“Burst!” Review of Dietland, by Sarai Walker

Sarai Walker’s 2015 novel Dietlandis a rageful, thoughtful, and funny kick-in-the-nuts of the patriarchy, written with much artistry and awareness of feminist theory. (In her afterword, Walker calls out feminist philosopher Sandra Bartky—one of my grad school professors—as an influence.) This book was written before Trump’s presidential campaign and the reveal of his “grab ‘em by the pussy” philosophy, before the Harvey Weinstein scandal exploded and Tarana Burke’s decade-old hashtag was commissioned for wider use, before #Time’sUp, before Christine Blasey Ford’s charges of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh threw us all back again to the Anita Hill testimony against Clarence Thomas, before both Brittney Cooper and Rebecca Traister published their books about the rage of black women (Cooper’s Eloquent Rage) and of a broader, historical group of women (Traister’s Good and Mad), before Women’s Marches and pink hats and feminist women and men taking to the streets and others wakening to feminism. . . . Before all of that, this book came out, and then Marti Noxon adapted it for television—which is what got me to read it. Despite all those ‘befores,’ this is the perfect book for this moment. It follows Alicia “Plum” Kettle as she comes to terms with--and celebrates--who she is, rather than continue to yearn for the acceptance of a fat-shaming, misogynist culture that could never appreciate and love her. Walker also juxtaposes Plum’s story of internal, emotional work and her friends’ cultural projects against the violent anti-rape culture work of the vigilante group Jennifer, raising the question, what is the appropriate response to violent acts against women and a millennia long culture of violent misogyny?

Working as a ghost-writer for a teen beauty magazine, fronting for a skinny, caustic woman who won’t even let the very heavy Plum have space in the office, she receives a mysterious summons to the basement Beauty Closet run by Julia, who—we discover later—is actually working on an expose of the beauty industry, seeking to undermine it. She also is gifted with the book Dietlandby Verena Baptist, daughter of the late diet plan mogul whose Baptist Plan Plum used to be a devotee of. Verena destroys her mother’s empire and ideology and uses her fortune to run a feminist collective of women working to fight the patriarchy in a variety of non-violent ways. Among those Calliope House supports is the former teen TV star, Marlowe, who threw it all in to live her life looking the way she wants to look and wrote a book called Fuckability Theoryafter TV execs fired her for cutting her hair and gaining weight. To remind her of what she was told by a man in her last television meeting, she sports a tattoo that declares, “women don’t want to beyou, men don’t want to fuck you” (137). While going through Verena’s and Marlowe’s “New Baptist Plan” for her, Plum wrestles with whether to give up her planned gastric surgery and life of starving herself and start living on her own terms: “I was hungry for everything, for food and for life. It was odd to think that a pill could take that away, or that I had ever wanted it to” (213).

In contrast to the language and image-based cultural work done by the Baptist-sponsored feminist collective is the vigilante work of Jennifer, the anonymous group that kills rapists and other exploiters of women, and in dramatic fashion attempts to exact both accountability and revenge. To them, the “language” of violence is the only language that these habitually violent misogynists could possibly understand. While I stand actively on the non-violent side of this debate, I can’t deny emotionally pumping an inner fist at some of Jennifer’s actions. And, while I think Walker is also ultimately on the side of non-violence, she also deeply understands those who think differently. She makes the women behind Jennifer into compelling characters with tragic and completely understandable reasons for their actions. As the female Air Force captain who first flew bombing missions in Afghanistan and then the plane out of which the bodies of murdered rapists were dropped in the U.S. desert said, “This is a different war, not an official one, but who decides which wars are legitimate” (227)? Walker’s depictions of Plum, of Julia, of Soledad, of Leeta dramatically illustrate the ways that women in our culture must always wrestle with multiple identities and negotiate split selves: fat girls, immigrant girls, angry and grieving moms, adolescents unsure of how to be—all can be symbolized by the tension our lead character expresses between herself as Plum and herself as Alicia.

With this novel, Walker challenges women receptive to feminism to wrestle with our multiple selves, our desires, our fights with the Powers-that-Be and to decide on our best way to “Burst!” in the terms of the iconic Baptist Diet Plan ad. So, read this, think, enjoy, rage, be challenged. On her website, Walker says she’s working on her second novel, which will be “even more bonkers” than Dietland. I look forward to reading it.