Read an Excerpt
Excerpt from A Sentimental Education, by Hannah McGregor, pp. 3-5 (WLU Press, 2022)
I was raised on sentimentality: girl heroines whose pluck and imagination and capacity for care elevated them above other girls—in a world where girlhood itself had no innate value—and instead made them remarkable, noteworthy. I was raised on Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennett and Anne of Green Gables’s Anne Shirley and Little Women’s Jo March, on The Little Mermaid’s Ariel and Beauty and the Beast’s Belle, all queer girls just a little out of step with the world around them, prone, as I was, to bookishness and flights of imagination and perhaps to an unbecoming surplus of feeling that somehow convinced them, despite the restraints of their worlds, not to settle, not to comply, to “want much more than this provincial life.” And they were rewarded, these plucky girls—who were all, it would take me years to realize, white—by beauty and marriage and some level of material comfort.
I recognized myself, a precociously smart white girl, in these heroines, and also knew that their story would not be my story until I solved the central problem of me, which was my fatness. Being fat can be radicalizing, if you let it, but sometimes it takes a while. I had a youthful conviction that I, too, had the stuff of a sentimental heroine buried beneath the body I’d been taught to think of as “not me,” but a thing I must be liberated from. This conviction was amplified by the domestic tragedy I lived through for most of my youth. My mother was diagnosed with cancer when I was eight and died by suicide at the age of forty-four, when I was sixteen. As much as I was shaped by my mother, by the person she was, I was also shaped by the fact of her death and the stories I told myself to try to make sense of it.
I begin here, with my body and with my mother, because these are the objective facts about me. I’m beginning with the objective: what I have observed, recorded, experienced. This is how Manulani Aluli-Meyer, a scholar of Indigenous Hawaiian epistemologies, explains objectivity, as something located in the body: “Body is a synonym for external, objective, literal, sensual, empirical” (2006, 266). The objective is what we can count: I had one mother, and then I had none. We were four, and then we were three. What comes next, the subjective, the mind, is how we make sense of what we have observed; this is what I call theory, and what Aluli-Meyer calls “logic, rationality, intelligence, conceptualization” (272). We err when we mistake subjectivity for objectivity, when we begin with the interpretation and pretend that it isn’t an interpretation at all but a statement of fact, when we begin with the theory and discard any experiences (especially those of marginalized peoples) that don’t fit. But theories are damned seductive, and they can make the raw stuff of experience hurt a whole lot less.