Ibi Kaslik is a writer, journalist, and teacher. She graduated with her master’s degree in Creative Writing from Concordia University and her short stories and articles have appeared in literary magazines such as Matrix and Geist. Skinny is her debut novel (Harper Collins Canada, May 2004). She dreams of one day owning her very own banjo. Nathaniel G. Moore interviewed her in winter 2004.

TDR: Where did the concept for Skinny come from?

I wrote the first versions of Skinny in a Creative Writing novella class and it eventually became my thesis project.  It is indeed cut from myself.  As a topic that I experienced directly in my personal life and social group, I never saw eating disorders represented in media discourse in the way it played itself out in life. Somehow Kate Moss, the Karen Carpenter story, and After School Specials never cut it for me.  Eating disorders and distorted body issues seemed, to me at least, to be about something more significant than the media influence on young women, and had less to do with the formulaic pop psychology pursuit of blaming it on overbearing parents.  In one sense yes, anorexics are products of their upbringing: in Skinny the anorexic character, Giselle, is a twenty-two-year-old med student, who grapples with her dead father's rejection and the high standards her immigrant parents have set for her. Yet many people coming from ambitious and over-achieving families are not anorexic. 

One of my aims with Skinny was to demystify clichés about anorexia, one of them being that anorexics are these vestal virgins who fear sexuality. Growing up, having an eating disorder was almost a common rite of passage, like experimentation with drugs and alcohol.  In a society so obsessed with food and youth consumption, kids, especially girls, are likely to succumb to one of the aforementioned modes of experimentation and for most people it’s a phase.  My interest was to follow a character, Giselle, who never outgrew the anorexic stage, and made rejecting food, and the values of abstinence and purity, a way of life.  I also wanted to glorify the notion of perfection implicit in anorexia that some theories about the disorder dismiss so rapidly, for at the heart of it is a sort of idealism and romanticism, the desire to arrest change, and resist the carnal world.  Evolutionary psychologists are now saying anorexia was a way for tribes to survive long periods of famine and nomadic life, and that women leaders starved themselves to enable their tribes to survive, so I don’t think I’m too far off on this tip of martyrdom. 

At the same time I wanted to juxtapose Giselle’s somber and cerebral approach to another view of the body as manifested in Holly, Giselle’s younger sister, the second narrator in Skinny.  Holly’s a junior-high athlete who pushes her body to physical extremes, but she does so in the glorification of her body’s capacity, not in its destruction.  I guess I always had two voices of women who pushed their bodies to extremes in my head and never really saw anything like that reflected in society. That, and I had just finished reading As I Lay Dying by Faulkner.  Good mentors and editors are also critical in shaping the mess of voices and ghosts in one's head.

TDR: With a seemingly dearth of amicable paths for certain publishers to get their books into giant stores without being compromised financially, are you at all extremely happy you have avoided a lot of the LPG pitfalls and frightening mess that a lot of small presses have to fight for to stay afloat?