Kate Manne joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about coming of age in fatphobic culture, disentangling the threads of weight, health, and diet culture, the racism at the root of anti-fatness, writing ourselves out and then back into our work, the psycho-social consequences of fatphobia on our bodies, the shame around shame, organizing our time, writing while mothering a young child, gathering and incorporating research in our work, and her new book Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia.

Also in this episode:

-the rhetoric around dieting

-becoming self-compassionate through writing

-why we might not trust pleasure 

Books mentioned in this episode:

Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings

Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness by Da’Shaun L. Harrison

Hunger by Roxanne Gay

You Just Need to Lose Weight by Aubrey Gordon

What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon

Fat Talk by Virginia Sole Smith

Kate Manne is an associate professor of philosophy at Cornell University, where she’s been teaching since 2013. Before that, she was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Manne did her graduate work in philosophy at MIT, and works in moral, social, and feminist philosophy. She is the author of three books, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, and Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia, which came out in January. You can subscribe to her substack newsletter, More to Hate, for musings on misogyny, fatphobia, their intersection, and more. 

Connect with Kate:

Website: http://www.katemanne.net/

Substack: https://katemanne.substack.com/

X: https://twitter.com/kate_manne,

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kate_manne

Get “Unshrinking” here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/722318/unshrinking-by-kate-manne/

Kate Manne's first interview with Ronit on The Body Myth: https://ronitplank.com/2024/03/04/the-body-myth-misogyny-fatphobia-and-the-morality-of-size-ft-dr-

About Ronit

Subscribe to Ronit's Memoir Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank?utm_source=profile-page

Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, The Washington Post, Writer’s Digest, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named Finalist in the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories. She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and lives in Seattle with her family where she teaches memoir workshops and is working on her next book.

More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com

Subscribe to Ronit’s Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank

Sign up for monthly podcast and writing updates: https://bit.ly/33nyTKd

Follow Ronit:

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Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography

Theme music: Isaac Jo