[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: City Song]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I'm really grateful you're here. On today's show we'll have a special live in-studio performance from jazz pianist Aaron Diehl. I'll speak with food writer Jake Cohen about Hanukkah holiday cooking. If you have questions, get ready to call in, and we'll hear from Rachel Bloom. Her one-woman musical comedy Death, Let Me Do My Show is now at The Orpheum Theater in the East Village. That's the plan. Let's get this started with the new documentary.

[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson]

In February 2016, Aubrey Gordon made the bold decision to post on the online platform Medium a letter she'd written to a friend. The post was titled ''A request from your fat friend, what I need when we talk about bodies.'' Here's how it began. ''I need you to listen closely. I need you to believe me when I tell you what happens. I need you to say the word fat about me because I am. I'm a size 26. Fat enough that some stores for fat people don't carry my size. Fat enough that some doctors will refuse to see me. Fat enough that getting on an airplane makes my blood run cold because they might kick me off without a refund for my ticket or they may charge me double.

Then I'll have explained to my friends my job my family why I can't make it on that trip. Every discussion about bodies whether in the media or amongst friends is about how to avoid the horrible fate of looking like me. I need you to hear that this all hurts and happens all the time.'' The post went viral and Aubrey began writing a blog anonymously under the name Your Fat Friend. She chronicled the daily indignities and discrimination she faced as a fat person.

Many people related. Many felt seen and heard. Others were angry with Aubrey and her perspective and it led to her losing anonymity and getting doxxed but also to a successful career as a writer and podcast host. Director Jeanie Finlay followed Aubrey and her career for six years bringing a camera crew into her daily life. It's now a film titled Your Fat Friend. It's in select New York theaters today, and I'm joined now by director Jeanie Finlay. Hi, Jeanie.

Jeanie Finlay: Hi.

Alison Stewart: Nice to meet you.

Jeanie Finlay: So nice to meet you.

Alison Stewart: And author and Maintenance Phase's host Aubrey Gordon. Aubrey, welcome back to the show.

Aubrey Gordon: Thank you so much. It's great to be back.

Alison Stewart: Jeanie, how did you first hear about Your Fat Friend?

Jeanie Finlay: I read that piece that you just read a sample from. I'm one of the 30,000 people that read it in the first week. I'd been making a film about fatness and I knew I wanted to meet the anonymous person who'd written that post because it spoke to me on a molecular level.

Alison Stewart: Which leads to the question that anonymous person, since she was anonymous, how did you learn who she was?

Jeanie Finlay: Um, I think I sent her a message through Medium and we just started talking, and obviously, you may hear from my accent I'm not American. I live in Nottingham in the UK and used a trip to Los Angeles. I was working on Game of Thrones. I used it as an opportunity to go over to Portland and to meet with Aubrey. Originally, I would asked her to write the voiceover for an essay film I was making about fatness. Then when I met Aubrey and I spent some time with her family, I knew that I'd found the person that I wanted to be the focus of my film.

Alison Stewart: Aubrey, what questions did you have for Jeanie before agreeing to this documentary? Did you go to your inbox someone says "Hey, let me come into your life? I'm bringing camera people too. I'm going to put a microphone on you." What questions did you have?

Aubrey Gordon: Yes, I know you're trying to hide but how about we film you trying to hide? [laughs] It's counterintuitive for sure. I don't even know that I would have had questions formulated in my brain. I think I just had this expectation of cartoon villain, of a reality show producer or something. I met Jeanie, and she is so not that. I think the thing that answered most of my unformed questions was just seeing her other work, which was done so tenderly and so thoughtfully and so collaboratively with the folks that she's filming that that just felt like, relationally, a safe place to be so that I could trust a process. Then whatever came out of that process came out of that process.

Alison Stewart: What has it been like for you, Aubrey, to look back on Aubrey of yesteryear?

[laughter]

I think about you as a by-list in a podcast and I've read your work but it was really fascinating to see you before all that. What did you see in that young woman?

Aubrey Gordon: It's really interesting because it's all-- Happened in fits and starts so I don't feel particularly different, but I noticed that I act differently. I do notice that for sure. I spent years and years as a community organizer working in left-leaning spaces and not speaking up particularly much when people said we need to pursue this soda tax for example, because it will be the end of the ''obesity epidemic' and not going ''Hey, I'm sitting right here and I'm not fat because of soda'' What? It would be great to have a conversation about that but I wasn't in a place of initiating those conversations. Now, boy oh boy, that's literally all I do. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Jeanie, what was your timeline for making a documentary? When did you start and when did you wrap?

Jeanie Finlay: Making an observational documentary film can take a long time. Some take longer than others. This one had the added complication of I made two other feature films. Your Fat Friend's my ninth finished feature. I was making sequels about Freddie McConnell a British trans guy who got pregnant and had a baby. I also made Game of Thrones the Last Watch. I was embedded on the final season. I started making Your Fat Friend. Started, completed those two other films, had a global pandemic, and then managed to finish Your Fat Friend and premiere at Tribeca earlier this year.

Initially, it's frustrating when things take a longer time, but in retrospect, it worked out amazingly because who knew that Aubrey was going to blow up. Initially, the storyline in the film was going to be is this anonymous person writing about their feelings and politics and how the personal is political? Which is the thing that really brought me in. How does this anonymous person come out into the world?

Then instead, we've got this whole, I'm going to use the journey words. We've got this whole journey. Aubrey goes from being anonymous to finding an audience of millions. The thing that's really fascinating for me is how does Aubrey's family come to terms with that. How does that change their very personal conversations around fatness. That only happens because we had six years of time elapsed so yes, it's been a funny old journey.

Alison Stewart: The name of the film is your fat friend. It's in select theaters today. My guests are its director Jeanie Finlay and its subject Aubrey Gordon. The documentary begins with you, Aubrey, reading from one of your essays where you just tell people to just say fat. Basically, to use it as an adjective. Without judgment, but a lot of people have trouble using that word. What would you say to someone who doesn't like to use the word?

Aubrey Gordon: I would say you don't have to use it for yourself. That's totally fine. Everybody gets to decide how their own bodies are described. The way that I describe mine is fat. In part because words like overweight and obese come from the BMI, which is like a famously racist tool that is not very good at its job of predicting negative health outcomes. In part because words like fluffy and curvy are better descriptions of other things like my dog than they are of me. I'm not a particularly fluffy person.

My dog definitely is, but most of all because I think the euphemisms that folks choose to name fat or plus-sized bodies are much more in service of their own comfort than for the respect and dignity of the person that they're talking to. We're not actually having conversations about, "How would you like me to refer to your body? What are the words that you use?" Instead, folks are just assuming that fat is the worst word that you can use because they think being fat is a pretty bad thing to be. That's what I feel I'm pushing back against, is the idea that being fat is a bad thing to be. It's the only way I've ever been.

Alison Stewart: Jeanie, what is your relationship with the word fat?

Jeanie Finlay: I think that the word fat is probably the reason why I started making this film. I started seeing the word fat being used a lot on Instagram in a way that I'd only ever seen it used in fat political spaces from activism. This was around this six-year ago mark, and it just made me think "Ooh, I'm having a lot of feelings about this. I'm a fat lady, but I'm a small fat lady." I'm saying small fat because there are privileges that come with being on the smaller end of the scale. As you get bigger, the bias you may experience is much bigger. I feel comfortable now describing my fat body as fat because it is. I see it as the same way as saying, I'm a Redhead, I'm white, I'm British. It just is.

I like the idea that it's a neutral word because as Aubrey says in the film, I don't feel unlovable or any of the negative things that are associated with fat. It was a word that I'd heard a lot as a chubby kid growing up to be absolutely synonymous with being unlovable or being like-- It's not a cool thing. It was never seen as a cool thing. What if it just is a neutral thing? It's the number one reason that kids are bullied, and it feels like something's got to shift. It's a messy, complicated, and loving experience with that word, I think.

Alison Stewart: Jeanie, in the film, there are shots in this film where you really focus on the body. There are slow pans, up and down bodies, there's a nude shot, there's shots of Aubrey swimming. What did you want to achieve with these beauty shots?

Jeanie Finlay: I wanted to light Aubrey's body with care and beautiful attention and lavish a luxurious gaze on it. I think that when you start making documentaries, it's very often people say, "Ooh, don't shoot me there, put the camera higher." There's a lot of attention on the idea of flattering. What if you uncouple your idea from fat being a negative thing? That basically means that the camera can go anywhere. Aubrey is the very first person that I've ever filmed who said, "You can put the camera wherever you want." I wanted to show her body in all of its magnificence and to allow her to take up space on screen. Putting the camera close, taking my time.

This is also a film about the Pacific Northwest, Aubrey is from Portland. We filmed Aubrey in water because she was a teenage athlete, a lane swimmer. When we were filming her in the swimming pool, she was laying back on the water and I thought, "Oh, my God, Aubrey looks like Mount Hood. She looks like a mountain range in the best possible way. Let's find a hot spring and shoot her out in nature." My shoots are very organic in a way. They allow space and time to really reflect on like, what are we looking at here? What are we seeing? Can I lean into that and really emphasize that? That's the beauty of making an independent documentary.

You may not know what the end of the film is when you start making it. I have time to really lean into that.

Alison Stewart: Aubrey, what was it like to see so much of yourself?

Aubrey Gordon: I think there are times when it seems like somebody else. Do you know what I mean? I don't know a lot of people who feel completely at ease seeing their bodies on a giant screen. I think the thing that felt so affirming and radical about it to me was that the vast majority of footage that we see of fat people's bodies is filmed from the head down middling around in public under a story about how we have to be rid of fat people as soon as we can.

It felt so incredibly powerful to have a visual that ran counter to that, that was rather than being that leering public ogling of the purported repulsiveness of fat bodies, to have a camera that felt curious and intimate and supportive and warm. All of that stuff is a total change of pace for me, both in terms of being filmed or photographed, but mostly just in terms of seeing it anywhere.

Alison Stewart: I worked in TV News, and there used to be B-roll that said, fat no faces.

Aubrey Gordon: Oh, buddy.

Alison Stewart: That was literally on the cover of-- exactly.

Aubrey Gordon: [laughs] You know better than I then. Yikes on bikes.

Alison Stewart: Capital R Rude. Why are people so rude? That's something that you get into, even during the period when you're anonymous. People just would send you just the worst comments, out of line. I don't know what the right words are to talk about what people were writing about you. Obviously, you think about this a lot. Why do people take time out of their day to send this to other people?

Aubrey Gordon: This is the $64,000 question. [laughs] It remains a mystery to me, but I think it has something to do with, we have this really pervasive cultural narrative that tells us that fat people have gotten fat because we have neglected our bodies and we have failed in some way and thin people are thin because they have succeeded and put in work. Even though 100% of us know fat people who have dieted until the end of time and are still fat people, and 100% of us know and are mildly irritated by a thin person who, "eats whatever they want and never gains weight" this is a thing that we know to be true, and yet that cultural narrative of superiority and hierarchy really persists.

I think that for folks who have been in dogged pursuit of thinness for a very long time, hearing someone say, "Wait a minute, I might just be fat and that might be the end of it," feels like they might have been spending a lot of time on something that they didn't necessarily need to be spending a lot of time on. They might have been on a mission that was never really going to succeed.

The lion's share of diets not only don't end in weight loss, they end in weight gain for most people who engage in dieting. Hearing that is really hard for people when they've dedicated so much time and energy and money and space in their lives to those things. I think it has something to do with that. Man, there's more there. We could spend a lot of time with a lot of therapists and a lot of troll commentaries and gain a lot of ground in our understanding there. I think it's linked to that idea that thinness is an accomplishment and fatness is a failure. When someone challenges that idea, it challenges folks' self-image.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing the film, Your Fat Friend with its director, Jeanie Finlay, and its subject, Aubrey Gordon. We'll talk a little bit more about the film. We'll hear a clip from Aubrey's mom. Her parents are in the film quite a bit and we'll discuss Ozempik after the break.

[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson]

This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guests this hour, the director of the film, Your Fat Friend, which is in Select Theater today, and its subject, Aubrey Gordon.

The film follows Aubrey from anonymity, from the time she wrote a blog post about being fat in the United States to her rise to stardom as an author and a podcast host, and generally, a person that people come to have smart conversations about these issues. Aubrey, we really get up in your family's business in this film. Jeanie gets up in your family's business.

Aubrey Gordon: Yes, correct.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Your parents are in this film a lot. What did you learn about your parents from watching this film?

Aubrey Gordon: That's a great question. I will just say coming off of the question about what was it like to be filmed in this very intimate way, I will say a welcome break from filming hard conversations with my own family members. It's a tough place to be. I think I learned a ton about my parents from this process and from my dad's partner, Zach, as well. I think Jeanie was able to get things out of my parents that I could not as their kid and that just wouldn't come up because man, oh, man, we all know how hard those family conversations are.

I think some of the most moving moments in the film are also some of the most moving moments in my life, which is both of my parents, both figuring out the scope and scale of the work that I do and what it could and can be, and doing some reflecting on what their attitudes are toward bodies and toward mine and what else they could have done and what they did right and what they did wrong and all that and all that stuff.

I don't know a single person fat or thin who doesn't have some version of that conversation that they want to have with their parents. It's really incredible to watch that play out on screen. The main thing that I feel like I learned once again is the incredible generosity of spirit that both of my parents have, particularly my mom. It's really wonderful.

Alison Stewart: At one point in the film, Aubrey's mom comes to Jeanie and confesses how she's starting to really feel bad and have a different understanding of how she handled Aubrey's weight over the course of her childhood. Let's hear a little bit of one of those moments from the film Your Fat Friend. This is Aubrey's mom talking to you while she's painting

Pam: Thinking about Aubrey being 13, 14 when she agreed to go with me to Weight Watchers, that her thing, her failed attempts, and wondering what prompted me to do that. Since you asked that wonderful question, did you expect anything to change? No, actually. What the hell was I doing it for? It was my responsibility. Her size was my responsibility very clearly. That was the message from my husband. I took action, but I didn't really believe in it. I went through motions. What I wish I had said then was bring Aubrey just into the discussion because she took away something that I didn't intend. Of course, she did.

Alison Stewart: Jeanie, what did you observe Aubrey's mom confronting, and her father as well, over the course of your time with them?

Jeanie Finlay: I find it very moving to hear Pam's words again. Pam was someone who was never going to be in the film. She initially just was like, "No, I don't want to be in the film. I don't want to be filmed." Because the film took so long, she agreed. She trusted me. We got to know each other. It was really fascinating that sometimes a stranger can ask the obvious questions, the different questions. The questions that are never verbalized. I feel like my job is sometimes to ask an uncomfortable question in a polite way and wait.

Seeing Pam really think about the impact of things that had gone on when Aubrey was a teenager was incredibly moving. The generosity of Pam to be able to even grapple with that. There are lot of people, particular boomers, who it's not in their wheelhouse. Even the ability to look at this and say, "You know what, maybe I didn't quite get it right." Pam has that in absolute abundance. She really was generous to the process.

I'm a parent. My daughter's 19 and we're all just trying to do the best we can. That's the thing that I really took from the film. You can do the best that you can and sometimes it's not the best for the situation, but it doesn't mean that you don't really, really, really love someone. Those are the messy family conversations that films can have. The films that I make definitely have, this is where they sort of thrive and come alive.

Alison Stewart: Aubrey, we haven't gotten to talk to you since the rise of Ozempic and other weight loss drugs, which have really changed the conversation about weight and dieting, at least for the people who couldn't afford it or get their hands on it. How are you processing this information? What are some of the questions you think people should be asking that maybe they aren't asking or the topic of the discussion around Ozempic?

Aubrey Gordon: I think it's been really fascinating to watch less than the discussion around the function of the drugs, but more of the cultural discourse that has grown up around the conversation around Ozempic. The thing that feels extraordinarily missing to me is there has been this incredible tidal wave of think pieces from people who are mostly not fat and have not been fat saying, "This is going to change how we think about fatness and fat people. We're all going to figure it out that it's not fat people's fault, that they just need medication in order to be thin." To me, what that underscores is a couple of things. One, the priority is still on making fat people thin.

It's still not on accepting people as they come, accepting their bodies as they are. It's not your fault, but only insofar as you then take a drug to become thin. That's what makes it okay, that it's not your fault, is that you're not going to be fat forever is one of the underlying cultural beliefs that we're laying bare in this conversation. The other is we're talking about a drug that's designed for diabetic people. We are not talking to diabetic people. We are talking about a drug that is being used for major weight loss.

We are not talking to fat people about what diabetic people and separately fat people need in this moment that feels like a major and sometimes almost willful oversight to go, "This diabetes medication is now in shortage." Let's not talk to the people who are being most impacted by that shortage feels like a major oversight in our discourse." That's all getting drowned out by the idea that there is some version of a magic pill, is how this is all getting processed for folks, which is the thing that folks have been sold a lot, a lot, a lot of times in the past.

This is the one that seems closest to an actual magic pill. People are getting swept up in that enthusiasm and not really thinking about the impacts of their words and that discourse when they're expressing that enthusiasm

Alison Stewart: On the film's website for Your Fat Friend, there's information about the size of the theater seats at theaters where the film will be screening, whether it's arms or stationary or movable. Jeanie, why is this an important part of this conversation?

Jeanie Finlay: For us, seat size is an access issue and we want theaters to embrace and think about this. I want people to take a 180. Rather than thinking, "Oh my goodness, my body is too big to fit in this seat, is to think maybe the seat's too small and theater should make them bigger," and to think about the needs of all audiences coming in. I also think if you know how big the seats are, you can make a choice about whether you want to go to the theater, who you're going to go with, where you're going to sit because some seats are bigger than others. You can make a choice about which theater.

We're asking each and every venue that plays our film to list this information and to add it permanently to their access information on their website. We want this to be a long tail of the film.

Aubrey Gordon: I should say--

Alison Stewart: Sorry.

Aubrey Gordon: It isn't just a matter of comfort for fat people. It can also be a matter of health and access kind of stuff. I can't tell you the number of plays that I have been to and come away with bruises for days on my side or on my thighs or what have you-- This stuff is not just a matter of feeling a little bit better. It's a matter of knowing that you can sit in a chair and it'll hold you. It's a matter of knowing that you'll fit in the seat and you won't make the person next to you uncomfortable, who will then in turn make you uncomfortable. It's a pretty far-reaching really wonderful thing that Jeanie has come up with and I'm so stoked about it.

Alison Stewart: I'm going to ask you to put on your activist hat. As someone who's worked in activist spaces and you know what gets changed and what begets change and how progress can be made, what's one thing that could change right now that would make life better for fat people?

Aubrey Gordon: Oh, we could ban discrimination on the basis of body size. That's a thing that the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance is working on now. New York is the largest municipality in the country to pass a ban on size discrimination. That's a huge deal and it happened like six months ago. In 48 US states, it is perfectly legal to deny someone a job or a promotion just because you think they're too fat. That is a thing that I think flies in the face of my values. I think it flies in the face of a lot of our values. It's time I think for policy to catch up to where we feel like it should be.

Alison Stewart: The name of the film is Your Fat Friend is in select theaters today. My guests have been at subject Aubrey Gordon, who honestly if your laugh could be my ringtone.

Aubrey Gordon: [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Come on now.

Aubrey Gordon: Thanks, buddy. I appreciate it.

Alison Stewart: Jeanie Finlay, its director. Thank you so much for the time today.

Aubrey Gordon: Thank you again. It's great to talk to you.

Alison Stewart: Thanks so much.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.