DeWoskin - Big Girl Small

PRAISE FOR RACHEL DEWOSKIN AND BIG GIRL SMALL

Plays out with the intensity of a song. Every word counts. This is one of those novels about love that we turn to in order to live with an ongoing condition, the slow burn and the long haul, the bolt that hits, stops, hits again.

DAVID LEVITHAN

Big Girl Small is the most engaging novel Ive read in many years. DeWoskin has aimed the book at all the pleasure centres: its sad, funny, quirkily suspenseful, andmost of allbeautiful.

DARIN STRAUSS, author of
More Than It Hurts You

Big Girl Small examines the crucial moment when we either listen to what the world says and stay small or dare to sing out at the top of our lungs.

NICOLA KEEGAN, author of Swimming

DeWoskins daring third book takes on sexual politics, physical beauty, pity, and violence, and succeeds in giving readers a nuanced and provocative treatment.

Publishers Weekly

I loved reading Big Girl Small as much as I loved watching The Breakfast Club for the first time. Is Rachel DeWoskin our new John Hughes?

ISABEL GILLIES, author of
Happens Every Day

Rachel DeWoskin handles the story with the sensitivity of a scalpel and a humour that leaves the reader howling. I was delighted and moved.

HELEN SIMONSON, author of
Major Pettigrews Last Stand

Rachel DeWoskin is the author of Foreign Babes in Beijing, a memoir about her inadvertent notoriety as the star of a Chinese soap opera, and a novel, Repeat After Me. She lives in New York City and Beijing and is at work on her fourth book, Statutory.

racheldewoskin.com

textpublishing.com.au
racheldewoskin.com

The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia

Copyright Rachel DeWoskin 2011

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following: We Belong Together by Rickie Lee Jones. Copyright 1981 by Rickie Lee Jones. Reprinted by permission of Rickie Lee Jones. Runaways by Elizabeth Swados. Reprinted by permission of Samuel French, Inc.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

First published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2011
This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2011

Cover design by WH Chong

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Dewey Number: 813.6

Primary print isbn: 9781921758249
Ebook isbn: 9781921834646

For my spectacular daughters, Dalin and Light

Contents

When people make you feel small, it means they shrink you down close to nothing, diminish you, make you feel like shit. In fact, small and shit are like equivalent words in English. It makes sense, in a way. Not that small and shit are the same, I mean, but that Americans might think that. Take The Wizard of Oz, for example, an American classic everyone loves more than anything even though theres a whole Munchkinland of embarrassed people, half of them dressed in pink rompers and licking lollipops even though theyre thirty years old. They dont even have names in the credits; it just says at the end, Munchkins played by The Singer Midgets. Judy Garland apparently loved gay people, was even something of an activist, but she spread rumors about how the midgets were so raucous, fucking each other all the time and drinking bourbon on the set. People love those stories because its so much fun to think of tiny people having sex. There was even an urban myth about how one of the dwarfs hanged himselfeveryone said you could see him swinging in the back of the shotbut it turns out it was actually an emu. Right. A bird they got to make the forest look magical. And what with the five-inch TVs everyone had in those days, the two-pixel bird spreading its dirty wings apparently called to mind a dead dwarf. In other words, people wanted it bad enough to believe thats what it was. Magical, my ass. I know that small and shit are the same because Im sixteen years old and three feet nine inches tall.

Judy Garland was sixteen too, when she made Wizard of Oz, but Im betting she must have felt like she was nine feet tall, getting to be a movie star and all. I should have known better than to try for stardom myself, because even though my mom sang me Thumbelina every night of my life, she also took me to Saturday NightLive once when we were in New York on a family vacation, and it happened that the night I was there they had dozens of little people falling off choral risers as one of their skits. My mom almost died of horror, weeping in the audience. Everyone around us thought she was touched, that all those idiots on stage must have been, like, her other kids. Like they were my beautiful Munchkin brothers or something, even though my moms average-size and so are my two brothers. Theyd even have average lives, if only they didnt have me. My mothers idea has always been to try to make me feel close to perfect, but how close can that be, considering I look like she snatched me from some dollhouse.

Nothing on Saturday Night Live is ever funny, but the night we went was especially bad. One of the little people even got hurt falling off those risers, but no one thought anything of it, except my mom, who made a point of waiting for an hour after the show was done, to ask was he okay. I was furious, because everyone who walked by us kept saying Good show to me.

I would never be in anything of the sort, by the way, because my parents dont believe in circus humiliation. Thats what my college essay was going to be on, freak shows and the Hottentot Venus. Most people dont know that much about her, except that she was famous for having a butt so big the Victorians couldnt believe it. So they made her into an attraction people could pay money to stare at and grope. I bet you didnt know, for example, that her name was Saartjie, or Little Sarah, or that she even had a name. The Little in her name is the cute, endearing version of the word, not the literal little. Or even worse, belittle, which, by combining be and little, means to make fun of. I think I would have included that definition as, like, the denouement of my essay, after the climax, where I planned to mention that after her nightmare carnival

life, Little Sarah died at twenty-six and they preserved her ass on display in a Paris museum. She was orphaned in a commando raid in South Africa; otherwise maybe none of those terrible things would have happened to her.

I have parents, thankfully. And they always tried to keep me private. I dont mean they hid me in a closet or anything, but they also didnt let people take pictures of me when we traveled or touch me for money. And when people stared, even kids, my parents stared back, unblinking, but friendly-like. The thing is, you cant blame kids for staring. Not only because Im miniature, but also because Im a little bit disproportionate. Thats what they call it when the fit of your parts is in any way off the mainstream chart: disproportionate. Maybe your arms or legs are too stumpy or your torso is small and your head is huge. Or maybe youre just you, like Saartjie Hottentot, and its only relative to everyone else that youre disproportionate. Maybe someday theyll think