“The Two Hungers”: A Conversation with Chana Porter about Diet and Purity Culture in The Thick and The Lean
The adage “You can’t judge a book by its cover” frequently gets ignored by book lovers, and for good reason: You often can tell whether or not you’ll enjoy a book by its cover, and good publishers know that. I confess, I initially picked up Lambda Award Finalist Chana Porter’s second novel The Thick and the Lean based on the cover alone. Designed by Aykut Aydogdu, the sensual cover perfectly encapsulates the novel’s fascinating exploration of diet culture and sexuality.
Porter sets The Thick and the Lean in a dystopian world where eating is taboo, though sex is normalized. Beatrice, a teenager when the novel opens, lives in the religious cult-like community of Seagate where religious leaders take the eating taboo to extremes and encourage residents to fast as much as possible. They provide vitamins for their members. Beatrice, however, longs to cook with real food and begins sneaking out to a nearby town, where she discovers an undercover grocery store. Meanwhile Reiko, a poor, burgeoning artist, lands a technology scholarship to a university. Attending will mean leaving her family and her art goals behind, but the chance to move ahead in society and secure the kind of wealth and security her family lacks is too tempting to turn down. Reiko experiences extreme culture shock when she starts college, and when the administration drops her scholarship after years of attending, she chooses a life of crime over a life of debt.
Beatrice and Reiko are connected by a banned book both manage to acquire. Written centuries earlier, the book is both a memoir and cookbook about a kitchen maid and a king who fall in love over her delicious cooking. These entwining narratives depict the constant struggle with bodily autonomy and freedom of choice, particularly for women, poor people, and disabled people. While the mechanics of the world may work differently than our own, it is ultimately not so very different.
I had a chance to chat with Chana Porter via text, and we discussed her writing process, how she got started writing The Thick and the Lean, what projects she’s working on now, and more.
Margaret Kingsbury: Thank you so much for chatting with me, Chana! I read and loved The Seep when it was published in 2020, and your newest book, The Thick and the Lean, blew me away. I’ve been thinking about it every day since I finished it. Both books are unusual, thought-provoking takes on dystopias, though quite different. How did you get started writing The Thick and the Lean? Like, what concepts or characters were there from the beginning?
Chana Porter: It really means the world to me that my book resonated with you. I started writing The Thick and the Lean back in 2016. I had been working on my debut The Seep for about three years at that point, which was really a process of trial and error and a ton of rewriting—I had come from playwriting and had no idea how to write a novel. So I thought I might take a break from The Seep and work on a short story which I blithely named FOOD STORY. I wanted to explore diet culture and purity culture, and especially how those two hungers felt interconnected for me growing up as a teenage girl in suburbia in the ’90s. So the first pages of the book are that short story.
MK: I also grew up as a teen in the ’90s with the whole purity culture and obsession with thinness, and I loved how The Thick and the Lean subverts those cultures. It’s amazing that it started as a short story when there’s so much that happens!
CP: Yes; clearly I don’t know how to keep anything short! But that’s what I love about speculative fiction. I realized that if there really were a world where food pleasure was highly taboo, it would affect every part of the culture. The question of who grows the world’s food and how it’s processed, what people watch on reality TV, what art hangs in a museum, what is preached about in a sermon… it all begged to be explored.
MK: You have three distinct narratives in The Thick and the Lean: Beatrice, a member of an anti-food religious cult; Reiko, an artist and tech wiz who gets a scholarship to a university in the middle; and Ijo, a kitchen maid whose story we hear from a banned cookbook both Beatrice and Reiko have managed to find copies of. All three have emotionally rich lives while also helping to expand the fantastic world-building. Was it challenging to weave in all three narratives?
CP: It was very challenging! Pacing three narratives is tricky. When I realized I was working on a novel, I discovered Reiko (who actually became my favorite). I knew I wanted to start on the outskirts of the city in the cult and then travel upwards through the city, ending in the realm of the uber rich. So the form of the novel became architectural, in a way. But Ijo, the kitchen maid, was a pretty late addition to the plot, probably around 2019. The storyline of the cookbook became the link between the two main characters. That was a very exciting development, and it took a few more years to get the balance quite right. Amara Hoshijo, who was also my editor for The Seep, had terrific ideas about pacing. She also helped me cut some world building to keep the action moving.
MK: Oh that’s interesting! Sometimes I feel like books within books can slow down the pace, but I actually felt the opposite with Ijo’s narrative, and looked forward to when her story would reappear within the main two narratives.
CP: I’m the same way—anytime I see something italicized, I want to skip it! I typically don’t want to read a letter or a poem or some kind of text within a text. But Ijo’s narrative really captured me. I’m planning on a book totally from her POV.
MK: Oh, I would love to read that!
I love the book’s cover. It is such an accurate representation of the book, simultaneously capturing both the sensual and disturbing aspects of the culture’s food obsessions. How did you react when you saw the cover?
CP: Aykut Aydogdu made us that original painting for the cover… I really can’t get over it. For both The Seep and The Thick and the Lean, the covers have far exceeded my expectations. They’re really beautiful objects and I’m extremely grateful. I think the cover looks unlike any book cover I’ve ever seen. It stopped me in my tracks.
MK: That’s how I felt when I saw it. I immediately requested it without reading the synopsis or realizing you had written it!
CP: Margaret, that’s amazing!
MK: I should probably have paid more attention but it definitely paid off! What projects are you working on right now?
CP: I’ve been busy! I have two new novels that I’ve been going between for the last few years, both very different from each other. Hopefully I can tell you more about those soon. Also, I have plans for a YA series, and plans for more books in the world of The Thick and the Lean.
Meanwhile, I’m writing the libretto for an opera based on Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed with the composer Ted Hearne. I really, really love writing. I worked for so many years for, let’s say, a very cultivated audience. So it feels so good that people want to read what I’m creating. I don’t plan on stopping ever. You can read short stories of mine in the forthcoming anthologies Peach Pit: 16 Stories of Unsavory Women, out from Dzanc this fall, and Multiverses, out from Titan UK this spring.
MK: The Dispossessed is one of my favorite novels. I can see how Ursula K. Le Guin’s novels might have influenced your own writing as well. And wow, so many exciting things happening at once!
CP: We’re all standing on Le Guin’s shoulders; what a master.
MK: Last question, what are some good books you’ve read lately, or what are you currently reading?
CP: Pretty random: I just started The Marigold by Andrew F. Sullivan, which also comes out on April 18th. I just finished Near to the Wild Heart, which I think is Clarice Lispector’s first novel. I also just reread Philip K. Dick’s Valis, which I hadn’t read since my early twenties. Hit me very differently this time around. I love returning to books decades later. Oh oh oh! And I just read Rachel Pollack’s amazing short story collection, The Beatrix Gates. Anyone who is interested in speculative fiction should read everything Rachel Pollack ever wrote.
MK: Oh, I’m going to have to check her out!
CP: I could keep going. I’m one of those people who keeps a stack and jumps between books. I’m going to add one more. María José Ferrada’s new book How to Turn into a Bird is so good.
The end, I promise!
MK: Thank you so much for chatting with me, Chana. I hope we can do it again in the future!
CP: Please keep in touch!
Chana Porter (she/they) (@ChanaPorter) is a novelist, playwright, teacher, MacDowell fellow, and cofounder of The Octavia Project, a STEM and writing program for girls and trans and nonbinary youth that uses speculative fiction to envision greater possibilities for our world. Her debut novel The Seep was an ABA Indie Next Pick, Open Letters Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Book of 2020, a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and a Times (UK) Best Sci-fi Book of 2021. As a playwright, her work has been produced and developed at New Georges, Playwrights Horizons, Cherry Lane, Dixon Place, Target Margin, and many more. She was writer-in-residence at The Catastrophe Theatre in Houston, Texas from 2017-2019. Chana is currently adapting Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed into an opera with the composer Ted Hearne.
Margaret Kingsbury (she/they) (@AReaderlyMom) is a freelance journalist and editor. She’s a contributing editor for Book Riot and former BuzzFeed Books newsletter editor and contributing writer. In addition to Book Riot and BuzzFeed, her pieces have appeared in School Library Journal, The Lily, StarTrek.com, SFWA, Parents, and more.