Fat
Swim
Fat Swim pool parties have been happening since at least 1978. After Shrill’s fat pool party episode aired in 2019, they exploded as a way for people in larger bodies to find community and access joyful movement without judgement
A
place
to play
A billboard
in Philadelphia
The opposite
of Ozempic
Emma
Copley
Eisenberg
A book by
The
problem
where
we all live
Your gut is a terrible thing to lose.
The billboard
APRIL 13TH - MAY 25TH
24 HOURS A DAY
ON VIEW AT
119 FAIRMOUNT AVENUE
PHILADELPHIA, PA
MARKET FRANKFORD LINE
TO SPRING GARDEN
Photography by
Devon DadolyTake your picture with the billboard,
tag @fatswim215 on IG
You want to dive in <3 But where to start?
Start with this resource list of books, conferences & community, films, medical providers, newsletters, podcasts, and TV shows that explore the mystery of having a body from a weight-neutral, body autonomy, or fat liberation perspective.
Emma Copley Eisenberg
Reader,
Dear
What a time to be publishing a book of fiction about the body! I just want to be able to watch my little TV shows without being constantly bombarded by ads for GLP-1s.
FAT SWIM, a collection of linked short stories, charts twelve years of the totally imaginary and completely real questions, struggles, dreams, and fears I have had about being embodied. I see this book as being about the space between the real self and the self the world reduces us to, particularly for women, fat people, and queer people. But it is also for anyone who has ever been confused about the great mystery that is being a human being with a body.
We all hold so many contradictory stories about the relationship of the mind to the body, but no one knows what is true. Does our “self” live in the mind, or does the flesh “know” things about the self that the mind can’t? Unclear. Despite efforts to get free and unlearn, many of us still believe that our bodies are disgusting or wrong–too weird, too dark, too fat, too feminine, too masculine, too limited. This is true of the characters in FAT SWIM, whose embodied baggage shows up in the strangest moments to shame and crack open the ways they love, parent, create, work, fuck, and love. There can also be pressure to be “liberated,” to “love ourselves,” to embrace polyamory and other non-normative choices around sex and relationships, but this pressure is about what is collectively moral, not what is individually fulfilling. What do we do when the rubber meets the road, when the feelings we have in private are not the ones we believe in public?
Fiction is such a powerful tool for this question, a question that the characters in the ten stories that make up FAT SWIM are all asking in different ways. This book is about how to understand our own appetites – for food, for sex, for pleasure – and the fact that looking at other people’s bodies and having our own body looked at is a troubled and violent and totally unavoidable part of modern, online life. Much has changed since I started writing this book twelve years ago and so the book too had to transform over and over again. It contains my oldest published fiction and my newest, rawest words. I swung big here; I gave it everything I’ve got. I hope you find something in it that makes you feel just a little more alive.
“A lush, radical meditation on the body’s pleasure and potential.”
-Carmen Maria Machado
author of In The Dream House
With a brash and stylish voice that implicates and confronts the reader, Emma Copley Eisenberg wades into the contradictions, joys, and violence of a modern world shaped by looking and watching, examining how our hungers can both hijack and crack open our lives. In the title story, a young girl looks to a group of fat women at her local pool to teach her about her changing body. In “Swiffer Girl,” a woman agrees to try for a baby with her partner, only to suddenly find herself haunted by the viral sex video that made the rounds during high school—a video indelibly tied to her own sense of self. In other stories, an obscure fat makeup vlogger’s strange friendship with a middle schooler forces her to reflect on her past life at a toxic beauty startup, a boomer retiree tries to understand her nonbinary child’s gender and polyamory, and a trans librarian takes a job as assistant to a famous science fiction writer only to find himself screening hookups on his octogenarian employer’s behalf.For better or for worse, these stories counsel, none of us can leave our bodies behind: they remind us what it is to be alive. As the characters in Fat Swim dance into and out of each other’s lives—and through and around Philadelphia—they seek connections and experiences that remind them of that fact, culminating in a reality-bending, tour de force finale, “Camp Sensation.” Eisenberg, whose fiction “should be studied by every contemporary author as the finest departure from the fatphobic hellscape of fiction that exists” (Electric Literature), has a singular vision, and Fat Swim is her most incisive and provocative work yet. Read an excerpt here.
Attend an event here.
Preorder
why is one of the stories dedicated (pejorative) to Jonathan Franzen??
Gu
ts
Fat
Swim
Fat Swim pool parties have been happening since at least 1978. After Shrill’s fat pool party episode aired in 2019, they exploded as a way for people in larger bodies to find community and access joyful movement without judgement
A
place
to play
A billboard
in Philadelphia
The opposite
of Ozempic
A book by
Emma
Copley
Eisenberg
The
problem
where
we all live
Your gut is a terrible thing to lose.
The billboard
APRIL 13TH - MAY 25TH
24 HOURS A DAY
ON VIEW AT
119 FAIRMOUNT AVENUE
PHILADELPHIA, PA
MARKET FRANKFORD LINE
TO SPRING GARDEN
Photography by Devon Dadoly
Take your picture with the billboard, tag @fatswim215 on IG
You want to dive in <3 But where to start?
Start with this resource list of books, conferences & community, films, medical providers, newsletters, podcasts, and TV shows that explore the mystery of having a body from a weight-neutral, body autonomy, or fat liberation perspective.
Emma Copley Eisenberg
Dear Reader,
What a time to be publishing a book of fiction about the body! I just want to be able to watch my little TV shows without being constantly bombarded by ads for GLP-1s.
FAT SWIM, a collection of linked short stories, charts twelve years of the totally imaginary and completely real questions, struggles, dreams, and fears I have had about being embodied. I see this book as being about the space between the real self and the self the world reduces us to, particularly for women, fat people, and queer people. But it is also for anyone who has ever been confused about the great mystery that is being a human being with a body.
We all hold so many contradictory stories about the relationship of the mind to the body, but no one knows what is true. Does our “self” live in the mind, or does the flesh “know” things about the self that the mind can’t? Unclear. Despite efforts to get free and unlearn, many of us still believe that our bodies are disgusting or wrong–too weird, too dark, too fat, too feminine, too masculine, too limited. This is true of the characters in FAT SWIM, whose embodied baggage shows up in the strangest moments to shame and crack open the ways they love, parent, create, work, fuck, and love. There can also be pressure to be “liberated,” to “love ourselves,” to embrace polyamory and other non-normative choices around sex and relationships, but this pressure is about what is collectively moral, not what is individually fulfilling. What do we do when the rubber meets the road, when the feelings we have in private are not the ones we believe in public?
Fiction is such a powerful tool for this question, a question that the characters in the ten stories that make up FAT SWIM are all asking in different ways. This book is about how to understand our own appetites – for food, for sex, for pleasure – and the fact that looking at other people’s bodies and having our own body looked at is a troubled and violent and totally unavoidable part of modern, online life. Much has changed since I started writing this book twelve years ago and so the book too had to transform over and over again. It contains my oldest published fiction and my newest, rawest words. I swung big here; I gave it everything I’ve got. I hope you find something in it that makes you feel just a little more alive.
“A lush, radical meditation on the body’s pleasure and potential.”
-Carmen Maria Machado
author of In The Dream House
With a brash and stylish voice that implicates and confronts the reader, Emma Copley Eisenberg wades into the contradictions, joys, and violence of a modern world shaped by looking and watching, examining how our hungers can both hijack and crack open our lives. In the title story, a young girl looks to a group of fat women at her local pool to teach her about her changing body. In “Swiffer Girl,” a woman agrees to try for a baby with her partner, only to suddenly find herself haunted by the viral sex video that made the rounds during high school—a video indelibly tied to her own sense of self. In other stories, an obscure fat makeup vlogger’s strange friendship with a middle schooler forces her to reflect on her past life at a toxic beauty startup, a boomer retiree tries to understand her nonbinary child’s gender and polyamory, and a trans librarian takes a job as assistant to a famous science fiction writer only to find himself screening hookups on his octogenarian employer’s behalf.For better or for worse, these stories counsel, none of us can leave our bodies behind: they remind us what it is to be alive. As the characters in Fat Swim dance into and out of each other’s lives—and through and around Philadelphia—they seek connections and experiences that remind them of that fact, culminating in a reality-bending, tour de force finale, “Camp Sensation.” Eisenberg, whose fiction “should be studied by every contemporary author as the finest departure from the fatphobic hellscape of fiction that exists” (Electric Literature), has a singular vision, and Fat Swim is her most incisive and provocative work yet. Read an excerpt here.
Attend an event here.
Preorder
why is one of the stories dedicated (pejorative) to Jonathan Franzen??
billboard
resources
book
Gu
ts
Fat
Swim
Fat Swim pool parties have been happening since at least 1978. After Shrill’s fat pool party episode aired in 2019, they exploded as a way for people in larger bodies to find community and access joyful movement without judgement
A
place
to play
A billboard
in Philadelphia
The opposite
of Ozempic
Emma
Copley
Eisenberg
A book by
The
problem
where
we all live
Your gut is a terrible thing to lose.
The billboard
APRIL 13TH - MAY 25TH
24 HOURS A DAY
ON VIEW AT
119 FAIRMOUNT AVENUE
PHILADELPHIA, PA
MARKET FRANKFORD LINE
TO SPRING GARDEN
Photography by Devon Dadoly
Take your picture with the billboard, tag @fatswim215 on IG
You want to dive in <3 But where to start?
Start with this resource list of books, conferences & community, films, medical providers, newsletters, podcasts, and TV shows that explore the mystery of having a body from a weight-neutral, body autonomy, or fat liberation perspective.
Emma Copley Eisenberg
Dear Reader,
What a time to be publishing a book of fiction about the body! I just want to be able to watch my little TV shows without being constantly bombarded by ads for GLP-1s.
FAT SWIM, a collection of linked short stories, charts twelve years of the totally imaginary and completely real questions, struggles, dreams, and fears I have had about being embodied. I see this book as being about the space between the real self and the self the world reduces us to, particularly for women, fat people, and queer people. But it is also for anyone who has ever been confused about the great mystery that is being a human being with a body.
We all hold so many contradictory stories about the relationship of the mind to the body, but no one knows what is true. Does our “self” live in the mind, or does the flesh “know” things about the self that the mind can’t? Unclear. Despite efforts to get free and unlearn, many of us still believe that our bodies are disgusting or wrong–too weird, too dark, too fat, too feminine, too masculine, too limited. This is true of the characters in FAT SWIM, whose embodied baggage shows up in the strangest moments to shame and crack open the ways they love, parent, create, work, fuck, and love. There can also be pressure to be “liberated,” to “love ourselves,” to embrace polyamory and other non-normative choices around sex and relationships, but this pressure is about what is collectively moral, not what is individually fulfilling. What do we do when the rubber meets the road, when the feelings we have in private are not the ones we believe in public?
Fiction is such a powerful tool for this question, a question that the characters in the ten stories that make up FAT SWIM are all asking in different ways. This book is about how to understand our own appetites – for food, for sex, for pleasure – and the fact that looking at other people’s bodies and having our own body looked at is a troubled and violent and totally unavoidable part of modern, online life. Much has changed since I started writing this book twelve years ago and so the book too had to transform over and over again. It contains my oldest published fiction and my newest, rawest words. I swung big here; I gave it everything I’ve got. I hope you find something in it that makes you feel just a little more alive.
“A lush, radical meditation on the body’s pleasure and potential.”
-Carmen Maria Machado
author of In The Dream House
With a brash and stylish voice that implicates and confronts the reader, Emma Copley Eisenberg wades into the contradictions, joys, and violence of a modern world shaped by looking and watching, examining how our hungers can both hijack and crack open our lives. In the title story, a young girl looks to a group of fat women at her local pool to teach her about her changing body. In “Swiffer Girl,” a woman agrees to try for a baby with her partner, only to suddenly find herself haunted by the viral sex video that made the rounds during high school—a video indelibly tied to her own sense of self. In other stories, an obscure fat makeup vlogger’s strange friendship with a middle schooler forces her to reflect on her past life at a toxic beauty startup, a boomer retiree tries to understand her nonbinary child’s gender and polyamory, and a trans librarian takes a job as assistant to a famous science fiction writer only to find himself screening hookups on his octogenarian employer’s behalf.For better or for worse, these stories counsel, none of us can leave our bodies behind: they remind us what it is to be alive. As the characters in Fat Swim dance into and out of each other’s lives—and through and around Philadelphia—they seek connections and experiences that remind them of that fact, culminating in a reality-bending, tour de force finale, “Camp Sensation.” Eisenberg, whose fiction “should be studied by every contemporary author as the finest departure from the fatphobic hellscape of fiction that exists” (Electric Literature), has a singular vision, and Fat Swim is her most incisive and provocative work yet. Read an excerpt here.
Attend an event here.
Preorder
why is one of the stories dedicated (pejorative) to Jonathan Franzen??
billboard
resources
book
Gu
ts