How it unfolds: Dance Mom #1 bursts into Studio A, the cameraman struggling to stay close behind. Dance Mom #2 comforts a sobbing child in the background while Dance Mom #3 ushers the remaining children from the room. The dance teacher, fat, stands in front of a white piano. What provoked the situation: she had thrown a chair at Dance Mom #1's child because the child is not a good dancer.
"You know what, Abby? We're done." Dance Mom #1 waves her finger, points to her child. "You're not doing a solo. Neither of my kids are doing a group dance."
"That's fine," Miss Abby replies, an implacable blob in black clothes. Her teeshirt says "Abby Lee Dance Company" in red letters.
Dance Mom #1 gets flinty, more perturbed—probably because Abby is fat and preternaturally immovable, a dark hill accustomed to staying still. The mom escalates. Points a finger. "Good luck making your bills without my tuition. I pay for costumes and props, and I don't get them!"
Then she rears up, squares off, and delivers the most American of jeremiads. "I've been here all day! Making costumes—for you! While you were down the road eating! Stop eating. That's why you're fat! Goodbye."
She leaves with her kids. She vows never to return. But she does. The next day, she comes back. The same way we all return to the source of our unhappiness.
Of all the things I've seen in the hours of sordid television I've watched—most while writing a dissertation about early American authors I never think about now because I failed to become an academic—this scene stays with me: an elegant thesis, an answer to all problems, yours and mine and probably all humanity's. Stop eating. That's why you're fat.
It was really the only thing in that entire scene that made sense. Why throw a chair at a child? Why be a mom? Why be a mom on camera? And the line while you were down the road eating. An odd image. What kind of road? A two-lane road, maybe. Abby eating at a Holiday Inn off the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the kind of building that springs out of nowhere, surroundings hilly and wet. Or maybe a wide highway cutting through strip malls festooned with the chain-restaurants we have in every city and every state, rural and urban, rich and poor, our national never-ending décor of culinary harmony, the only thing keeping this country together. Chili's. Applebee's. Ruby Tuesday. Outback. All the places where I ate as a skinny child and a skinny teen and now dream of revisiting when I get skinny again or too fat to care, or maybe even fat enough to go on Ozempic, which, I've been told, is not for people who want to shed "vanity pounds."
Or maybe Abby was down the road eating at a truck stop like the one I used to pass in Nelsonville, Ohio, off US Route 33. Saddest building I've ever seen: a squatty trailer attached to a windowless clapboard house fixed to a slab of concrete. In the window, one word in buzzing neon: EAT. As if you needed to be told.
I wish I'd eaten there because now I never will. It went out of business when they put the bypass through. Now no one drives through Nelsonville, Ohio, which is good for everyone except the people in Nelsonville, Ohio, because it's a small Appalachian town that used to thrive on coal and now is poor and unpretty and, predictably, very fat. It depended on the income passers-through generated. Now we just pass by.
While you were down the road eating. Maybe I pictured Abby sitting alone, the destination and the goal. Just down a road, by herself, eating.
(It was actually said like this: "While you were down the road EEEAAAATTTIIING.")
Abby, as it turned out, wasn't at a truck stop or a Holiday Inn. She wasn't at a destination at the end of the road, alone with a bucket of ribs. She was eating at McDonald's.
I learned this years later from a blog or Reddit thread, evidence of how bored I am, how insatiable my post-academia workaday life has made me. I used to think about the so-called big ideas—the beginnings of this country, the year 1787, the XYZ Affair—but now I thrive on silly minutiae like where Abby went and how much she ate and how she managed to make her bangs look like a perfect sausage link. McDonald's. This detail... how it closed off possibilities. I've been to a McDonald's before, and I'm sure there was nothing special about this one in Western Pennsylvania. Abby was a successful TV star by then. I wish she'd splurged on Olive Garden.
When Dance Moms aired, I was open about the fact that I watched it, much to the puzzlement of other early-career scholars who were trying to be all high-brow. Nothing but podcasts and NPR for them. I, on the other hand, watched trashy TV while dissertating about Thomas Jefferson and Philip Freneau and Hugh Henry Brackenridge and other white men who agonized about what would become of America—if it would last 30 years or 600, if it would survive the Whiskey Rebellion, if it would keep surging west. I watched Dance Moms while fielding nasty comments from readers who, I suspect, hoped I'd drop out of grad school and stop inflicting on them observations that had already been made decades, centuries ago. Really—what more is there to say about early America? It was early, it was America, and it's over now. Like everything else.
I'm less open about the fact that I'm from Ohio. Might as well be code for, "I'm uncultured and fat." Even if I'm not fat, I will be. Ohio turns out a lot of fat people. The geography's bad. The food's terrible. It's cloudy all year round, and there's nothing to do but eat.
(The diner in Nelsonville should've changed the sign from EAT to FAT. Because eat equals fat, and you only have to change one part of one letter anyway, duh.)
While I dissertated, I never ate because I was never bored. I was frustrated and angry, sometimes exhilarated. I wrote all day and ran at night. I had fantasies about screaming at my advisor the way Dance Mom #1 screamed at Abby—"Get your finger out of my face!"—even if my advisor was very patient and her finger was never in my face and she didn't deserve to be screamed at. Rejected from a prestigious conference: "I don't know how much more people think I can take!" Knowing I would never measure up to other scholars: "Five-hundred-pound hog eating my face!" The rejection from the last job I applied to, the final chance to become a scholar, a real scholar, as the pandemic closed in and the tenure-track lines got slashed: "You think putting a few kids on Broadway makes you someone? Those five kids in there put your fat name on the map."
My Dance Moms obsession got bigger—doubling in size overnight—when I left Ohio to take a dissertation fellowship at an Ivy League university. I didn't belong there. I mistook someone's Boston Brahmin accent for a British one. Humiliated myself on the reg. Fielded backhanded compliments from other fellows, most of whom hailed from Columbia and Yale. "You'll make a great teacher someday," they said after hearing about my dissertation project.
It was the same year the Dance Moms girls moved to LA. They couldn't really cut it there, either. The West Coast dancers were too glamorous, too hard-hitting. But at least one of the girls got to do a music video with Sia.
Once, while at a lecture at the fellowship center, I asked a famous scholar a question. (We were supposed to do this—the fellowship director said so.) When I finished what I had to say, the room went quiet. "That's certainly a take," the scholar said. "Did anyone else have the same question? No? Moving on, then." I cried in the bathroom afterwards. "Save your tears for the pillow!" Abby always told the girls because they were always crying or on the verge of crying because Abby was mean, because they lost, because they got second place and second place was never good enough for Abby, even if it came with a trophy—unlike second place on the academic job market, which costs you a nonrefundable plane ticket, several tablets of Xanax, and hours spent on a job talk you'll never get back.
After the famous scholar was mean to me, I didn't have a pillow to cry into, but the bathroom of the fellowship center at the Ivy League university seemed a good-enough substitute.
Nonetheless, I had the fellowship, and it was mine, and when I had it, people said I was set apart. Like something Biblical. Fewer and fewer people were getting tenure-track jobs in those days, but that was okay because I had the fellowship, and fellowship recipients defied the odds. My advisor said this. Other fellows said this. Despite my every disadvantage—the state school pedigree, the Midwestern accent, the fact that I said "pome" instead of "po-ehm"—I would succeed. I was safe. "You're safe," a former fellow said to me, one who came from a similarly inauspicious background but ended up working at a top-tier liberal arts college. "The fellows always get jobs."
I didn't. I didn't even get an interview at the conference the other fellows were asked to attend. Search committees saw past the fellowship to my real (lack of) pedigree. They knew what I was. A fellowship at an Ivy didn't make me someone, didn't fool anyone. "Like putting silk stockings on a mule with some of you," Abby said to the moms. "Or lipstick on a pig!" one of the moms clapped back.
I don't think early American writers foresaw the problem of fat, the one-in-three statistic rattled off about schoolchildren, the anxiety over kids getting diabetes before they get fractions. I don't think they foresaw the problem of 50 states, let alone the day we'd rank them by fatness. (West Virginia is always the most obese.) Well, maybe Jefferson foresaw fat. He didn't want to see our citizens "occupied at a workbench, or twirling a distaff." Factories should stay where they belonged: in Europe. We should be in the fields, he said. We should be yeoman farmers. All this required was getting some land, which required, in all probability, being white and male. It also required, in all probability, buying people to till it, because it was a lot of land.
Stop eating, that's why you're fat.
But I think I understand Jefferson now. Since failing as an academic, I've been working sedentary jobs. Twirling the distaff of deliverables. Rather than pacing for hours to write another fevered page of my dissertation, or forgetting to eat because I'm obsessed with Brackenridge, a fat 18th-century lawyer from Western Pennsylvania who disliked the region's pesky "native inhabitants" so much he recommended destroying them, and a fat woman also from Western Pennsylvania who screams at girls to jump higher and yells, "Second place is the biggest loser on stage!"—unlike them, I work in a cubicle and await freedom, which means my next meal. I work in an office with walls the color of mustard, a color I detest on everything except hotdogs. I work for a public health department, and our mission is to get people to stop eating because that's why they're fat, and fat is bad for our health and our economy, and it makes us sad and unable to ski or zip-glide. It means we have to buy two tickets for a spot on an airplane, and if we keep eating, then the airlines are going to have to get all new seats, which will probably divert money from airline safety, and that means more plane crashes—probably fatal ones.
Down the road eating!
I know I'm not verifiably fat, but I spend a disproportionate amount of time trying not to get that way. Too much time. Time I could be spending on other things, like on finding my next job. (Next job in what?) But a fat gene lurks in my family. I have a fat aunt who lives on a farm, and I know why she's fat—I've seen what she eats. Fried chicken. Pork bacon. But also, she's fat because of that gene. It originated in County Mayo and smuggled itself aboard a 19-century coffin ship bound for the New World. It went undetected because the person who had it almost certainly wasn't fat because they were starving. A stealth fat gene. Once it got here, it spawned descendants like my aunt. It revealed we're big squatty peasants who once pulled potatoes from the earth. No use hiding anymore.
Well, I'm hiding. My life is an ever-long battle. Why? I don't know. Would it be so bad to be fat? And is anybody watching me enough to care? I don't devote much time to answering these questions because I'm too busy counting calories and steps, adding numbers in my head, hoping one falls below a mythical 2,000 and the other exceeds a mythical 10,000. I haven't been to McDonald's in years. I resolve to get down to two meals a day, maybe just one, because I inexplicably buy Dance Mom #1's syllogism: Abby can't stop eating; she's fat. I can't stop eating; therefore, I must be fat.
But I can't just stop eating. Can you?
My friend has a theory that fat is passive aggressive, and that becoming fat is the ultimate form of attention-seeking, a way to make the people around you uncomfortable without saying a word. I don't know if I agree, but I'm taken with the idea. Imagine the ability to upset people just by getting wider. Like a superpower. Except we all do it.
Stop fattening! That's why you eat!
Gen Z is trying to change the discourse around fat. I know this because I'm online. People there talk a lot about size acceptance. It's been 12 years since Dance Mom #1 told Abby to stop eating, and Gen Z kids—raised on a steady diet of Dance Moms and TikTok reenactments—have opinions. "That's fatshaming," they say, and fatshaming is deadass dumb and very '90s. It shows the dance moms are old and have unrealistic expectations of what normal people look like. Abby is normal people.
I agree with their take. Even think it's admirable. I grew up in the '90s, in the era of malls and Les Wexner, and everything in Columbus was oh-so Victoria's Secret. No wonder we were fat. Looking at a mannequin made me passive aggressive.
But I'm not sure Gen Z is really more enlightened. They praise fat influencers but thank their lucky stars Ozempic has come just in time for their entry into fat, cubicle-bound adulthood. They say curves are beautiful but never question why be beautiful? They use Facetune to look skinny on Instagram.
Stop eating, that's why you're fat! Goodbye.
It's the "goodbye" that gets me, Midwestern niceness tacked on. Like a red satin Christmas bow fixed to a rusted mailbox in Nelsonville, Ohio. Dilapidation made charming.
During my fellowship year, I went back to Ohio once. I was on the job market and interview season was approaching—the big convention where you fly across the country to meet with hiring committees and convince them you belong with them. Although interview requests were going to everyone who wasn't me, I scheduled a mock interview at my home institution anyway. "Hey, you never know. Might as well be prepared!"
The day of the mock interview, I sat in a janky little room—homely and poorly lit, like everything at my home institution—and fielded questions from two professors, senior faculty at my institution. Both had themselves gone to Ivy League (or Ivy adjacent) universities. Both had published books and sat on myriad search committees where they almost always hired people with backgrounds similar to theirs. Never from peer institutions, those other Midwestern flagships that obviously churned out scholars as boring and plodding as ours supposedly did.
Professor #1 asked about Elizabeth Eisenstein, who was not in my dissertation. Then he wondered how I was planning on finishing my dissertation without her. Professor #2 asked how I managed to get a letter of recommendation from Professor Famous, one of the top early Americanists in the nation. "Managed" was the word he used. Then Professor #2 told me I needed to work on my wardrobe if I was to impress the search committees at the hiring conference. "You should consult your advisor on what to wear."
I had nothing to say. I said nothing. I wasn't dressed for an official interview because I hadn't yet bought the all-important conference interview suit for the same reason I hadn't yet bought a plane ticket—because I didn't have an interview.
"Fix this hair!" Abby once screamed at one of the girls. "'Cause it's HORRIBLE."
One of the moms shot back: "And why don't you fix YOUR hair. And fix your face and your body and everything else!"
If I'd been more passive aggressive at that moment with Professor #2, I'd have told him I was in the process of outgrowing my interview suit because I was in the process of getting fat. Then I could've watched him get as uncomfortable as he made me.
That year I finally got one interview—not at the conference but over the phone—for a college in Lubbock, Texas. I did not get the job. As Abby Lee says, "Second place is the first to lose." When it comes to the academic job market, she's right.
The moms were right as well—in various ways. Truly, Dance Mom #1's tirade wasn't just a tirade; it was a jeremiad. And the American jeremiad isn't your ordinary jeremiad. Whereas its European predecessor castigated people for their sins, the American jeremiad gives us cause for hope. John Winthrop wrote the first American jeremiad aboard Arabella, telling us we were a city on a hill and couldn't afford to fuck things up. Ronald Reagan plagiarized it. Sarah Palin plagiarized Reagan. But the message remains: we can change. In fact, it's demanded we change. Wedded to the American experiment is the forever optimism that we're destined to prevail over our faults. Our problems come with a ready-made solution born of circular reasoning and dumb blind faith: we might fall short of our standards, but the failure is temporary because we're American and that means we're exceptional and exceptional people do not fail.
And if we're exceptionally fat, we can change. In fact, it's mandated we examine our ways and cut calories. Yes we can! Corpulent as we are, we can begin anew.
Even Abby believes. "Your face!" she shrieks at the girls. "Thighs! Thighs! Cross your thighs!"
The girls believe, too. They want to be perfected, loved. To stop falling short. I know this because in my Ph.D. program I felt the same way. I wanted to impress those famous scholars. The fellow dissertators in the fellowship program. The professors in my own program who wouldn't have hired someone like me. I wanted to ask question in lectures that led to breakthroughs, that prompted people to stand up and laud me as the future of American studies.
In early America, our whole world stopped at Western Pennsylvania. Maybe we should have left it that way. The country needed to stop eating all that land. That's why it's fat.
Abby is no longer fat. I saw her recently, a Dance Moms retrospective on Nightline. She went to prison for bankruptcy fraud, but now she's out. In a wheelchair because cancer left her paralyzed. She's folded into halves, thirds, fourths. Shaky skin, a curtain draped over dry bones. Before she went to prison, she had bariatric surgery. She couldn't stop eating, and that's why she was fat. So she had surgery to stop herself from eating. It was the only way.
She believes the girls are ungrateful. She thinks yelling at them was a waste of time because most didn't have talent anyway. You either have it, or you don't. No use trying to perfect yourself. Forget all that striving—it's for nothing. Probably.
Silently I agree.
The girls are now in their 20s and weathering the existential crisis of fat. They're bigger now—of course they're bigger; they're no longer 12 years old. On TikTok they share beauty routines. Clothes that hide flaws. They're influencers, slathering their faces with two types of primer and four colors of foundation. Still striving. Still seeking recourse for falling short.
I, too, have fallen short. I failed to become a scholar, to keep Brackenridge and Jefferson in my life. I miss those days, the simple world when I was too unhappy and frenetic to eat, and all I had to do was watch Dance Moms and write arcane things. I hate that my dissertation languishes online, neither fat nor thin, never destined to become the book I imagined.
I miss the smell of libraries, the heart-stopping dread of academic conferences. The famous scholars who would tear me down for using the wrong word. The readers for journals who wrote me reports saying, "There is nothing of value here." The famous scholar who turned away from me at a conference when she heard which program I was attending—only to double back forthwith when she discovered I had the fellowship. Even though I hated academia, I loved it. The roaring snobbery. The insidious self-hatred of always striving. Same reason people hated and loved Abby in all her chair-throwing misanthropy. As much as we deny it, we preferred her to this woman who, for various reasons, stopped eating.
Maybe I even miss driving through Nelsonville, Ohio. Now I pull up google maps, street view, and search Route 33, hoping to find that truck stop with the word EAT. I see an old building, think it's the truck stop—but no, it's a church. The truck stop is gone, razed to make way for a new building that will never be built because no one goes to Nelsonville, Ohio. There remains a field, unoccupied as the day white settlers ventured west. Back then, no one was down the road eating. No one holding a neon sign.
