VPLA 2024
Fat Girl Dancing

Title: Fat Girl Dancing

Author: Kris Kneen

Publisher: Text Publishing

Fat child, self-denying adolescent, hungry young woman. A body now burgeoning uncontrolled into middle age. Kris Kneen has borne the usual indignities: the clothes that won’t fasten, the mirror that affronts, the stranger whose gaze judges and dismisses.

This is the story of how Kris learned to look unblinkingly at their recalcitrant body, and ultimately found the courage to carry it to freedom.

Fat Girl Dancing is a frank, beautiful and triumphant ode to self-respect from one of Australia’s most original and acclaimed writers.

Photography by Sarah Walker

Judges’ report

In this triumphant memoir Kris Kneen asks, ‘What will it take for me to come to peace with my body?’ Otherness is a state with which we are all sadly familiar and this book, dealing with size and queerness, is a love-letter written to us all in our glorious non-perfection. Everyone should read Fat Girl Dancing and stand tall. As we’ve come to expect from Kneen, Fat Girl Dancing is original and experimental with form, startling in its sensual and poetic language and radical in its thesis. It is shockingly intimate and delightfully playful; it is rebellious and life-changing.

Extract

The villagers told me about the dugong that lived in the waters nearby. There had been two of them, a mated pair, but one of the young men speared the female and killed her. I was horrified. Why would he do that? The old man told me about how the youth were straying from traditional ways, itching to leave the villages and head to the capital of Port Vila. They didn’t listen to the elders anymore. They didn’t follow traditional ways. It was a familiar story. I had heard similar complaints back home.

Still, I felt sad for the dugong who died, and even sadder for her mate, who would be lonely forever. They mate for life.

The man told me to watch out for him. He sometimes threatened human men if they were swimming in noisy groups. He was powerful and could sweep up from behind and push men onto the rocks. Some of the local men had been injured but they didn’t want to hurt him. They understood his pain. The man told me the dugong, unlike the volcano, wasn’t a threat to women. Only if we saw him swimming in the bay, Anthony should watch his back.

We went swimming in the bay. The water was so clear that even at its deepest part you could see down to the sandy floor. We said hello to a group of Scandinavian tourists sunbaking and paddling in the shallows, me feeling self-conscious as always in my swimming costume, which was black with legs down to my knees. I slipped into the water quickly to hide myself and swam out into water as warm as blood. The sun settled on my skin. Anthony bobbed around me. This was a true holiday. This felt like the first time I had been able to relax in years.

The dugong was not there and then suddenly he was.

The Scandinavian backpackers all stood on the rocks and giggled and pointed and then I turned around and he was there. He was longer than I was tall and bigger across than the circumference of my own bulky body. Anthony nervously swam back a few strokes towards the shore. The dugong came closer to me and turned on his side. I reached out, nervous but fascinated. I touched his belly: soft and tight as a snake. My heart was beating too fast and I tried to calm it. I stroked his belly and he slowly drifted closer to me. I had never been this close to such a large wild animal before.

Anthony nervously called out to me to come a bit closer to the shore. I swam back a few feet and the dugong followed me. The tourists had reached for their cameras. I could hear the click of the shutters as they took photos of me swimming with the creature. I reached out to touch the top of the dugong’s head, and it was covered in barnacles. I quickly took my fingers away. You could cut yourself from touching his head—or his back, which looked like a floating rock crusted over with mussels and barnacles and oyster shells.

The dugong put his flippers on either side of my chest and gently moved away from the shore, dragging me along with him.

Anthony laughed. ‘He likes you.’

I turned around and grinned at him. ‘I think I’m basically his dugong bride.’

It was funny and wonderful and terrifying. I let the creature gentle me away from shore for a while, then lost my nerve and tried to turn towards the shore. He pushed back. His flippers felt like a firm hug. I giggled nervously. Anthony slapped the surface of the water behind me. The dugong let go and backed off, giving me a moment to stroke quietly towards the shore.

In a few seconds he had floated towards me, putting those flippers around me insistently, taking me out again. I caressed his chest. So soft and yet so powerful.

What if I let him take me? How far would we go?

I relaxed into this gentle cradling, the power in those flippers, the beautiful ugliness of the beast. He stretched out in the water beside me exactly like a lover would. I laughed when he pressed against my chest more firmly and wiggled his body, edging me further out to sea.

You might see him if you are lucky.

I considered myself lucky at that moment, but I was also a little afraid. Once more I pushed the creature away from my body cautiously; once more he let me go again. Anthony smacked the surface of the water again and he backed off, but as I made my way back towards the gentle incline of the rocks he followed me. When I hesitated, turning back towards him, he pulled me close again.

My body is buoyant. I have no fear of drowning. I tried to relax and let him take me further out into the perfect green of the ocean. For a moment, in his arms, I felt strangely safe.

‘I think you’d better come in now.’ Anthony smacked the water harder, and again the dugong backed away.

The desire of the dugong, the desire of the two aggressive men back on Efate then in the guest house on Tanna. My body was read differently in this island nation. Everything I knew about beauty could be thrown out, reassessed, picked apart and knitted back together in a new and strange way.

I bobbed gently back to the cliff face and climbed up it, grinning, knowing the creature had identified me as something like itself, a great blubbery thing of the ocean. For the first time I felt exactly the right size and shape.

About the author

Photo by Sean Gilligan

Kris Kneen is the award-winning author of memoir—Affection and The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen—and fiction: An Uncertain Grace, Steeplechase, Triptych, The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine, Wintering, as well as the Thomas Shapcott Award-winning poetry collection Eating My Grandmother. They have written and directed broadcast documentaries for SBS and ABC Television.