For as long as I can remember, the sensation that my body is fat and thus disgusting and wrong has run in the back of my mind like the whir of an air conditioning unit.
The American Novel Has a Major Problem With Fat People
Makiko looked old. Everyone looks older as the years go by, but that’s not what I mean. She wasn’t even forty, but if she told you “I just turned fifty-three,” you’d wish her happy birthday. She didn’t look older. She literally looked old.
Mieko Kawakami, Sam Bett, • Breasts and Eggs
To become chronically ill is not only to have a disease that you have to manage, but to have a new story about yourself, a story that many people refuse to hear—because it is deeply unsatisfying, full of fits and starts, anger, resentment, chasms of unruly need.