In the first pages of Fat Girl Dancing, Kris Kneen’s newest memoir about their shifting relationship with their body, they write: “When you are told to draw a woman’s body your mind sketches what it has been taught, the hourglass of femininity, your true sight complicated by years of seeing one thing repeated: the memory of bodies, the imagined flesh.”
I love this idea – “your true sight complicated” – because it immediately invites us to consider what our perceptions of our bodies might be if they were untroubled by the dominant ideologies and beauty standards, and the tsunami of fitspo and wellness ideals presented by advertising and most mainstream media. While the task of uncomplicating things enough to find a kind of “true sight” is undoubtedly too large for any one writer to achieve in a single book, Kneen makes a significant contribution with Fat Girl Dancing.
