body in this one specific male gaze way?”You mentioned this in the piece and when I was then looking on TikTok, I did see a lot of the most popular examples of frump are on thin bodies. That’s sort of adjacent to the normcore thing, right? Where skinny models wear giant jeans and white sweatshirts and Reeboks and are like, “it’s normcore!” What do you think it means for fat folks specifically to dress frump?EmmaI think it has a different valence and a different meaning for fat folks to dress frump. Again, so many of the Sexy Adult Woman shapes and fabrics are designed to make our bodies smaller—that is not so for frump fashion. Again, we’re adding layers. We’re going oversized. We’re drawing attention to our bodies with bold patterns and weird bows. Part of Sexy Adult Woman, we are taught, is minimizing. Like, attract attention to the right places, like our tits and our ass and whatever. But it’s also supposed to not attract attention in a lot of ways.I think frump does attract attention and that’s been something that was uncomfortable for me. I will speak for myself. At first dressing more oversized, embracing different shapes and silhouettes and doing things that are just a little bit strange or having weird scrunchies in my hair—like, people do look at you. And I don’t know how I feel about that, always. And to bring it back to our conversation about the narrator in Housemates. There’s a power in being looked at and observed and seen. And then sometimes there’s an exciting power in being unseen. It kind of depends on the day. Sometimes I’m like, I’m down for being seen today. And then other days I’m like, please don’t look at me. Just look away.So I wonder if there are different ways to think about the effect of frump on the eye. Like, sometimes the effect of frump is to shock the eye and to make the eye excited and then other times the effect of frump is to make us invisible. I’m kind of here for that invisibility cloak that frump can allow, too.I think I get something really joyful out of the youthfulness of frump, too. There’s something about fat people dressing youthfully that makes that fills my heart with joy and makes me feel a little bit like I’m like reclaiming or re-experiencing some of the choices and fashions that I wanted to make as a kid when my body was not cherished. I was a plump to fat child as well. VirginiaThe clothing options back then were dismal. EmmaVery bad. I feel a little bit like I’m like healing my fat inner child when I dress frump, too.VirginiaWhere I get stuck sometimes is worrying about that perception and thinking, “Will this outfit be read as stylish on my fat body when I know it would be read as stylish if a thin person wore it?”EmmaYeah. It’s tough. There are some days where I know this isn’t going to read successfully and I feel bad about that. And there are some days where I know this isn’t going to read successfully and I’m okay with that. I like what you said about will this be perceived as stylish. I think sometimes you have to take frump to a ten to be perceived as stylish. The one through five can be a wiggly wobbly area. So sometimes I think I aim for a six and above when I want to be stylish, because it’s the pizzazz.VirginiaThis was clearly a choice.EmmaThis was a choice. I think that’s what you’re talking about is you want to convey that this was intentional, not a failure. I think a lot about how do I convey that? I am intentionally making this choice. That’s part of the reclamation, it’s “I’m aware.”Virginia“I have reclaimed an entire word and genre of dressing. I am aware that this is a conscious choice to be stylish.”Just to drill into that for a second because I feel like people listening are going to be like, "Okay, I want to dress frump. Tell me how.” Are there specific favorite pieces? Or styling tricks you use that you’re like, “this is what elevates it when I want to go there?”EmmaIt’s a constant evolution. We don’t have all the money in the world or all the time in the world. But things that I find do read more intentional are things like really unexpected shapes. Like, I have these really weird bubble sandals that are—I think they’re even Uggs. (Similar.)VirginiaOh, I have the clogs! They’re big rubber shoes?EmmaExactly. This is a big deal for me too because I grew up, like, oppressed by the Ugg boots of the girls that I went to high school with. I swore I would never wear Uggs. But now I’m like, fun colored Uggs! I think color is a huge part of it. I do think that color is essential for frump, so choosing colors that feel a little bit bonkers. Like chartreuse and bright pinks and neon. I’m having a lot of fun with neon lately. My hair is a never ending source of despair. I don’t think I’ve like mastered the frump hair life. I guess if we were going to go full frump it would be like complicated braids. Do you remember that hair braiding book from when we were kids?VirginiaOh, was it a Klutz Press? Yes, yes. It had the color photos and something on the bottom? EmmaI think it was called, like, Braids and Bows or something? VirginiaThis is how I learned to braid!EmmaIt had ribbon braids and fish tails and stuff. I don’t know, maybe the ultimate frump hairstyle is just my greasy hair. Depends on the day, as we’ve been saying. I’m really gravitating towards dresses that don’t show my cleavage. I have large boobs. It’s been like a journey for me to be like, how do I feel about that?Which Leah also does in the novel—I gave her very large boobs, which is a thing for like non-binary folks. Like she’s thinking a lot about like gender dysphoria, but also just having large boobs in the world. So I’ve been wearing a lot of clothes that are high necked or almost turtlenecks, which was another thing that I feel like I was told as a kid, don’t do that. Because if you’re fat or you have big boobs, don’t wear turtlenecks. It looks bad. It’s not flattering. And I’m like, but actually it’s comfortable. It makes me feel like locked and loaded for my boobs. I just feel more myself in those kinds of necklines. VirginiaI recently discovered a new lime of swimwear called Lime Ricki, which turns out to be a Mormon brand.EmmaI haven’t heard of it!VirginiaInstagram served it to me, and it will now serve it to you because I’m saying that name out loud. But it’s pretty size inclusive, it goes up to 4x. And the patterns are very frump-adjacent. There are a lot of really bright colors. And because it’s a Mormon line, it’s very modest.Emma Love it.VirginiaHaving a high neck swimsuit in a really great pattern? It’s so exciting!EmmaThat’s a hot tip. I like that. VirginiaCheck it out. EmmaIt’s it’s interesting because I’m not ashamed of my boobs. I would just like to have the choice about where they go and how they fit and where they live. VirginiaHow big of a focus are they getting today!EmmaExactly, exactly. VirginiaI’m a big fan of them, but that doesn’t mean they’re for everybody. I know writing about style is not your primary thing. You’re a brilliant novelist and reporter, but also the way you articulated that just gave me a lot to think about. So I appreciate you getting into frumpiness with me, too. ButterEmmaBecause I am bisexual and bigenre, I have to pick two. That’s just how it is. It’s been a great and exciting and sometimes stressful season leading up to releasing a book, and one thing that has been keeping me alive is there’s a show on HBO Max called Dog House UK—I don’t know if you’re familiar? VirginiaI’m not, but I’m intrigued. EmmaI’m about to change some lives. It is the most soothing show about dogs and healing. It is a place in the wilds outside of a major UK city—is it London? No one knows. But it’s a beautiful green sanctuary where dogs who have been abandoned or neglected or are no longer wanted are brought in and each dog gets a caring British human assigned to them to love them and nurture them and work on their behavioral issues.VirginiaI need to watch this with my 10-year-old.EmmaThat’s only half of it. And then sweet British people come in who are like, “I’m looking for my soulmate in a dog form,” or like “I lost my sister to cancer and I’m having a hard time,” and these sweet British people go into the back with their computer in their like dee dee dee and they look through all the dogs they have and then they matchmake the humans with the dogs. You get to watch these humans and dogs meeting and joyfully experiencing each other falling in love for the first time. It doesn’t always work out as is the case in life and no one is pressured to marry their dog soulmate on the spot, but it often does. It’s like two for three usually per episode which is pretty good.I get worried about the dogs who are not adopted of course so I really appreciate that at the end they’re like don’t worry, Rosie the fat Beagle found her forever home. Like, don’t worry she’ll be fine. VirginiaI’m sure doing the show they’re getting a lot of write ins like, does Rosie need a home? I mean, they’re tapping into a nice wide audience. That’s reassuring.EmmaI should say though, relevant to your listening audience that there is sometimes a little bit of dog fatphobia on the show. VirginiaOh,  Corinne keeps wanting to do a piece about this! We talk about this all the time. Pet fatphobia is a weird thing.EmmaIt’s a weird thing. On the show they’re like Rosie the fat Beagle could really stand to lose a few pounds! And I’m like, calm down. Rosie is fine. VirginiaShe’s perfect. EmmaShe’s an angel. Do not touch her. So, trigger warning for people.So that’s what gets me to sleep and through my days, which is essential.And then I want to recommend a crop of cool books coming out with fat people in them that I feel like people should know. One of them is an older book that I think you already read, Big Girl by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, about a fat Black girl in Harlem. It’s also about music. It’s a beautiful book. It’s a really complicated story about hunger and art and becoming the person you want to be. Also, there’s a new book out called skin and bones by Renée Watson that just came out a couple of months ago. I haven’t read it yet, but I read an excerpt of it and it’s beautiful. It’s also really explicit about weight and diet culture, but really complicated and nuanced. I’m really excited to read it.VirginiaYeah, that looks phenomenal.EmmaSo that’s technically three, because I’m trisexual apparently, but I love it.VirginiaHere for all of it. Number one I need to watch that with my 10 year old, we have a very beloved family dog. But my kids are frequently suggesting we need a second dog, which I have complicated feelings about because they also think we need kittens. And we are a house that has two rescue geckos, so the whole situation is getting out of hand.EmmaThe second dog thing is a major plot line of the show. Maybe you all should watch and discuss. VirginiaThat’s what I’m thinking. I need to know though, will it help me not do it? Or will it mean we ended up with five dogs? I need to know which way it’s going to push me.EmmaI’m guessing the five dog route. Well, actually—sometimes owners come in with their really picky little dogs and and they’re like, “Fred needs a friend.” And then Fred meets all the dogs and he’s like, all these dogs suck and the couple is like, okay, like maybe Fred doesn’t need a friend. So it depends on the vibes. There are different episodes but basically they’re pro-multiple dogs. I will tell you that.VirginiaAll right, that’s complicated. I’m appreciate that trigger warning for me as a parent navigating pressure. EmmaThe multiple dog landscape.VirginiaOn a related note, I think my Butter is going to be Monty Don! He is a British gardening celebrity and a wise gardening soul. Because in the UK, they have gardening celebrities because gardening is the national pastime, other than dogs. And he has the show Gardener’s World that is a very long running BBC gardening show, it has been around for like 40 years. Not always hosted by Monty Don, but hosted by him for a long time. EmmaGreat name. VirginiaYes, he’s a delightful, older British gentleman who gardens in cardigans and his wellies. He’s wonderful. The show is wonderful. It was my pandemic comfort watch with my kid. And I have been off it for a few seasons, but I’m getting back into it. Because it’s garden season right now so I just want plant content constantly. They just do these lovely segments where they find this elderly person and who is the foremost dahlia gardener in England orhas the country’s largest collection of delphiniums and he lives on a regular little suburban neighborhood tract house.EmmaHow do you watch it?VirginiaWe watched it on Britbox, which I may need to re-subscribe to in order to do this. I think you can maybe sometimes watch some episodes other places as well. I will put that info in the show notes: Roku, Apple TV.But it is so soothing and you will want to garden but even if you don’t like gardening, just watching people be so passionate about these niche hobbies of “I raise primroses and grow 47 different kinds of primroses.”EmmaWhat I need right now to sleep, so all of your recs are appreciated. VirginiaI think it will help you during the book launch stress. EmmaI love that.VirginiaEmma, this was so much fun. Thank you for coming on. Tell folks how we can follow you, how we can support your work. Number one, of course everyone needs to go buy Housemates!EmmaThis was a delight. Thank you so much. Yeah, I am on all platforms. Tiktok, Instagram @Frumpenberg because, brand consistency. I would love if people buy Housemates from your local bookstore, pick a fave, pick bookshop.org. Whatever works for you. That’s the main most important way, so that I can live on to write another book.VirginiaWe can’t wait. Thank you. This was so fun.---The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies. The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

You’re listening to Burnt Toast!We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it’s time for your May Indulgence Gospel. And because it is Fat Swim Week, we are doing an entire swim-themed episode for you!We’ll get into:Can we reclaim the swim dress? (But do we want to?)Why is the Lands End swimsuit website SO bad?How to get sunscreen in impossible-to-reach spots?Why does Corinne hate flip flops?Even more thoughts on visible pubic hair.And so much more about how to show up fat at the pool or beach this summer and have an absolute blast.This is a paywalled episode. That means to hear the whole thing you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber.

Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark!It’s time for your May Extra Butter! Today we are talking about the bodies of Bridgerton.If you’re listening to this the day it drops, season three is out! We love the show. We love Nicola Coughlan. And we do not love the way the Internet talks about her body!To listen to the full episode and read the full transcript, you’ll need to join Extra Butter.Extra Butter ensures that the Burnt Toast community can always stay an ad- and sponsor-free space—which is crucial for body liberation journalism. Join us here!Extra Butter Episode 7 Transcript

Director Jeannie Finlay discusses 'Your Fat Friend' documentary, highlighting the challenges of representing fat life in media. They reflect on emotional connections with audiences and the impact of diverse storytelling. The episode also explores joyful moments and showcases the empowering artwork of fat British artist Taney Tinsley.

Stylist and author Dacy Gillespie joins for a fashion challenge debrief breaking traditional rules, navigating personal growth, exploring stylish yet comfortable jeans, reflections on planning outfits, documenting creativity, and exploring creativity in clothing. The hosts also discuss style influences on TikTok and trendy plus-size options in barrel pants.