This month Stella celebrates big beautiful female theory, shortlisted for the 2023 Stella Prize.
What book are you currently reading? And what is one piece of pop culture that you’re obsessed with right now?
I’m going to cheat and say the most recent book I read and loved, which was Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata. I’m obsessed with her frank and unsettling prose, her wild and weird ideas, her willingness to transgress boundaries, to embrace disgust and dismantle taboos. Basically, I’m champing at the bit for all of her writing to be translated into English!!
And in terms of pop culture, I keep on thinking about Lana Del Rey marrying her alligator tour guide who kind of looks like that French actor Jean Renu. Apparently they like sitting in the car and read and talking in parking lots together. What do they talk about?? What does he read???
What did he think about Paris fashion week and how does it compare to wrestling gators on the bayou???? Often, as I am falling asleep, I imagine myself doing a cabaret performance where I am painted green, with downy fake eyelashes, and I lip sync the extended monologue from her song Ride:
Because I was born to be the other woman
Who belonged to no one, who belonged to everyone
Who had nothing, who wanted everything
With a fire for every experience
And an obsession for freedom
I want to know, are they as happy together as she insists? Does she like Louisiana? Is she wild, and fucking crazy, and free? I truly hope so.
Big Beautiful Female Theory blends memoir, cultural criticism, and visual essay in such an exciting way. Did you have a sense of its shape from the beginning, or did it emerge through the process?
I often start with a strong idea of what I want to do, what I should do, which eventually crumbles and I find the form in the rubble. When I approached big beautiful female theory, I started with the first essay, and then I wanted to expand on it. At first, I wanted it to be a more traditional memoir, I guess, rather than a fragmented one: one, cohesive story with a strong narrative shape.
When I sat down and tried to do that, however, it just kept on coming out in fragments and pieces, jokes and puns, small, self-contained worlds like Polly Pockets, a little bit about bush walking, a bit of art history, musings on plastic surgery, girlhood. All that jazz.
I think a big part of the process was letting go of my preconception of what a memoir should be. How could I approach it in a way that felt natural to me? Rather than one expansive whole, it then made sense to view the book as a kind of accretional text, a series of diversions, images and sensations. One step forward, one step back. Which for me reflected more what life is like.
There are so many amazing one liners / memories / ideas. Tell me a bit about your writing practice. Are you someone who uses their phone notes app when an idea comes to you?
I have written a lot in my notes app over the years, and it functions, as I think it does with a lot of people, as a bit of a dumping ground of different streams: confessions, lines, quotes and grocery lists. The first drafts of a lot of the essays emerged when I was walking, in nature, with my head ironically buried in my phone, tapping away.
A lot of the one-liners in their book started their lives as Tweets, which I tended to use a lot to brain-dump soundbites that were floating around in my head. I’m still on there but I rarely post. Just bob around in and absorb what’s in there, like a tampon in a toilet bowl.
Around Christmas last year, I got rid of my smartphone, but the fairly dodgy one I bought still has a voice recorder, so I’ve started dictating a lot of work in idle moments.
I also seem to get a lot of ideas when driving, so I have a stack of post-it notes in the console and a pen, and I pull over and write down lots of scraps.
My more formal practice is fairly piecemeal. I have many notebooks on the go and I work on Scrivener, and I try to write a couple of hundred words a day, depending on what’s going on in my life.
I think it’s helpful to have a bunch of different practices going at once, so if I’m ever stuck I can just transcribe a voice note or something. Though it often feels like being Don Draper’s secretary, trying to keep track of his self-destructive chaos.
It was cool to see references to Susan Sontag, Maggie Nelson, and Joan Didion alongside reality TV, Tumblr, and meme culture. How do you see those worlds interacting (or clashing) in your work?
Part of my thinking in combining lots of different elements is that life doesn’t quarantine the high and the low from each other, especially in our increasingly online existence. I wanted to reflect on the whiplash of this experience. For instance, you can be trying to be literary, reading your Didion or your Sontag, but then of course at the same time you’re scrolling on social media, and look Diane Keaton just died, and would you like to try a weight-loss supplement, and look Kim Kardashian is selling merkins now, and look, this person just lost 50lbs, and then another person is selling you a hormone-hacking diet book, and hey, would you like to buy period underwear?
These things aren’t separate in our experience of the world, so I wanted to reflect that, and show how the mind tries to make sense of all of this fragmentation and chaos. And this is often done, in my mind at least, through humour and association, juxtaposition and play.
Humour and pain go hand in hand in your work, encouraging readers to reframe self-deprecating thoughts into something more expansive and empowering. How do you navigate that balance?
It’s just something that happens intuitively in my work. I’m always looking for the humour in things, even the painful things. In the essay from the collection, The Fat Bitch in Art, I write that the only way I know how to create is to rub salt and then caramel and then salt into the wound, in a “salted caramel self-stinging salve”. Nothing is ever just funny to me, or just sad. There is always some intermingling between the two.
My favourite writers also embrace this duality. Sylvia Plath, who is often described as being overly maudlin and sentimental, also had the capacity for hilarity. Melissa Broder, Hera Lindsay Bird and Sayaka Murata also come to mind.
If you overhear someone laughing, sometimes you might think that they’re crying, and vice versa. And when I look back on my life, the bits that make me laugh the most are the difficult times, when I’ve been flailing through life, because those feel the most real, the most human. The parts where I’ve felt together and content? They barely register in my life story.
What do you wish critics or readers talked about more when discussing your work?
It’s been quite a while since the book came out, which has led me to reflect a little on how thrilling it is to have anyone pay attention to a book at all, and even more generously, to engage with it as a critic. Most books sink without even a ripple, so anything that helps it reach an audience is welcome.
With the recent shuttering of Meanjin and many other layoffs/cuts in the arts, I am just so happy to have anyone take the time to write about my work and engage with it. Even if someone hates the work, at least they were moved by it. The worst reaction I could imagine to my work is indifference. Or for someone to call it “nice”. No worse insult than being called “nice”. I’d rather be called a disgusting wench with revolting body odour and little to no redeeming qualities than “nice”.
About the Book
Part feminist manifesto, part comic book, big beautiful female theory is a carnivalesque exploration of the ways identity is formed through culture, relationships and the weight of society’s expectations. Without falling into a simple recovery narrative, these essays also resonate with humour, offering a sense of delight and optimism in defiance of difficult circumstances and unfair patriarchal structures.
With breathtaking honesty and fierce wit, Eloise Grills turns her life, her body and her mind into art, confronting what it means to grow up in an increasingly unfathomable world.
Judges Report
Eloise Grills takes our gaze to task in big beautiful female theory. The book as an object alone is ambitious enough to warrant recognition. Grills transforms writings (impressive in their own right) into visual essayistic feasts for the reader. At times theoretical, heavy but not dense, her work attends to an under-examined body in Australian literature.
It’s a body onto which, Grills demonstrates, much of our cultural imaginary silently attaches, then loathes and fears – the fat body. big beautiful female theory is disarmingly raw, both in what it reveals about its narrator and subject, and in its deceivingly slapdash composition. But Grills maintains a self-awareness that’s rarely self-indulgent, and at times zooms out from introspection without the suspicion of the reader – and then it implicates us.
Further Reading
Reviews
“Grills’ curated gut-spillage requires all of the adjectives and a whole lot of adverbs; intellectual, creative, irreverent. Invincibly vulnerable. Fragmentarily cohesive. Contradictory. Funny. Beautiful.” – Nanci Nott, ArtsHub
“Blazing with feeling, the book is ecstatic, exhaustive self-expression, drenched in watercolour and hectic sincerity: William Blake edits Rookie magazine.” – Imogen Dewey, Meanjin
“Combines feminist theory and memoir with playful illustrations in a riotous exploration of the beauty industry, consumerism and sexuality.” – Cameron Woodhead and Fiona Capp, The Age/Sydney Morning Herald
Links
Read an interview with Eloise Grills for The Wheeler Centre
Watch an interview with Eloise for Kill Your Darlings‘ First Book Club
Read more about big beautiful female theory in this interview with Eloise for Going Down Swinging
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