what do anorexia, abortions, and hunger strikes all have in common?

If you tried to recommend me right now a book about abortion, hunger strikes, and eating disorders, I would probably say, yikes, that sounds kind of heavy, do you have anything more readable? But this is exactly the reason that I am so fascinated by State Champ, a novel about a sardonic fallen champion runner who begins a hunger strike to protest the arrest of the doctor she works for at an abortion clinic where her presence is tolerated, at best. The writer, Hilary Plum, maneuvers so capably through and across these topics and gives a pressure valve to so much of the frustration that comes from and is expressed by its events, which feel both ripped-from-the-headlines and eternal. Mainly, I wanted to know what happened next. I read it in one day.

Since eating disorders, sports, and bodily autonomy are going concerns of this publication, I wanted to talk to Plum more about her book, and she kindly submitted herself for an interview. What follows is our conversation about why disordered eating and hunger strikes make people so angry and uncomfortable, and how to find life in so many places where people want only to see death. Also, a little about playing sports.

I came away from this interview thinking about how I find a lot of writing about eating disorders intensely uncomfortable to read about, even as a person of disordered eating experience. But as Plum notes in relation to hunger strikes, the discomfort of the spectacle is part of the point, or it should be. We so often treat disordered eating as a personal problem, and it is such an isolating experience, when they are in fact so often a response to systemic stress, and perhaps even the social/interpersonal purpose of it is a (perhaps backwards) way of raising a red flag, reaching for connection and help. But no one cares, and as things stand, people still dimly respond to it by being like “can you just eat the food normal.” All not unlike a, dun dun dun, hunger strike.

Anyway—my highest of recommendations for this book. Here is our chat: