If this is the first missive of mine you’re receiving, welcome! Frump Feelings is monthly dispatches on culture, books, and fat liberation, and the main place where I share new writing, classes, events, and personal updates. I’m moving away from Instagram and mass emails in 2025. I’ve enjoyed being in community with you online and would love to stay in touch! However please do what’s best for your inbox <3

Main Meal

Dear friends,

I’ve written before about how I don’t understand plot and I don’t think a lot of writers do. It’s barely taught in MFA programs, yet as a reader it’s voice and plot that I usually crave, by which I mean that ineffable thing that grips you inside a story rather than pushing you out of it. What’s often missing though, I think, from the conversation about plot is an understanding that it is more than just a series of incidents AND more than the mind of a character. A fuller, more holistic vision of what a plot is and why one works or doesn’t is something I’m always chasing. And who better to ask than Liz Moore, the author of five novels, including recent mega hit The God of the Woods and Long Bright River. Obama is a fan, and so is

Emma Copley Eisenberg: Welcome Liz Moore! You are my friend and writing buddy here in Philly and I am such a fan of your books and it is a great pleasure to have you aboard the Frump Feelings van. I for one cannot wait for the Long Bright River TV series to drop, which we just learned will happen on March 13. I hope we can watch it together while eating delicious fancy popcorn. My first question for you is one I also annoyingly shouted at you at your Philly launch for The God of the Woods. And that is: what to you is a plot?

Liz Moore: Plot at its most fundamental level is story, and story is something that we as a species have been doing since the dawn of human civilization. I never would have identified myself as someone who was “good at plot” when I was first starting out as a writer. My first book was a collection of interconnected short stories which I did because I was so afraid of writing a novel length plot. In that format, I was able to develop a set of characters I let crop up in different ways in different stories and it just felt much more manageable to me. It’s a format I recommend to a lot of people who are still working to develop the stamina to complete a full length work.

With my second book, it was so character driven that I basically just decided to tell it from two different points of view without knowing exactly how they were connected. I just bounced back and forth and let the characters kind of talk to each other until I figured out what their story was. Even though that book wasn’t marketed as a mystery, I still think of it as one, sort of, because the central mystery is a mystery of genealogy. But it took me about three published books to think of myself as somebody who was very story forward. Now, a fundamental part of how I write is asking a big unsolved question, whether it’s a mystery of identity or a mystery of genealogy or personal history or whether it’s a more traditional there’s been a murder or disappearance. So, a plot to me at the end of all of this, is a big unanswered question that has to be answered by the end of the book.

ECE: I don’t know about you but how I was taught to think about plot was Aristotelian: plot flows out of the character, a flaw in the character, or something the character wants and can’t get. Things have to be causally related, etc. How do you think about plot in relation to character? Are you looking for the seed of the plot in your characters?

LM: Yes, always. The way that I construct my books begins with place and then people and then problems. I first have to imagine a place that I know well enough to set a book there. And out of that place comes a particular set of issues that the people in the place might be contending with. Then I try to get to know the people via lots and lots of character sketches, writing their backstory, writing their youth even if the action isn’t set in the moment of their youth, writing scenes from their present, and what they’re contending with now. Through that, I determine the central problem that the characters have to solve. So character and place always come before plot, but for me there’s no book until their problem is introduced. For my fifth book, I knew I wanted to set a novel in the Adirondacks but for a while I was trying to set a much different novel there, and it just wasn’t working. And so I scrapped that novel but kept the place and developed a different set of characters and a different problem, which became The God of the Woods.

ECE: There are many things about TGOTW that dazzled me but the way the POVs constructed the plot, in some ways were the plot, was the biggest one. It almost seemed like a relay race where the characters were passing the baton off to each other. How did you figure out which chapters of TGOTW would be in which characters’ POV?

LM: I think of TGOTW as a kind of panopticon where everybody is looking out at each other and can only see certain angles. There was the technical thing where certain characters couldn’t tell certain parts of the story without removing all suspense because certain characters harbor a secret that the reader cannot know too early. So whenever I got to a part in a character’s POV where suddenly if they continued telling the story they’d tell too much, I’d just jump into another character’s POV and let them tell the story with information missing because they didn’t know it. So there was no real science or math to it, I just sort of hopped around but my only guide was this character cannot tell this moment in the story because they would be telling too much.

ECE: How did you know what was “too much”? Are you trying to have the characters always know more than the reader or the reader always knowing more than the characters?

LM: Both, in a way. The reader is privy to multiple POVs whereas each character is only privy to their own point of view. But a lot of the individual characters contain one secret, a separate secret that even the reader doesn’t know. I thought that this would be a one disappearance book when I first started it – I thought only Barbara would disappear – but as I started to do more sketch work around her and her family and to discover the reason why her family is so cold to her besides just being sort of assholes, it occurred to me that maybe there was a separate tragedy in their past that turned them, at least partially, into the way they are today. Suddenly I had two disappearances on my hands to solve and multiple secrets for different characters to keep.

ECE: I offered paid subscribers to Frump Feelings the opportunity to ask you a question (thanks so much to all the subscribers that compensate me for this labor!), so this one comes from supporter Kathleen Donahoe: “When you are writing a mystery, how much is revealed to you in the draft (vs planned in outline?) like...10%? 90%?”

LM: Nothing is planned, all is revealed as I write. In order to think OK I have a novel on my hands I must know those three things at the start – people place problem. But once I know those things I don’t know the answer to the mystery myself and I have to just write forward and fail a million times. To readers, whatever theories you came up with along the way about the whereabouts of these two children in TGOTW I also entertained and tinkered with for a while and ultimately dismissed either because of plausibility or because it wasn’t what I thought the characters themselves would be likely to do or if it just wasn’t within my emotional wheelhouse to write. I went down many many roads and came to the answers I came to sort of by trial and error.

ECE: I am trying to write a novel now, the one I was working on at Yaddo, and I think I know the answer to the mystery and that is part of the problem.

LM: You might surprise yourself too. If you think you know the answer to the mystery, see if you can come up with a revelation that is a mislead even for you. Write towards the place you think you’re writing towards but be open to surprises even for yourself. And I find that what that does for readers is they too will be misled. If you can pull the rug from both of you, that’s helpful.

ECE: I want to move into a place that may be hard to talk about but that I also know as your friend is important to you. Your second novel is called Heft and the first line of its marketing copy is “Former academic Arthur Opp weighs 550 pounds and hasn't left his rambling Brooklyn home in a decade.” Opp describes himself as “colossally fat,’’ and says "I feel sort of encased in something, as if I were a cello or an expensive gun.” Talk to me about what drew you to write a superfat character and how you handled his fatness in the novel.

LM: Oh man, I'm simultaneously relieved and terrified to talk about this. It's something I've been thinking about for a very long time, though, so: let's do it. When I think about what drew me to Arthur Opp, I think about the version of me that first conceived of him, and all the versions of me that came before. There's the kid version of me--fatter and taller than the rest of any class I was in. The middle-school version of me who signed up for Weight Watchers in seventh grade. The teenage version of me who came home every day after school and compulsively, furtively ate in solitude until I felt ill. When at last I confided in someone about this secret habit of mine, they told me to go to Overeaters Anonymous. I tried it out; it helped until it didn't. I was the youngest person there by a decade, or more, and I was too shy to ask for a sponsor.

I left my home in suburban Massachusetts at 18 and went to college in New York, where, for the first time, I discovered how to walk for miles and miles a day, and also how to stop eating. I lost so much weight that I frightened my family. At the insistence of my mother, I saw a nutritionist who told me--I can still hear her saying it, the tone of her voice--"a can of soup is not dinner." I felt scolded. I never went back.

When I began Heft in 2008, I was twenty-five years old and, in theory, recovered: I was neither bingeing nor restricting. In practice, though, I was certainly not healed. There's a term that's used a lot in AA (the rest of my family's twelve-step program of choice): “white-knuckling it.” It's when you're not actively using alcohol, but you're also not working the steps, not doing the emotional work that accompanies abstinence from your addiction. The version of me that began Heft was white-knuckling my way through life.

I think I was drawn to writing Arthur because he allowed me to explore many of the thoughts and compulsions and emotions around food and eating that had been a part of me since young childhood--but making him physically different from me allowed me to do so in a way that felt "safe.” What this really meant was: I didn't want anyone to confuse me with him. I wasn't brave enough to write someone closer to me. I regret this today.

ECE: I have a lot of love and compassion in my heart for those past versions of you (I too was a teen who went to Weight Watchers) including the one who wrote Heft and was still actively struggling with disordered eating and weight shame. Heft was released in the year of our lord 2012, a very different time in its thinking about body size and weight stigma. What was the process of releasing the book like and what would you do differently now?

LM: I loved Arthur Opp--still love him--but I also objectified him, made him a vehicle for all of the baggage I've ever had about food and weight and eating. In Heft, I obsessed about Arthur's weight, Arthur's eating, so that I wouldn't obsess about my own. He was a therapeutic intervention for me. He was also a metaphor, or an allegory, a site for processing my own pathologies, and so--purely technically--he now feels to me a little one-dimensional. There are a lot of things I'd change about Arthur, if I were writing him today: for example, he was very neutered in his sexuality, almost childlike. He spent long paragraphs describing his body in a way that now feels more reflective of my own disordered thinking at the time than of his. I guess if I were writing Heft today, I'd be less afraid to bring the protagonist closer to my own physicality, to run the risk of readers conflating the two of us. In general, I'd be braver about exploring the parts of my own life and my own background that, at twenty-five, still felt like very dark secrets to me--too shameful to reveal. I'm in my forties now, and, I think, much braver. So let me take this opportunity to say, to any readers who felt hurt by the language I used when describing Arthur: I'm sorry. And to Arthur Opp himself, who maybe deserved a different author: I'm sorry to you, too.

ECE: That’s really meaningful to me, Liz. I think we all deserve the space and grace to keep changing and growing and unlearning diet culture and fatphobia; the trouble arises when we refuse to see that we are replicating the harm that was once done to us by the world. And how could we not play out our body stuff on our characters! That is what we were given, and it’s deeply human, I think, and deeply sensible as a writer, to grapple with the material on the page that we are grappling with in our lives. You’re breaking a cycle here by saying this out loud, which is precisely what many writers who use fat fictional characters to play out their stuff will not do.

Further, I felt that the character of Barbara in The God of the Woods, who struggles with binge eating, was painted with a really kind and nuanced brush, showing that it wasn’t Barbara or her body who was at fault but rather the social milieu and emotional repression of her family that leaves Barbara emotionally and physically hungry. How did you approach writing Barbara’s relationship with food?

LM: You know it’s funny, with Barbara I did not think of her as a binge eater, I thought of her as a healthy eater and someone who likes food and enjoys it and I think of her mother, Alice, as the one with a very disordered view of what is “normal” in terms of eating such that when she sees her daughter eating almost anything it’s a problem for her. I think of Barbara as someone who is quite at home in her body and is comfortable in her body and moves her body and enjoys her body. At one point she says “I like camp better because I’m always hungry at home.” Barbara’s friend Tracy is the character who I think has a lot of hangups, and Tracy is probably the character I most directly relate to both in terms of my own physicality as a kid, someone who was fatter and taller than most of my peers and somebody who had certain compulsions when it came to eating. But what I will say is that one of the things I cut and was sad to cut – and I don’t think I’ve said this to anyone else but I will say it here! – is that Tracy used to have a flash forward into her adulthood and there were moments of real love and acceptance for her larger body as an adult. I couldn’t justify it from a story perspective and I had to lose it, but I’ve always thought of Tracy as having some peace with her body and her eating in the future.

ECE: Last question: what do you do now, in your forties, that is body joyful? Are you a swimming lady or a bath bomb lady or a cooking lady? What is up?

LM: I stretch, I’m super into flexibility these days and I’ve never been flexible, I’ve always had really tight muscles every place and I LOVE it, I’ve become very pro-stretching and I have made quantifiable progress in terms of how far I can stretch. Also it is relaxing and just feels really good.

Toppings

• I’ve been reading Wintering: The Power of Rest & Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May. This past year took me dangerously close to burnout and with so much violence and fear in the air at the moment, this book, while at times I wanted more from it, has been a balm. I also read the bizarro gorgeous novel The Princess of 72nd Street by Elaine Kraf on the recommendation of

  Naomi Kanakia
  . I’m trying to read novels published only before the year 2000 right now, sorry my 2025 buddies, I’ll get back to new fiction soon.

• I’ve been listening to the audiobook of April May June July by Alison Hart (Kristen Sieh is one of the best narrators around IMHO!) as I collage scraps of paper onto other scraps of paper. Life giving.

• I’ve been supporting Vamos Juntos, a Latine grassroots org in Philly where I live that works on “resisting deportations, educating immigrants about their rights, developing a powerful and intergenerational base, and building community wisdom and leadership.”

• I joined the Freelance Solidarity Project at the National Writers Union and encourage you to do the same if you are a freelance media worker or book author. FSP works on the things we need to survive and thrive — payment, kill fees, contracts, healthcare, and more. Attending their intro call and then paying my dues was honestly the first thing that’s made me feel hopeful about this industry in years.

That’s all for now, love,
Emma

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