Today I went live to talk about my essay “From Baby Fat to Brandy Melville,” the latest in my four-part narrative arc, Raising Daughters in the Epstein Era — and 150 of you showed up on a Saturday morning, which honestly floored me.
We started in a fitting room at Contempo Casuals in 1988, where I watched a girl’s mother and grandmother silently transmit everything they believed about bodies and worth without saying a word. I thought I was comforting her when I said it gets better. With thirty-some years of perspective, I’m not so sure.
The conversation that kept surfacing: the cycle doesn’t break just because we know about it. My grandfather called my mother Crisco — fat in the can — and then called me the same. Nobody thought it was strange. Nobody intervened. “Diet tomorrow” was a matrilineal mantra, said like a prayer after every family dinner, with me and my brother as unwilling witnesses. I escaped without an eating disorder, which I now recognize as something close to a miracle.
We got into the paradox at the heart of the essay: I raised my daughters as far from that language as I knew how. We don’t do body shame in my house. And they only want to shop at Brandy Melville — the one-size store, where one size means approximately a zero to four. The culture changed. The fitting room didn’t.
The chat was extraordinary. Stories poured in — a weight chart on the fridge at age twelve, calories counted from age nine, nicknames that stuck for decades. One woman’s mother still talks about the ten pounds she wants to lose. She’s almost eighty. Another shared that her mother’s dementia has taken almost everything — but the body dysmorphia is the last thing to go.
We also got into where we are now: GLP-1s returning a new wave of hyper-thinness to the culture, body positivity quieting in ways it wasn’t just a few years ago, and the Brandy Melville founders’ John Galt clothing line — which is exactly the screaming signal you think it is.
The question I kept coming back to: whose interests are served by keeping women small? That’s not a rhetorical question. It has an answer.
Tomorrow’s Sunday Salon goes deeper into the full four-essay arc. Paid subscribers, I’ll see you there.
You can read the full essay here:
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Thanks for listening.
I’m Dana DuBois, an essayist and GenX word nerd living in the Pacific Northwest — and founder of I Write Out Loud and co-host of The Daily Whatever Show.
Through memoir writing, audio storytelling, and community spaces, I explore the larger cultural forces shaping relationships, feminism, parenting, media, modern dating, and life in mid-flight.
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