While I feared pat and tired "love your body" platitudes, I decided to read the book anyway. And just as Rachel said, it was full of humor and honesty and emotional depth, and it made me want to interview Frankel (who conveniently lives a ten minute walk from my apartment). The main reason Frankel decided to finally tackle what she calls her "dieting addiction" once and for all was because her two daughters, Maggie and Lucy, were reaching puberty. "It’s my goal to instill this happiness and comfort in my daughters’ skin so that they’re never distracted from their real goals with this shit," Frankel told me. "The decades I have lost on negative thoughts and negative behaviors with the self-loathing, it’s just a waste of time." More insight from Valerie on body image, lady mags, mothers and daughters below.

Jezebel: You worked at Mademoiselle and wrote about both positive and negative experiences you've had with women's magazines. At Jezebel we seem to love and hate women's magazines in equal measures, and I wonder if it's possible to consume that sort of media in a way that's not destructive.
Valerie Frankel: As awful as it was at the beginning (see Dodai's earlier post about the coked-out calorie counting), once the original editor who hired me left, working at Mademoiselle was really was awesome at the end. It was amazing and that’s why it probably didn’t last. I think of my daughters reading women's magazines, I try to teach them to be a little cynical about the way the material is presented, to be a little savvy about the relationship between editorial and advertising. And they learn that because of living with me and my having been in this business so long. That being said [my daughter] Maggie loves all of it. Teen Vogue and Seventeen, the number of teen titles is dwindling daily but she loves it all and wants it all. And she probably reads the way that most people read it, for the fashion and the beauty. She did say this one crazy thing she wanted to take swim lessons because she read in one of the teen magazines that guys consider girls who swim, 'hot.' This is why you want to take swim? She said it wasn’t, but it was part of the package. And in terms of my consuming women’s magazines, I’m sort of aged out of a large portion of them. I don’t read them for fashion and beauty. It’s going to sound dowdy and ridiculous but at this point I really do read them for the recipes.

Jezebel: In the book, you do an experiment where you count the number of negative thoughts you had about your body in a single day. I wanted to try that experiment before I met with you, but I was too scared.
Valerie Frankel: I started writing this book when I was 41, and now I’m 43, and I definitely felt like in the process of writing the book I had to reach a certain level of maturity to deal with this stuff. It was also having kids of a certain age and not wanting them to make the same mistakes, and I didn’t want to make the same mistakes my mother made [Frankel's mother criticized her weight endlessly].

Jezebel: I know you wrote a lot about being teased mercilessly about your weight in middle school, and I wonder if things are worse for girls your daughters' age because the ideal has become smaller and smaller since you were a tween.
Valerie Frankel: As the nation gets fatter, the ideal standard gets smaller, because it becomes that much more impossible to attain. There are the girls for whatever reason are the targets, and I still see that in my daughters' school. And it seems to be established pretty early, I was a target in the seventh grade, and it stuck, even regardless of what my weight was in any given year. I wrote about it in the book. My parents forced me to go on optifast, which is this experimental liquid protein diet, and I did lose weight. I was officially underweight, but I don’t think anyone ever saw me with any kind of perspective. I was still the target, the fat girl. There were fat girls at my school who became full-blown anorexics, like walking skeletons, scary ass shit. And they had been targets about being fat, and then when they lost all that weight they were targets for being skeletal and too thin. That’s just the way it was forever.

Jezebel: You talked earlier about having to reach a certain level of maturity before being able to work on your body image. How long did that process of purging the negativity take?
Valerie Frankel: The writing process was a full year, and it’s been a year since then. I would say I feel stronger all the time, and more conscious. You go in and out, and sometimes I feel like I’m losing control of it again, but then I wrest control back. Because I did a shitload of work. Emotional work, and my goals were emotional. Just reframing it that way. My goals were not about losing weight or running a certain distance, they were wholly emotional.

Jezebel: Sometimes I watch the Biggest Loser and it seems like with that show and most of the other weight loss shown in pop culture, it's all about image. They never address any of the emotional stuff.
Valerie Frankel I watch it too! They never focus on it on The Biggest Loser except for this one episode. Did you see the one, with Jillian’s mother who is a shrink? It was such a crazy episode. Jillian’s mother is a shrink who deals with eating issues and body image, and her mother came on and did little sessions, which of course were taped. And one guy went on and admitted that he had been abused sexually and physically and probably verbally, and hello! It was way too intense. They never did it again. My theory was to get to the root of everything about body image for me, and get square on that, and move forward. And I think it’s great and everyone should do it. It really works.

Jezebel: I have to be honest, when I first read about your book I thought it was just going to be another book about weight loss touting the same superficial "love yourself" message that is never helpful. I mean, obviously if just telling people to love themselves worked, the dieting industry would be out of business. But your book wasn't like that.
Valerie Frankel:There’s nothing about dieting in it. It’s not about food, it’s about body image. This is a true memoir, it’s not a real time memoir that are so popular now, like “my year of losing weight” or something. It’s about everything, the present and the past and melding the two. Just in terms of the writing of this book as a discovery process, I knew that body image had been a major theme of my life, but I was shocked when in the course of writing I discovered that it had influenced every major decision in my life. Marriages and career, and parenting, and just everything. I mean everything. Everything I wore, everything I did. Just everything. And that alone was such a shock, and made me want to live the rest of my life differently.

Jezebel: How did the thought process go?
Valerie Frankel: I went back for the earlier chapters, I took a deep breath and plunged into those painful things from my past. Despite the fact that I had been a writer for 25 years and have probably written millions of words, have never written about the mother stuff, or the junior high stuff. And it was interesting to hear the reaction of friends. They were all 'I can’t believe you were such a loser in junior high.' It was so this part of my past that I suppressed, and all the mother stuff. I mean, my old friends who were there, they knew. But my mother and I have such a close relationship despite this one area. It just seemed so weird, so many people were like, how can you even talk to her? But it’s complicated.

Jezebel: Mother daughter relationships always are.
Valerie Frankel:It made me think about my fiction too. A lot of the mother daughter relationships I’ve written about have kind of been one-dimensional because I hadn’t been able to deal with the anger part of it. I had to unlock it. I’m working on a novel now and I’m finding it much easier to go to those dark places. I had written comedy for so many years and I wondered, why? It also helped me get to those dark places that I had suppressed when my husband died [Frankel's first husband died of cancer in November 2000]. I don’t know if you have anyone close to you who died, but it’s very difficult to let yourself think in terms of anything being insincere about the relationship or the relationship having any flaws. It’s like as soon as somebody died, everything has to be wrapped in this sort of golden glow. I idealized that marriage for a long time because I couldn’t go there. Not just writing about, but thinking about, things I just had not allowed myself to deal with. And it was crazy, just typing and crying and everything built on itself.

Jezebel: Anytime we bring up issues of weight at Jezebel I read the comments from our readers and they're always so deeply sad. There is a lot of self-loathing there, and I just wish there is a way we could all — myself included — discuss these issues without being so hard on ourselves.
Valerie Frankel: I think in this culture it's impossible to not care about your weight. But you have to understand, one of the key themes in the book, and it was a major, light bulb moment for me, is that weight is a distraction from the real problems, and what really matters in your life. It’s a convenient distraction. It’s not going to go away. You think about your weight instead of your abusive boyfriend or your job that’s not going anywhere or that you don’t know what you want to do with your life. And I realized it through a lot of really bad times in my life, obsessing about weight was a way to not deal with other issues.

Jezebel: It sounds like it was almost a comfort for you.
Valerie Frankel: It is a comfort. I wasn’t an emotional eater, I was an emotional dieter. Like dieting itself was the addiction I thought that if I went cold turkey on dieting, I would just be lost in a store. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. And I think when all that stuff goes away, when you stop dieting and stop obsessing, you create an emotional vacuum and something has to rush into it. It can be positive things. I think you can strengthen your relationships or get somewhere in your career or write that novel or run the marathon or whatever your real goals are if you just stop obsessing about your weight. And you might gain five pounds, but you’ll have written a novel. My bad self-image hasn’t affected too much of the trajectory of my life overall, but I just would have been a lot happier for a long time. I would love it if my daughters' generation of girls weren't distracted from their goals by thinking about this shit. Just think of what you all can do if you don’t have this one thing.

Thin Is The New Happy [Amazon]
Valerie Frankel's Palace Of Love [Valerie Frankel Official Website]

Earlier: The Last Days Of Mademoiselle: Cocaine, Cigarettes & Calorie Counts

What attracted you to Laura as a fictional construct in the first place? In the Times you've declared your love for her and I've read the Salon essay in which you first mention your admiration for her. You call her "a mastermind of stealth independence."
Basically I read these various articles about her, and realized that she was more complicated than I would have imagined. She and George Bush got married at the age of 31, and she was a democrat until she married him. She actually has some very liberal close friends, including a woman who’s a midwife in Berkeley. I think a lot of people, most people, are primarily friends with people who are of the same political persuasion as you are. I think it’s notable to be First Lady to a super conservative President and friends with midwife. She would invite people over when she was First Lady of Texas and when she was at the White House. Because she was such a great reader, she would invite writers to events, and they would have been on record as disagreeing with her husband. They just assumed that Laura had never read their books, but then they would show up and have realized she had read everything they'd ever written.

I’ve read all of your novels, and while Lee (from Prep) and Hannah (from The Man of My Dreams) are more cynical, all three heroines are quite shy and introverted. It seems like these sorts of introverted characters are not usually protagonists. What makes you gravitate towards them?
Well I think that the all the protagonists of my books are observant, because I can’t really imagine writing a novel that didn’t have an observant protagonist. What would be the point? I also think that I’m interested in social awkwardness, because it seems to illustrate or magnify these aspects of human behavior. So I would say that’s a lot of it: the things that interest me as a person.

Alice's shyness makes her incredibly ambivalent about her husband, Charlie's, ascendence to the Presidency. I was particularly taken with the observation she makes as narrator: "We did everything we could to get as many people as possible to pay attention to us, and it worked, and now we complain. Leave us alone, we say. Just like you, we’re entitled to privacy."
I feel like most people who are famous have actively pursued their fame, but some people are famous as a result of their relationship to someone else, and that’s always true for political families. For example, Sasha and Malia Obama didn’t choose to be famous, but now they are. It's the outsider question. To me it’s always more interesting to hear a story told from the perspective of an outsider, because an outsider notices things more, whereas an insider takes things for granted.

I read the Cindy McCain profile in this week's New Yorker as I was reading the American Wife, and it struck me that very few women really revel in being First Ladies. What sort of person does enjoy being a political spouse? Do you think Hillary liked it?
I think Hillary Clinton is a really interesting person because people have very strong reactions to her in terms of admiring her or disliking her. I think she was a good First Lady, but I think she’d actually be a better President than First Lady.

Ok, now I need to ask the obligatory question about what you think of our potential First Ladies, Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama.
There was an article on Cindy in the New York Times on August 23rd. It was the same day Biden was announced as Obama's VP pick so it didn't get as much press as it should have. I really urge anyone to read it, it raises a lot of questions about her professional involvement with her family’s company (ed. note: the article basically says that Cindy, "a private person" is an absentee chairwoman who cashes the checks from the beer distributorship she inherited but "has left scarcely a mark on the company.") Michelle Obama seems like a much more regular person. I just watched her on Ellen and I think she’s a good sport. You see her dance with Ellen, which Barack did too. It is interesting. Obviously because everything in politics is so scripted it makes us even hungrier to know people’s real selves, which we kind of can’t do.

Speaking of real and fictional selves, one thing I thought was really interesting, and one thing I’ve been thinking about with Sarah Palin, is how these details come out about you and become your “official biography” that everyone refers to. Like with Alice in American Wife, her father being a postal worker, which wasn’t even true, was seized upon by her husband's campaign. Do you ever wonder what details would emerge about you and become those sorts of talking points?
I’m not planning to run for office, but there are definitely certain details. This is a different kind of book than Prep or the Man of my Dreams. So there are different questions that come up over and over. There’s a set of questions with this book and a set that comes up with other books. There’s a tidbit that Prep was turned down by 14 out of 15 publishers, which is true, but misleading because it was sold within two weeks. It makes it sound like I struggled more than I did. Anyone who is writing about fiction writing likes stories about long odds.

Long odds makes me think of Sarah Palin. What's your take on her?
I wish she were a fictional construct. I’m not a fan of hers. But I certainly admit that she’s got a compelling life story.

American Wife [Amazon]
Curtis Sittenfeld [Official Website]
Imaginary First Lady Tells All [NYT]
Why I Love Laura Bush [Salon]
For McCains, a Public Path but Private Wealth [NYT]
Michelle Obama On Ellen [YouTube]

Earlier: Pussy, Parents And Puppies: A Q&A With Comedian Margaret Cho
This Is Not Chick Lit: A Q&A With Writer Janelle Brown
New Yorker Profile Shows Cindy McCain Is A Nouveau Betty Draper

You're on the road now doing stand-up, and your reality show is about to premiere, but you've done scripted shows in the past. I know you've discussed the lack of non-stereotypical roles for Asians in your act before, and I was wondering if it's gotten any better since you started out in show biz. There’s just nothing that’s out there. The only roles that are out there if you’re a woman of color are based on ethnicity. If a role is for Asian women in particular, it’s going to be for an acupuncturist. Of course, there are Asian acupuncturists in life that are real women, but it's still a stereotype. I feel bad for Asian actors who want to work, because there are only those stories out there for us. The real story behind the movie 21 is about Asian American kids, but they used white kids for those main roles and Asians in the supporting roles. I don’t know why. The problem isn’t even out-and-out stereotyping at this point, it’s non-inclusion. That’s the way racism presents itself nowadays, as if non-inclusion is better. I think it’s actually worse, because then you don’t see those people at all.

Speaking of inclusion, you seem really focused on being a good role model for your fans so that they don't feel alienated.
I always want people to feel beautiful. I try to be super positive about my body, and super positive about not saying, 'I feel fat and I feel ugly.' Of course I have moments of weakness, and sometimes I have interviews on those days. ! I don’t want be self-deprecating in the way that comes too naturally for women. I want to be a woman who is really proud of her physical being, I am proud to be forty, am proud to be in this body. People don't get to see a lot of real women on TV who haven’t had plastic surgery, who haven’t had botox, and I’m totally normal. In my new TV show, I try to be naked a lot because I think it’s important for viewers to see a real 40 woman looks like, but also because how things were for me the last time I had a show. When I first had a screen test [for her 90s sit com All-American Girl], I wore a midriff shirt and my stomach was showing, and one of the executives said, don't ever, ever do that again.

I also hear you're totally awesome about using your body for experiments on the show. I definitely read your blog about getting the G-shot. How was it?
I really was disappointed in the G-shot! I have some weird value judgment on how I reach orgasm and I always felt inadequate that I couldn’t have one through intercourse. Why isn’t it enough that I can orgasm? Why is it more valuable to orgasm a certain way? What a great gift! Unfortunately, the G-shot didn't allow me to come from sex. It made it not possible for me to have sex for many months. We’re all built differently and female sexuality is so unique, and the specialness of who we are, you can’t take that into account when you create a procedure like that, though I think that it does work. It actually reinforced my realization that I’m not going to come that way. I had this ex-lover who was like, 'I wish you could come from me and not your vibrator.' And I was like why? Are you emasculated by my vibrator? I’m really into sex toys and I can’t understand why people feel like it’s not a part of the sex process proper. It’s bullshit. I hate that.

Another big part of the show (besides getting a shot of collagen in your G-spot, obvs) are your parents, whom we love.
They really fit into the show and I thought it would be great to have them. It seemed like the right kind of thing to do and I was excited to have them on, along with my assorted friends. [I wanted to show everyone because] we are definitely a queer family — because that’s how queer family comes together, we create our own families.

Your puppies also have a big role on the show! And I read on your blog that you are a fan of the Daily Puppy, which we are also so obsessed with. Yes! I have three dogs, small, medium and large, all mixes. My medium is an Australian Shepherd Mix and my big one is a black German Shepherd mix. Sometimes I will wait until midnight and go on the Daily Puppy so that I can see the dogs change over to the next day's puppy, I'm so into it. , I’ll go deep inside it. I’ll get deep in there. I’ll be lost all day. It’s really funny sometimes. Once I remember I was going down the comments, and there was this guy on the boards called "puppy hater" and he kept going on about how the readers are fat old women who have nothing to do, and we’re so fat that we have nothing to love. And the readers just went fucking crazy on him!

People can be really mean on the internet! Even to puppies!If I had a daughter, I would have a real hard time letting her see any of the stuff online and the way they talk about women and women’s bodies. It’s so cruel and sickening.

Donut Pussy [Margaret Cho Official Website]

Earlier: This Is Not Chick Lit: A Q&A With Writer Janelle Brown

Because your novel has female protagonists and a baby blue cover, it seems that some people have categorized it as chick lit, which felt reductive to me.
It is reductive! It’s also dismissive. “Chick lit” is a catch all for everything that’s not “hard” literature written by a woman. It implies that the male experience is universal, while the female experience is something only other women would be interested in. Even Joyce Carol Oates’ last book got the disembodied female head cover treatment! I understand where the term comes from – [books about] female protagonists looking for love in the big city – but my book has nothing to do with finding a man. Companies know that women are really the only ones who still buy books, which is good, but there has to be a better way to market them.

Speaking of labels, your book has been called feminist by several reviewers, and one of the three main characters, Margaret, runs a failing feminist ‘zine called Snatch. Did you set out to make a markedly feminist statement?
I didn’t sit down to write a feminist manifesto. But no, “feminism” specifically didn’t come to mind. I wanted to write a book about women’s relationship to decision-making and self image, about female identity, and what being a woman means to three different age groups. I did found a feminist zine [the proto-Jezebelian Maxi ] in the 90s though.

I related to Margaret’s struggles with Snatch, particularly her difficulty reconciling artistic freedom with the need to make money. There’s a scene at the beginning where a very broke Margaret goes to a birthday dinner for one of her more successful friends. They end up going to a very expensive restaurant and Margaret gets shamed into paying much more than she could afford. I’ve definitely lived that uncomfortable scene more than once.
Me too. There’s always this awkward shuffle around the bill. Money definitely creates this imbalance, especially because in creative worlds it seems like it flows so easily and quickly, particularly when you’re not the one getting it. When I graduated from college in the 90s, there was this feeling that we’d all just be starving artists and listen to Nirvana and that was great. And Margaret wants to be pure in her artistic vision and anti-capitalist, but part of her gets completely sucked in against her will. It’s hard not to when you see all these people earning so much money. It seems like it’s right there and you can’t get it. It warps one’s sense of life and ambition and success.

Margaret’s fraught relationship with her wealthy parents also seemed to shape her feelings about capitalism. She never want to be a stay at home mother and depend on a man, the way Janice did.
She’s definitely set up her own life in opposition to her parents’ choices. She’s let that dictate her moral stances. What I really wanted to show with Margaret’s relationship to her mother, Janice, was that every woman has been shaped by what their mothers do and who they are. Some people adopt Margaret’s “fuck you” stance, and others follow their mothers’ paths, but we’re all still reacting to what we observed growing up.
All We Ever Wanted Was Everything [Amazon]
In Every Dream Home, A Heartache [Salon]
Janelle Brown [Official Site]

Earlier: Blogging Towards Bethlehem