Festival Books
Planet of the shapes
Susie Orbach tells Claire Sawers how the battle against body fascism is a never-ending struggle
In 1978, psychotherapist Susie Orbach wrote the bestselling Fat is a Feminist Issue, warning against dieting, and outlining the compulsive behaviour linked to eating disorders. Fast forward 30-odd years, and have we paid heed to her warnings? In her latest book, Bodies, Orbach reveals horror story after horror story: the six-year-old anorexic; the surge in bulimia on Fiji (after TV was introduced there in 1995); and the celebrity-fuelled rise in ‘pregnorexia’, where mums-to-be keep themselves dangerously underweight. Beyond the terrifying trend for eating
disorders, Bodies goes deeper and darker into our quest for physical perfection. Orbach describes leg extensions (by Chinese women feeling vertically inadequate), genital enhancements, boob job birthday presents for American girls turning 16, and chilling cases of body dysmorphia, recently seen in extreme form in Michael Jackson, the 21st century poster boy for bad body image. ‘We’ve never been under so much pressure to perfect and design ourselves,’ Orbach laments. But the more ridiculous and radical lengths people go to for thinner, musclier, daintier or sexier bodies; the more determined Orbach is to battle against the tide. She helped set up Dove’s ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’, and is convener of any-body.org, an online magazine opposing cookie cutter notions of the ‘attractive’ woman. This visit to Edinburgh will let her air her views on modern vanity and raise worrying questions about our sense of self-worth.
‘Believe me, it’s a very hard struggle to challenge the notion of uniform, homogenised beauty,’ she admits. ‘But a growing number of young women now get a slight sense of ridiculousness about the fashion and beauty industries, and want to rise above it.’ Orbach’s own daughter, now 20, experienced her own sense of unease growing up. ‘She was raised in a weird household; always felt different from her friends,’ confesses her mum. ‘It was a place where we actually relished food, and we love our bodies. I mean, can you imagine?’ ■ Susie Orbach, 29 Aug, 4.30pm, £9 (£7); 30 Aug (with Sara Maitland), 7pm, £9 (£7).
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THE GENERATION GAME Douglas Coupland wrote his breakthrough novel in 1991 and is now delivering a sequel of sorts. Rodge Glass hears about retribalization, rumours and Rain Man
F ans and critics have known it was coming for months, with rumour and misinformation clogging up chat rooms and columns. Now that Generation A is finally set to be unleashed upon the reading public, we’ll see if the furious debate will have been justified. ‘It’s a reminder of how glacial the speed of the book world is,’ says the author, who claims he feels no pressure to match the international success of his 1991 debut Generation X. Since that book, Coupland has become a hugely successful novelist, writing 12 books crossing multiple genres, using his fiction the generations who came after X, notably in his novels Shampoo Planet, Microserfs and jPod.
to assess
The world has certainly changed since 1991. So what’s the difference between the people of Generation X and Generation A? ‘Maybe it’s like I had a kid once who died, and so I named the next kid after the first one. Seriously.’ The author has discussed his books this way before. He famously wrote about the ‘death’ of Generation X in 1995, when he felt it had been over-exposed and over- commercialised. Coupland had always distanced himself from the ‘voice of Generation X’ label, and used every
opportunity he could to move on from it. So this return is an interesting one. ‘The two are definitely linked, mostly by the notion that you have a group of isolates who end up in a strange place telling stories to try and reorder the world,’ admits Coupland. ‘In 20 years, we’ve undergone a massive electronic revolution that’s affected us all on deep levels. Marshall McLuhan [Canadian philosopher and media theorist] called this “retribalization”. I wanted this book to reflect these changes. I also finished a biography of McLuhan that publishes next March. The two books fed into each other a good deal.’ So, did Coupland return to his 1991 novel during the creative process? ‘Strangely, no. What I did was make an ongoing effort to recall how I felt and how I was thinking while doing that book. I think a more precise truth came from that rather than mimicking the book page-for-page, though I did read bits and pieces. What I find when I re-read anything is that I remember with spooky laser precision exactly how I was feeling the day I wrote the words and exactly what was going on in my head. It’s kind of Rain Manny, and not something I ever expected.’
‘MAYBE IT’S LIKE I HAD A
KID ONCE WHO DIED, AND SO I NAMED THE
NEXT AFTER IT’
Douglas Coupland, 30 Aug, 8pm, £9 (£7). 27 Aug–10 Sep 2009 THE LIST FESTIVAL MAGAZINE 65