Barrelhouse Reviews: The Incredible Shrinking Woman, by Athena Dixon
Review by DW McKinney
Split/Lip Press / September 2020 / 125 pages
Athena Dixon’s essay collection The Incredible Shrinking Woman narrates the transformation of a Black woman reckoning with her position in a world that tries to shrink and mute her. Whether due to the physical ailments of her body, her sexual desires, or disconnections experienced in public and private, Dixon is discontent. Beyond her self-described life as a fat Black woman is a greater discourse on personhood, Blackness, grief, and love.
The Incredible Shrinking Woman is Dixon’s second book, following her poetry chapbook No God In This Room (2018). She founded Linden Avenue Literary Journal in 2012 to feature extraordinary work while also providing editorial experience to Black women. As an essayist and poet, Dixon’s words sucker-punch her readers and leave them gasping. The essays in this collection ruminate on lost loves and friendships and the dissonance between body and space, all while cataloguing the culture of latchkey kids; adults who grew up on M.A.S.H. charts, burn books, and AOL; and young adults who have filtered their socialization through chat rooms, instant messenger apps, and online dating. As media and technology’s imprints appear with greater frequency in contemporary literature and storytelling, Dixon’s essays exemplify the lives lived during the transition between their absence and their proliferation.
Dixon, born in a middle-class, two-parent home and now holding multiple degrees, acknowledges that there is a fiction assigned to her type of life. She should be happy, married, and living in a house with children. But that fairytale escapes her, and she has lived a life far from one. The Incredible Shrinking Woman progresses non-chronologically through time, yet paints a steady picture of Dixon. She reckons with her terrible relationships with men, her body, and her desire to live a life of freedom—one in which she exhibits all facets of herself at once.
The book begins in adulthood, after Dixon’s divorce, with the essay “A Goddess Makes Platanos.” Dixon sits on her kitchen floor as platanos fry on the stove. A fierce hunger growls inside her. She yearns to be wanted by men, to have them miss her when she leaves a room and have the touch of their hands linger on her body. But Dixon admits that her inability to “curry their favor until they finally see me” is her own fault at times. She gets in her own way. She can also be too much of a good thing or not enough, depending on the lover. “I’ve learned I can spiderweb across a man’s life in equal parts love and regret. I’m not easily forgotten, but often left behind.” Throughout the collection, Dixon remarks that she becomes a waystation for men to come and go on their way to becoming who they’re supposed to be. The more of them who pass through her life, the less of her is left. Dixon acknowledges, “But I know I don’t want to be picked clean….I want to be devoured so there is nothing left except the memory only on their lips and a hunger for more of me.” And where some women would find themselves ruined, Dixon finds brief satisfaction.
Just when we are enjoying Dixon’s pleasures and joys, her sorrows arrive and usher us in another direction. The essay collection traverses moments of fulfillment and “shrinking,” as Dixon flays open each experience with an unflinching honesty. She offers both the lean meat and the unpleasant gristle for us to dine on.
In “The Greater Whole,” Dixon battles the effects of Meige disease. To regain her body confidence, she uses specific clothing choices to erect an illusion of normalcy while she regains a semblance of control over the disease. “Native Tongue” shines light on Black Midwesterners, who are often forgotten or examined with an unforgiving lens. Dixon writes, “To search for people like me is to look beyond the concrete jungle and into the distance. It’s to revisit those places that seemed punishment when our relatives were forced from their cities for vacations and holidays.” If being a Black Midwesterner wasn’t conspicuous enough, Dixon was also a Black kid who “talked white,” who played a cello, and who wore “corny” tie-dyed short sets. Dixon’s youth was a series of compounding grievances that drove her to prepare for slights that might never arrive—“I carried a stick of Teen Spirit deodorant in my backpack because one of the boys sniffed the air every time I entered the room and I was terrified to be a fat black girl existing in a cloud of stench.”
At her lowest points, Dixon chases connection with men through online platforms and dating apps. Each interaction, each release, never quite sates her and sometimes leaves her battered. She endures misogynoir in “Things Men Have Said to Me (Some of Which are True),” sexual assault, trauma, and violence (“Butterfingers,” “Lakeshore”); toxic relationships (“Once Upon an AOL”), and the sharp knife of grief brought by the loss of love (“Liturgy”). Adding to that dissatisfaction is the constant smallness she feels—and makes herself feel.
“50% Off” and “Skype Sex and the Single Girl” are just two of the essays where Dixon subverts her idea of shrinking and ideas about fat women and sexuality. She is full of desire, lusting, and pleasure. Through her frank—and sensuous—depictions of her sexuality, Dixon introduces us to her commanding sexual alter-ego, Lola. Shrinking Woman is not just about people enacting their displeasure on Dixon’s physical body, but what she does to her mind and body as well. She renders herself invisible and overly accommodating until she has denied herself a fully vibrant existence.
Hip hop and R&B thrum through the essay collection. References to Usher, Yo! MTV Raps, De La Soul, and Outkast sent me drifting back to my own adolescence and young adulthood, where so many of us hanged onto the very grown lyrics as a way to make sense of puppy dog crushes, slights, and tough moments. These proffered reminiscences are a celebration of culture and identity that drill down to Dixon’s commentary on Blackness—the moments when she is proving her Blackness, and the moments when she revels in hip-hop’s undeniable connection to who she is.
The Incredible Shrinking Woman is Dixon’s intimate personal examination, written with her own unburdening and liberation in mind. Dixon exposes the inner workings of her life in a way that can be uncomfortable and heartbreaking at times, but what she offers is reality. She dispenses with the carefully crafted lives, the fanfiction and fairytales that we love and surround ourselves with, that are not the whole truth. And though it’s tough to confront, it’s much-needed. For Black women like me, Dixon’s essays resonate down to our souls. She speaks to our yearning, a need to connect and be loved, our striving for fulfillment, and a general weariness we cannot seem to shake. Dixon’s words also add to a greater discourse about what it means to see and not be seen, what it means to hunger and not be filled, and how this leads to a desiccation of body and spirit. To be clear, Dixon never warrants pity. What she demonstrates is a careful public excavation of herself that so many of us are unable to do in private.
“Depression is a Pair of Panties” concludes the essay collection. Dixon sorts through her panty drawer in search of the perfect pair of panties to match her mood while offering a discourse on mental health. A longtime acquaintance takes issue with the happy life Dixon enjoys while they work or stay home to raise their kids. “She seems to believe that a few pictures on Facebook means I am living my best life,” Dixon writes. What that person does not know is that Dixon struggles with anxiety and depression. It’s easy to craft the lives we want people to view in a social media-dominant age. We take pictures at just the right angles, cropping out what we don’t want before slapping on a filter. This is the life people see—not the junk crammed in the corner, out of frame, or the sadness cresting in our eyes as we take the photo. The book does not offer a fairytale ending—so few of us have those—but instead Dixon resides in a moment of “stitching and repair,” readying herself to either rise or shrink once more.
DW McKinney is a Black American writer and interviewer living in Las Vegas. She is a columnist for CNMN Magazine with work in Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, Narratively, and HelloGiggles. Say hello at dwmckinney.com.