Eating Disorders: "Eight Bites" by Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado’s extraordinary short story collection Her Body and Other Parties frequently features the supernatural to convey the perils of being a woman in today’s world, perils as powerful and insurmountable as those that haunt horror fiction and films.

The story “Eight Bites” addresses one such danger, the toxic messages women internalize about body image, which contribute to, if not engender, the various pathological conditions described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychological Disorders, Fifth Edition. While it is difficult to say whether the protagonist of “Eight Bites” has Binge Eating Disorder or Body Dysmorphic Disorder, her relationship to food and eating is unhealthy to such a degree that she undergoes bariatric surgery, with no indication whatsoever that this procedure is medically necessary.

The Toilet of Venus

Source: Peter Paul Rubens/Wikimedia Commons

The story begins as the narrator slowly loses consciousness from anesthesia and flashes back to her motives for the surgery. She recalls that her mother, a slim woman, had limited herself to eight bites of food at each meal in order to keep her slender figure. Whenever the narrator attempted such discipline, the result was binge eating. She hates her body; she hates herself.

She reminisces, "I was tired of flat, unforgiving dressing room lights; I was tired of looking into the mirror and grabbing the things that I hated and lifting them, clawing deep, and then letting them drop and everything aching."

The narrator begins to think about having the surgery when she notices that her sisters, also big women, have suddenly grown slender. She wonders, “what disease was sawing off this branch of the family tree,” only to find that they have all had bariatric surgery.

While her sisters don’t have the kind of wasting disease the author fears, they are indeed ill—mentally ill—in a way that is quantitatively, but not qualitatively, different from the unhealthy attitudes towards bodies and eating shared by far too many women. They rave about the results of the surgery, and the narrator decides to follow their example, “I could not make eight bites work for my body, so I would make my body work for eight bites.”

The avaricious female surgeon who performs the procedure represents an exteriorized version of the self-hatred experienced by the subjects themselves. During the operation, she discusses her vacation plans for the following year, the implication being that a sufficient number of these surgeries will fund her getaways.

When the narrator, still conscious, begins to speak, the surgeon quips in return, “Don’t make me cut out your tongue.” This seemingly gratuitous bit of nastiness invokes the silencing of women in a patriarchal society, while the maiming of an unnecessary procedure invokes more bodily forms of assault. Bariatric surgery is not a godsend to help women, but a vicious means of preying on their insecurities.

Surgical instruments

Source: آرمین/Wikimedia Commons

Nor does this surgery bring happiness or a solution to any of the problems that prompt it. The sisters demonstrate that the surgery might prevent them from eating, but it has not relieved them of the burden of their obsession with food. One sister accompanies the narrator on her “last supper” before the surgery, asking her to describe her meal so that she can enjoy it vicariously.

Nevertheless, the narrator falls for her sisters’ positive spin, expecting that having the surgery will change her life for the better. She is disappointed. The decision alienates her even further from her daughter, Cal, who disapproves of her mother “getting half of one of her most important organs cut away for no reason.”

Cal points to the real problem, “Mom, I just don’t understand why you can't be happy with yourself.” At the end of the story, years later, the narrator is expecting her daughter and grandchild for their annual visit, hardly a sign of family intimacy. And the narrator is still alone. All the surgery has changed is her body, but what really needed changing was her mind.

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The narrator’s self-inflicted violence finds its most forceful and poignant expression in the story’s supernatural element, the ghost that haunts her post-surgery. She hears strange noises in the house and discovers this phantom in the basement:

I kneel down next to it. It is a body with nothing it needs, no stomach or bones or mouth. Just soft indents. I crouch down and stroke its shoulder, or what I think is its shoulder . . . It turns and looks at me. It has no eyes, but still, it looks at me. She looks at me. She is awful but honest. She is grotesque, but she is real.

The ghost, with its soft body and interrogating vision, is the fat that the narrator has gotten rid of. It haunts her, just as the residue of her self-hatred and the disappointing effects of her surgery haunt her. And it reproaches her for not having found a way to love herself. The narrator responds by telling the entity she is unwanted and then brutally beating her. After that, the narrator hears her occasionally but does not encounter her face to face.

Until the day she dies. The ghost will then come for her,

Arms will lift me from my bed—her arms. They will be mother-soft, like dough and moss. I will recognize the smell. I will flood with grief and shame. I will look where her eyes would be. I will open my mouth to ask but then realize the question has answered itself: by loving me when I did not love her, by being abandoned by me, she has become immortal . . . She will touch my cheek like I once did Cal’s, so long ago, and there will be no accusation in it . . . I will curl into her body, which was my body once, but I was a poor caretaker, and she was removed from my charge.

Floral Female (the Ghost)

Source: Anonymous/Public Domain Vectors

This impressionistic and inscrutable description conveys one essence of immortality—that which survives and comprises the eternal is love, an idea common to Judeo-Christian beliefs.

Life is a gift, and life includes our mortal bodies, with their capacity for pleasure. The narrator and countless women eschew this capacity, denying aspects of their vitality, aspects of their being. By rejecting herself and her birthright, the narrator has rejected love, the healthy love of self incarnated by the ghost. The story ends with an apology to the ghost, which is also an apology to herself for rejecting life’s plenitude:

I’m sorry,” I will whisper into her as she walks me toward the front door. I’m sorry, I will repeat. “I didn’t know.”