First Book Club: Eloise Grills on big beautiful female theory

Each month we celebrate an Australian debut release of fiction or non-fiction in the Kill Your Darlings First Book Club. For July that debut is big beautiful female theory by Eloise Grills (Affirm Press)—part feminist manifesto, part comic book, in which the author turns her life, her body and her mind into art, confronting what it means to grow up in an increasingly unfathomable world. Ellen Cregan spoke to Eloise in an Instagram Live conversation earlier this month.  

Ellen Cregan: Have you got an elevator pitch for your book, for those who haven’t read it yet?

Eloise Grills: Oh gosh, elevator pitch, I actually never managed to have one of those—but I guess it’s an illustrated collection of essays, and they’re all memoir in some way, about existing in a fat body and what that means. So looking at it through a bunch of different prisms, like through pop culture and through society, and through my autobiography as well, and thinking about beauty culture and beauty standards, and the idea of writing memoir at all.

How did this book come to be published? As you said, there’s quite a lot of different essays in there that engage with a lot of different ideas. Did you always know you wanted it to be a book?

It started its life as an essay that I was writing in 2017, because I’ve always been interested in the body and wanted to write about that, but I had some trepidation about writing about my own relationship to my body—it was something that was always in my mind, but that I had never really addressed. So I went from there to writing the essay, which won the Lifted Brow Experimental Non-fiction Prize, and from there I started working on a book. At first I thought it might be a more straightforward memoir, but then I decided that I wanted it to be a collection of essays, and a collection of experimental essays—so some of them are prose poetry, some of them are illustrated, some of them are comics. I’m particularly drawn to comics, as a medium, so I definitely wanted to have quite a lot of that.

I’ve always been interested in the body and wanted to write about that, but I had some trepidation about writing about my own relationship to my body.

What comes first when you’re writing? Is it the words or the illustrations, or a single artwork?

I think often it’s the written part. I’ll have phrases and ideas going around in my head, I’ll have little notes that I’ll take on my phone or what have you, and then that will develop. I might write the ‘script’, which is often quite fragmented. And then I often go into a visual way of working, and then I might go back and forward between the two. I have a tendency to get quite bored, so I like to alternate, I like to spend a bit of time drawing and a bit of time writing.

Do you find between the two mediums that things develop at a different pace?

The writing takes longer, for me—particularly the research heavy stuff, that takes me a really long time, and I don’t think of myself as being a particularly fast writer. I feel like a good day might be 200 words—sometimes it’s much faster than that if I get in a flow. With the paintings, I think particularly when I get in that flow state, there’s quite a lot of joy and often quite a lot of humour in the work that I’m doing, so it’s almost like the treat I give myself after I’ve done the writing for a while. Which means sometimes the paintings get left until last, which is a bit annoying because it’s my favourite part.

The book, in both the written and illustrated aspects, is concerned with really big topics—there’s a lot about feminism and mental health, diet culture, and fatness—but you are really humorous and witty and cheeky. Can you speak a bit about using humour in your work, especially when you’re broaching serious topics?

I think I’ve always had a pretty dark sense of humour. I love telling a joke, I love making people laugh, I’m not very serious—sometimes I might come off a little serious with my writing, but I never feel that way internally.

I think the first time I really engaged with funny writing was when I read Hera Lindsay Bird’s collection Hera Lindsay Bird, and I think that just completely changed the way that I approached humour in my work. There’s a bunch of New Zealand poets that I found really inspiring, like Freya Daly-Sadgrove and Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle. I think the idea of taking humour and putting it into my work—I’ve always been tweeting stupid puns and things like that, and I really enjoy doing that—and I’m like, well, why don’t I put some of that into my writing? Why don’t I use some of that silly word play? The only reason was because I felt like I wasn’t allowed to, but I feel like reading some of that work gave me permission.

The other thing you do a lot in this book, and generally in your art practice, is you do a lot of self portraiture. Why do you like to use yourself as a subject?

I think because it’s the most accessible thing that I have. I try to work in different ways and take myself out of myself, but so much of my practice is about that experience of being within a body and then having other people observe that body, and being in these really hyper-observed spaces, like on social media. And I think there’s an element there as well of playing with this uncanniness of it—like I’m creating this weird doppelgänger of myself, that is partially me and partially not.

So much of my practice is about that experience of being within a body and then having other people observe that body—like I’m creating this weird doppelgänger of myself, that is partially me and partially not.

And I think I’m really interested in just examining my way of being in the world, and examining my thoughts and feelings, and transforming that into art in some way. I really enjoy reading really personal work because I find that the hyper-personal and the really specific can often be the themes that I relate to most in a piece of work. Even if it’s not something that I have experienced, I can say, ‘oh, that person has used a really specific memory, or a particular embarrassment or something like that’, and I connect with it more and it feels more visceral in that sort of way.

There’s a lot of nudity in the self portrait as well. Do you think the nudity relates to how introspective the writing has to be?

I think so—I mean, I’m not naked that much compared to how naked I seem in the work!

It can be a bit of a stand-in for vulnerability. I used to be really self conscious about my body and really afraid of showing it. So it was almost a challenge to myself, like, ‘how much of yourself can you put into your work? Can you actually embrace your body and put it in your work in this way?’ And I found it not necessarily liberating, but definitely it’s made it less scary. I think a lot of my favourite writers, even if they’re not necessarily working with their own nudity, I really relate to that unguardedness in a lot of work.

 

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