How to Write Into Others’ Biases with Virginia Sole-Smith

VIRGINIA SOLE-SMITH IS a New York Times bestselling author whose reporting on diet culture, health and parenting has appeared in The New York Times, Scientific American, and many other publications. She also writes the popular anti-diet newsletter Burnt Toast and hosts the Burnt Toast Podcast. In all, she knows how to write into others’ biases as she explores fat-bias, fat justice and much more. Listen in and read along as we talk.

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Marion: Today my guest is writer Virginia Sole-Smith, a journalist who writes about diet, culture, anti-fat bias, feminism and health. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Scientific American, Slate, and ELLE. She’s the author of the 2018 book, the Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America. She writes the Burnt Toast Newsletter and hosts the Burnt Toast Podcast. Her new book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture is just out from Henry Holt. Welcome, Virginia.

Virginia: Thank you for having me.

Marion: Well, I’m delighted that you’re here, and my audience is writers and they want to know how to get themselves out in the world. So let’s talk a bit about building authority. In 2009, after six years of reporting and writing about the beauty industry, you went to beauty school spending 600 hours over 10 months learning about the industry, and I found that fascinating and it got me thinking about authority and how we build it as writers. So what was your original intent when signing up for beauty school and what lens do you think it gave you to look out over this world of diet, culture, anti-fat bias, feminism and health?

Virginia: I love that question. I love that you went back that far. That is one of my-

Marion: I know everything about you.

Virginia: This is one of my favorite early projects, and it’s something I learned a lot from… In many ways it was not a successful experiment. My plan was to go to beauty school and write a book about the beauty industry, and that book never sold. I did do a blog about it, which was a lot of fun and it led me to many other stories, which ultimately led me to the work I do now, but it didn’t have the intended… That was a period in publishing when we were doing a lot of year of doing this experiment. That was a popular publishing gimmick. And to be honest, I was like, “Okay. I can do a gimmick book.” And then that wasn’t what I wanted to write. When I think back at that proposal, I’m thinking that was not the stories that needed to be told. It was centering me way too much. It wasn’t getting into the issues, but it was a good learning experience. It was a good experience of learning how a book would not hang together and that just having a clever gimmick does not hold a book together.

But more importantly, the experience of actually doing that reporting and spending time with folks in the beauty industry, mostly women who are engaging in beauty culture in all these different ways, helped me start to understand it from a lot of different angles, which really deepened the way I was writing about the issue. So it ended up teaching me so many things I didn’t expect it to teach and didn’t do thing it was supposed to do. So yeah, it’s a strange experiment.

Marion: Yeah. That’s a great answer because the idea of different angles is what we need to bring to journalism. And you’ve taken on many topics that through which we learn a lot about our biases and reading you is to unlearn what I’ve been taught. Part of that is becoming comfortable with the language I’m truly uncomfortable using. Like I’m going to be real uncomfortable here using the word fat, but reading you and seeing you deploy the word in various ways, I think I’m supposed to use it. And reading you, I’ve learned the word fat phobic and we are fat phobic. You’re absolutely right. We are. I’ve learned the phrase, I’m using the phrase. My phrase that I love of yours is fat justice, which is one of your many areas of expertise. Your Burnt Toast podcast tagline on your website describes the podcast as “weekly conversations with authors, activists, researchers, and other folks working to dismantle diet culture and promote that justice.” So talk to me about the use of language that many of us feel we are forbidden to use and how actually using it educates us about our biases. Is that what it does?

Virginia: Yeah. I mean, this goes back to your question about authority too, which I realized I didn’t entirely answer in a straightforward way. But I think that we have so many ideas about how we’re supposed to talk about our bodies and all of them are rooted in other people being the authority on your body. Other people and not even other people, although often it comes up as a person, it’s your mother or your partner or whoever, your doctor, but really other systems, larger cultural systems that have taught us which bodies are good bodies and should be valued and respected and which bodies are not good bodies, and that we are free to dehumanize and treat poorly. And this was work I was starting to explore in that early beauty industry work. And that then led me to reporting more concretely on the diet industry and to discovering fat activism as a concept.

And what I really learned in those years is that we all need to take back authority on our own bodies. We all need to say, “You know what? I get to be the expert on my body, and that means I get to decide how I describe my body, what words I use.” It’s one of the most powerful ways to claim authority over your body, and of course as writers in our work. So for me, reclaiming fat is a way of rejecting all of the negative associations with that word. It’s a way of rejecting the idea that because I live in a fat body, I am somehow less valuable than someone who’s in a thin body. And when you take away the negativity associated with these words, you just take away their power to be weaponized against you. You say someone can call you fat. Okay, yeah. You’re tall, I’m medium height, someone else is short and I’m fat and they’re thin, and these are just neutral ways of talking about bodies. It’s a powerful shift, but it is scary.

Marion: It’s a powerful shift indeed. And it comes from you, I think, through this lens with which, and this links to authority, this links to being a writer. One of my favorite pieces of yours was published in The New York Times during COVID, and it digs into the idea of being trapped in one’s house during COVID, as most of us were. But how that provokes a very different response for those with food disorders. You report on this piece that some doctors, therapists and dietitians who treat eating disorders reported a spike in the need for their services during COVID. I say it’s one of my favorite pieces because well written with a sturdy argument and a link to it in my transcript. But more than that, it’s unexpected. So let’s talk about the lens through which a writer views the world. Admittedly, this was not the lens through which I was looking at. COVID, your piece published in March of 2021 gave me a new lens. So talk about having a lens and keeping it well polished.

Virginia: Well, I think we all brought our own lenses to COVID. The work we were already doing as writers was then how we understood and navigated the pandemic. So because I had already written a book about our relationship with food, my first book, I was thinking a lot about the diet industry. A lot of what I noticed early on in COVID was here we were faced with a global pandemic losing thousands of people’s lives every day. And a common refrain on social media was, “Oh my gosh, I can’t stay trapped in my house. I’m going to get so fat.” And I just thought, “Really? This is our big fear? Not, do I need to be bleaching my groceries? When will we get vaccines?” All of this other stuff, we were afraid for our lives, but because we live in such a fat phobic culture, we verbalize that fear through, “I can’t exercise the way I used to. I can’t go to the gym anymore. What will happen to my body?”

When really it was a privilege to be sitting at home gaining weight. It was a privilege for those of us who could ride out the pandemic in that way. So then of course anyone who was vulnerable to disordered eating, anyone who already had a complicated relationship with food and bodies, the isolation of COVID, that larger narrative of, oh my gosh, the worst thing that can happen right now is that you’re going to get fat while surviving a pandemic. All of that created a real perfect storm for folks who are vulnerable. So it started with, because I have that lens, I’m noticing that discourse online. And then I started thinking, “Okay. So what is happening for folks with eating disorders right now? How is this isolation and this new narrative around bodies impacting them?” So that’s what led me to be able to tell that story.

Marion: That’s great. And just following up on that lens for a moment, I’ve written and published four books with big American publishers. I’ve written for some of the publications you’ve written for, I’ve probably had 150 ideas turned down by my agent over the years. And publishing is not… How should we say it? It’s not made up of the bravest people in the world. So with all of these biases at work, pitch me, how did you get past the biases of American publishing? They’re just people with your lens.

Virginia: Well, there’s both how I got past it and how I did something different. And in terms of how I got past it, in a lot of ways, I think my first book was dipping a toe in these waters. It isn’t as explosive as Fat Talk, it isn’t as provocative. I think it does a lot of really wonderful things. It’s a book that’s very close to my heart, but I didn’t yet have the authority. I didn’t have the platform, I didn’t have the credibility I needed to say to Holt, “We need to do a book about anti-fat bias.” That conversation would’ve been too scary, too disruptive. They wouldn’t have wanted to go there with a first time author. So it really was the second book. But interestingly, as much as I love the Eating Instinct, it didn’t sell very well commercially because it was in many ways more of a amusing, a thoughtful exploration, but not a big, here’s what I’ve come to say kind of book.

And so when that one didn’t sell particularly well, I was able to come back to them and say, “Okay. Here’s my new idea. You can sell this. It provokes a reaction.” If we put the word fat in a title, people have a reaction. And yes, there is a risk that a lot of people’s reaction will be, “Ew, I don’t want anything to do with that book,” of course, because fat phobia. But even more, I was able to say, the conversations I’ve been having with readers since the ending instinct is telling me that parents in particular are really grasping for this information. We have some new cultural awareness that the way we’ve talked about bodies for decades is causing more harm than good. Let’s get out in front of it and really have that conversation. And they were, at this time, super game, really open to it and ready to go for it.

But on the flip side, I’ll tell you all the way along writing for major media outlets, this conversation was getting harder in a lot of ways. There was an opening of some doors. When I first started writing about these issues for women’s magazines 10 years ago, I mean, it was pushing a boulder bill, like a non-starter. The biases were so strong. That started to shift. But even writing about this for the New York Times and other outlets, I was regularly encountering a lot of bias in the editorial process that made it hard to tell those stories.

So that’s really what led me to then launch Burnt Toast, my Substack newsletter, where I would have a place to incubate these ideas, to explore these conversations, to write these pieces that I couldn’t publish in mainstream media. And then that started to build the audience. That showed Holt that there was a real market for the book. And really Burnt Toast is what made Fat Talk a New York Times bestseller. The community that came out of that was what really led… So I couldn’t do it just in mainstream media. I needed to also have this independent way of getting people engaged in the conversation.

Marion: That is such a wonderful answer for the people listening because building out from the authority that we talked about initially, building this brand, if you will, building this voice, polishing this lens, and it includes being agile. You’re really agile. I mean, earlier this year in the run-up to the publication of your new book, you published a guest opinion piece in The New York Times under the headline, “Why The New Obesity Guidelines for Kids Terrify Me“, and I’ll put a link in the transcript to the piece. But the piece begins with the fact that this year, the American Academy of Pediatrics released its first comprehensive guidelines for evaluating and treating children and adolescents with obesity to which you react. So I teach a class in writing opinion pieces, and I tell everyone to be ready to react. So talk to me about being ready to react with this argument that you had, you just came out in the same month that these recommendations came out.

Virginia: Yes. And it is exhausting to do it that way. You have to be ready. It’s the thing about having the lens, about being really plugged into the conversation that you’re writing about. I didn’t really have a choice. As soon as those guidelines were published, my email and my DM’s on Instagram were full with readers saying, “What are we doing? What is the response? How am I supposed to think about this? What do I do at my kid’s pediatrician visit next month?” So I knew we needed to respond, we needed to have a different conversation. And I’m also watching the way the mainstream media is covering that issue, and I’m seeing what’s not getting told. I’m seeing what’s missing from that conversation. So I know what I can contribute is the exploration of the bias and how the guidelines uphold the bias.

So yeah, this is a big part of the job is keeping an eye on what’s happening on your beat or in the world you write about and being ready to respond when something timely happens. I mean, Ozempic is another one. There’s always these things bubbling up. Whatever your topic is, there’s always going to be news stories bubbling up. And I think there is both being ready to react and knowing how to take just enough of a pause that you can come up with something really worth saying. I think often the first hot take is not the best take, and you do need, Because I think my first hot take was just a lot of words that the New York Times wouldn’t have printed. I was really mad. So you have to sit with it for a minute and refine, but then starting to say, “Okay. But okay, I see how this conversation is playing out. What aren’t we hearing? Who aren’t we hearing from? What isn’t being told?” And then that’s who I am.

Marion: Hot take, yeah. So let’s talk about a hot take a little bit in regard with your new book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. Early in the book you argue that when we talk about families with multiple generations of thin people, we’re really comfortable crediting genetics for their inherited thinness. But when we talk about families with multiple generations of fat people, we default to epigenetics or how your behavior and environment influence how your genes work.

And when I read that and I read that paragraph about four times, and I kept thinking about you and wondered if you just get really mad when you come to these conclusions because they’re talk about a hot take. I mean, if that had dropped into my head like genetics for one, epigenetics for the other, I think I’ll go burn something in the fireplace. So talk about the role of anger. And I have to say I’ve read through the body of your work. You don’t read angry, you read measured. Measured is the word. I would use how to dole it out so that I can metabolize your argument one tidbit at a time. So talk to me about going from hot take to measured.

Virginia: I really appreciate you saying that because I think I also often am angry. I’m most often in my process of working towards measured. So I’m glad to hear I get there. I think it’s tricky. Because I think anger is such a tool. It’s so powerful, and I think as women especially, we are told to shove it down and turn it off and don’t seem too angry or they won’t take you seriously. This is something we’re really up against. And I think anger is often a superpower for writers in general and especially for women writers.

But I also think you need to be clear on who you are angry with. And what’s often a limitation of controversial conversations is that we end up angry at our readers or we end up angry at individuals. I’m not angry at people who’ve gone on diets, I’ve gone on diets. I’m not angry at people who think that their kid will live a happier life if they’re in a smaller body. That’s a logical conclusion to make in our world. I’m angry at the systems that have required that of us. I’m angry at the way the healthcare system leaves fat people out in the cold. The way schools still weigh kids and cause a lot of shame and harm. I’m angry at cultural discourse in media that promotes eating disorders. So I’m angry at a whole system and if that is who I’m angry at, then the solution is helping more people understand that anger and helping more people understand how the system hasn’t served them.

So then, yeah, I need to be really measured in how I walk us through that. Because if I come in super angry, anyone who’s at a different point in this process, someone who’s still feeling like thinness is really valuable in their life is going to feel shut out and this conversation isn’t for them. And I’m trying to make this a conversation for everybody so that we can all do the work to dismantle these larger systems.

Marion: Yeah. That’s a terrific answer. And I noticed that in much of your work, certainly in your new book, you call for us to redefine fat talk. Stop making fatness the worst case scenario. And as you say, start reclaiming it as a perfectly good way to have a body. And you argue that every parent needs to talk about fat because kids of all ages, “Absorb a daily onslaught of body shame from peers, school, diet, culture, and parents themselves.” And you talked before you said, “You know this is an uphill battle, or some days it could be perceived as that.”

So let’s talk about energy. Sheer exhaustion is a perfectly reasonable response to have to this particular issue, this brand, this work. How do you keep your energy? Is it possible to take time off from this when Ozempic is coming in and the American Academy of Pediatrics is coming in? Or do you just have to run with it all the time?

Virginia: No, you really need to take time off. I’ve definitely learned that. And I didn’t take a lot of time off earlier this year because the news cycle was so intense. And then I went straight into book promotion and I did hit a wall by midsummer of, okay, I can’t keep going at this clip. And you know how this is, once you have a book out in the world, people are saying, “What’s the next book?” And right now that’s the conversation where I’m like, “No, not yet. I’m taking time off before I think about what’s next.” I mean, I’m writing the newsletter and doing my podcast, but I’m not thinking about another book yet because I know I need a little bit of breathing room and healing time.

Marion: Yeah, you do.

Virginia: Yeah, it’s so important. But I think that I sustain it because a great strength of doing something like a newsletter is that you’re in constant conversation with your readers. So I’m always hearing from folks who are coming into this conversation from a new angle, a new place, giving me something new I want to write about. So there’s no end of material, which is exciting and energizing. And what I’ve also come to realize is it means that it’s okay to step away because if I miss one hot take opportunity, if I miss one spike in the news cycle, there’s going to be another one in a week or two I can grab onto. I don’t need to swing at every pitch, which takes some time to realize that you can let some go to save your energy to go for some bigger ones. And I think that’s something that I’ve been really getting better at, but still a work in progress on for sure.

Marion: I think it’s great advice, and I think coupling that with the idea that you have to be ready to go, you can always put a new top on a piece, but if you’ve got a piece ready to go and then the Ozempic thing comes in, then the American Academy of Pediatrics comes in, you know how you feel, and then you put a new top on them and you’re ready to go. So let’s talk a little bit about research. You have 46 pages of research notes in the back of this wonderful book, and the whole point of the book is to help parents name and navigate the anti-fat bias that infiltrates everything. As you remind us, it infiltrates our schools, doctor’s offices, family dinner tables, it’s everywhere. So reporting and research, this is your brand, this is your point of view, this is what you believe to be true. Then you set out to research it. How do you manage intent against pure reporting? In other words, how do you not seek merely those things that confirm what you want to be true?

Virginia: Yeah. That’s a great question. I think that’s the perpetual struggle of journalism. It’s also the perpetual struggle of science itself. Every researcher setting out to do a study has some outcomes in mind. And I think my main criticism of how weight and health has been studied in the last 40 years and even before that is that it was studied from a place of anti-fat bias. From the premise of fat is always bad and we’re going to collect data to support that. So a lot of what I’m doing is identifying the bias in the mainstream science and in the way this work is getting done. So I’m naming their bias and then looking for evidence for any researchers of which there are not a 10, but there are a growing number who are trying to approach the questions from a less biased place or from at least a place of having identified the presence of anti-fat bias in previous work and in their own work, and how do we control for that in the science?

So that’s the lens I’m coming to. You can absolutely say, “Well, Virginia, you have your own bias in play here,” but I think it’s a different thing to have an agenda than it is to have a baked in bias against an entire group of people.

Marion: Yeah. I think that’s a good discernment.

Virginia: That’s what I want to tease out, is yes, I’m coming in with an agenda, but I’m not coming in trying to write off an entire group of people. So then that changes the evidence that you’re seeking out. But it also means I am looking at the mainstream evidence. I’m looking at what their results showed and how did the bias inform those results and teasing all of that out. It’s a complicated puzzle and it’s something I think about a lot. And as you can see by the amount of Venn notes, I am a somewhat compulsive over researcher. So yeah, definitely always casting a wide lens.

Marion: I think the amount of research in the back of the book really helps the authority of the book. I do. I read through it and it’s good and it’s solid, and yet I suspect you have people that just come at you with hammers and talks. So let’s just talk for a moment, and let’s just only give them a moment, but my listeners want to know about haters. You publish your podcast, you’re on TikTok, you do public speaking. What’s your outlook on haters and what’s your strategy?

Virginia: My feeling is the haters are not who I write for. They’re not my readers. I don’t really owe them anything because they’re not engaging in my work in a good faith effort to understand. I welcome good faith questions. My whole work here is introduce these ideas to people and help them walk through this very messy, murky conversation. But there is a difference between someone saying, “Wait, I’ve always thought this and now I’m trying to understand.” Versus someone coming in and saying, “These people are terrible parents because they’re fat.” I mean, there’s just such a difference in the intent. So you can tell very quickly.

And when someone comes at me with, “Please explain your work,” sorts of attacking questions, I didn’t write it for them. If they want to know more about my work, the work stands, the footnotes are there. You can engage with it on your own time. I don’t owe you a personal explanation. So my feeling is, and advice I’ve gotten from other folks who do this work is you do what you want with the hate. You can ignore it because some days that’s the best strategy is just to let it go. You can have fun with it. So sometimes I post a TikTok video of me eating a brownie with a hateful comment next to it because-

Marion: I saw that one.

Virginia: … you know what? That’s the fun that you can have with it.

Marion: Brownie looked really good too. I got to tell you.

Virginia: It was a great brownie. Yeah, stand by that one. I’ve done it with pizza, any kind of snack, whatever. So you can have fun with that. You can make gold out of what they’ve sent you in other words, or you can disengage or if you want to engage, you can. I personally rarely choose that strategy. But the point is, center your own needs and do what makes sense for you. Don’t worry about how they’re going to react or whether you’re going to win them over because you didn’t write this for them. It’s not for them. That’s fine. We don’t have to be for everyone.

Marion: Yeah. That’s good. And I appreciate that. That’s very measured again. So as we start to wrap this up, I’d like to talk a little bit about vulnerability. The old adage is write what you know and you have included your family, including your children in your work and some really powerful pieces, particularly about a child with health issues. And you’ve written strong opinion pieces that really show us the cost of care in this country. Outside of the work on fat and fat bias, there’s one piece in particular that people should go read on your website that I’ve just found really poignant and wonderful about what might’ve happened under the Trump administration to healthcare.

So you’ve got your kids in your two books, and Nora Ephron told us that everything is copy, and I think she’s right, but I always try to teach the people I work with that everything is good copy if you write with vulnerability, which brings our families to the page entails, I mean, you’ve really got to talk about being human. My dad used to say, “If you want anyone to remember anything, either make it funny or put it to music.” He was a sports writer and that worked for him, but for me, it’s about vulnerability. So what would you say? I mean is everything copy and facilitation of telling the story enhanced with using your children as examples?

Virginia: I don’t know if I think everything is copy, or at least I know why Nora Ephron says that, but I don’t know if that’s compatible with good parenting, which is maybe a separate conversation. I think in terms of what is their story and what is my story, and there are pieces of their story, and it’s of course a very blurry line. Because a mother and daughters is going to be a lot of shared story, and so I may not always be getting it right, but I try to limit what I write about them to pieces that feel like my story to tell or a detail or a moment of their lives that doesn’t actually tell you very much about who they are. You might know some basic facts about my older daughter’s health condition. You don’t know what book she likes to read or her favorite music or what she thinks of the kids in her class. You don’t know her as a person, and that’s a boundary that’s really important to me to protect for them.

But I think it’s different for every writer and every relationship. And there might be times as they get older, I would ask for consent to write about different things. Both these books came out when they were still pretty young, and so it’s a trickier thing to explain even to… My older daughter’s 10 now, so we can have more nuanced conversations. But even still to explain this might be read by thousands of people. That’s hard for kids to grasp. This might be seen on the internet by millions of people. I can barely grasp it.

So I do think we have a responsibility to think through what we owe them and what boundaries we want to protect for them. But I also completely agree vulnerability is key to good writing. So I think about what am I comfortable being vulnerable about and what parts of my story need to be part of this? But I also think a lot about what other other stories are not being told. And my perspective as a straight, White privileged lady is not the only story we need. So there’s only so much material I’d get out of my own family if I really want to be doing my job as a journalist.

Marion: It’s a lovely answer and it’s a remarkable body of work, Virginia. I can’t wait to see what you do next. And I didn’t mean to ask about the next book because I know how hateful that question is coming from a publisher. I just will delight in wherever this goes. Thank you so much for coming along today, and I hope you sell a billion copies of this new book.

Virginia: Thank you, Marion. This was wonderful.

Marion: The writer is Virginia Sole-Smith. See more on her at virginiasolesmith dot com. Her new book is Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. Just out from Henry Holt & Company. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overitstudios dot com. Our producer is Jaquelin Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marionroach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project where writers get their needs met through online classes and how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. If you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

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