Acclaimed New Zealand author Catherine Chidgey is back with her tenth novel, The Starving Bride, which explores the pervasive and enduring body-size pressure on women and girls. She talks to Julie Hill
The Starving Bride is set in a near-future Blackpool, England, where the residents bring back a sideshow involving a young woman dressed as a bride, starving herself for weeks in full public view. How did you discover the real sideshow that the book is based on?
When I was researching English seaside resorts for my previous novel, The Book of Guilt, I stumbled across a reference to a sideshow that happened in Blackpool and elsewhere from the 1930s called the Starving Bride.
Basically it took the form of a young woman, dressed as a bride, lying in a glass casket all day with no food for between 30 and 40 days. She wasn’t a professional performer but someone who was plucked from the general public, who was down on her luck and needed some money to set her and her groom up for their married life together. And what she was paid was phenomenal, enough to buy a small house if she made it through the full 30, 40 days.
Unlike in my book, the council, church and citizens of Blackpool wanted it closed down but every time there was a protest it just brought more publicity to it. So it became absolutely huge and people came in their droves to see it.
I decided that this is speaking to us now and to where we’re headed, in that skinny is back. When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, it was all about heroin chic and Kate Moss and extreme dieting. Now that is back with a vengeance, but 100 times worse, because we have the internet and Ozempic and celebrities debuting their new summer bodies and all of that rubbish.
Around the 2010s it felt as if progress was being made in terms of body positivity or acceptance of a wider range of bodies. Do you think that’s fallen off a cliff now?
I absolutely do. I think whatever drives that kind of poisonous narrative suddenly sat up and realised oh, we’ve let our foot off the accelerator for a few years. Let’s put things right.
What age do you think kids start worrying about this?
When my daughter was six she came to me and said, “Mum, my thighs are too fat.” That floored me. I don’t know where she got that from because it certainly wasn’t us. So I’ve been taking steps to fight that with her. We read books about self-esteem and she recognises that gigantic, unstoppable machine that we’re all fighting against every single day as women and girls. I say to her, you know that message is rubbish, right? And we have to fight it and keep talking about it, and you need to talk to your friends about it too, and not allow yourself to be sucked into it because it will consume you. And we do all that but it still feels so terrifying.
Is it difficult to get that message across when you might have struggled with it yourself?
I’m 56 and I think any woman who grew up in the 1980s and 90s will have taken the message on board that whatever you look like, it’s not OK. It’s poison and I do still carry that with me. But at the same time I feel a great deal of tenderness towards my old self who had that inner critic shouting at me all the time “you’re not small enough, you're not good enough, you’re not pretty enough”. That’s why I dedicated the book “to our younger selves who were beautiful already”.
Some of the characters are obsessed with America’s Next Top Model, which came under fire in a recent Netflix doco. Did we understand how bad it was at the time?
I was totally hooked on it! I do think that we recognised on some level that it was awful but that was also part of its appeal: we want to see people being put to the test and either failing, so we can take a certain kind of dark glee in that, or triumphing and we can imagine ourselves in their shoes. So that absolutely had to be part of the novel.
In the book, Frank notices his daughter isn’t eating but struggles to speak up, why?
For Frank, it’s such a minefield. He notices that his daughter is maybe taking the dieting a bit too far, but it’s explained away, like all teenage girls go through a dieting phase or she’s having a growth spurt. And we do reach for those excuses because I guess the alternative is too awful to contemplate, which is that my daughter is slowly killing herself and perhaps I have some role in that. And he’s also been warned by his wife, you cannot comment on a teenage girl’s body, so he’s in an impossible position.
It reminded me of Ariana Grande and the way people debate whether it’s OK to comment on her weight loss.
I feel a great deal of compassion for her. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be a creative person who is quite possibly sensitive because those two things often go hand in hand, and feel the pressure to be small and then to have to listen to all of the comments about what she is still doing wrong. And this is what [the main character] Hazel is going through in the book, with audiences coming in and commenting on her body, being able to say anything they like while she is lying there with her eyes closed, taking it all in.
How did you research pro-anorexia online content?
Those sites are quite secretive and closed to members of the public but where I did find plenty of material was on Reddit. There’s also an influencer on Instagram who is severely anorexic, and she does make-up tutorials and dresses up in little girl’s clothes, and goes to Disneyland to create content with the encouragement of her mother because it’s bringing in a lot of money.
In the book, the Anabelles are a group of pro-anorexia young women. On the surface, it seems as if they’re driven by a sense of solidarity but in fact they’re driven by self-hatred and cruelty, because the way that you get [through to] someone who might have fallen off the rails in terms of sticking to her diet is not by being kind, it’s by shaming her. So it’s this really misguided sense of belonging.
Was writing this a painful process?
Partly, in that I channelled that inner critic, but it also felt quite liberating to give voice to that toxicity and say to my readers, you’re not alone in this. I think part of the way to dismantle this is to break that sense of isolation, that shame we all feel that I don’t look the way that I want to, and I’m ugly and unlovable. It sounds corny but I hope people feel less alone when they read this story.
The Starving Bride, by Catherine Chidgey (published by Te Herenga Waka University Press) is available now.
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