I may have been just over a hundred pounds, but I did see how weight gain could snowball. As the brother, Edison, explains in the novel, “I used to look pretty good. Then I didn’t. That’s the point. Once I got sort of fat, one more baby-back didn’t matter. See, when you look sharp, you got something to protect—an investment to preserve, a power to keep. But when you’re already big, there’s nothing to lose from getting bigger.” If you’re in good trim, it’s easy to decline a cupcake: you’re motivated; you have a social resource to preserve. But for my brother, passing on a cupcake presented itself as pure self-denial with no reward. Once you’re hundreds of pounds overweight, eat it or don’t eat it, what difference does it make?

  Most of all, I approached this subject with sympathy. I’d often been enraged on Greg’s behalf when we went somewhere together and all strangers seemed to see was some huge guy. The rebel of the family, he was a mastermind. With no formal education beyond junior high school, he taught himself to be a sound engineer from books. He started his own company while still in his teens, building sound systems and recording studios. He was Philip Glass’s soundman for Einstein on the Beach in New York City and toured with Harry Belafonte all over Europe. He was funny, he was politically clued up, and his memorial service was crowded with devoted friends who revered him. Indeed, my primary reservation about writing Big Brother was that I was loath for my own exceptional big brother to be remembered solely as fat.

  I had anticipated that this novel would be difficult because its origin made me sorrowful. I did not anticipate it would be hard for other reasons.

  So far, only a few other fiction writers have focused on fat. Yet overeating has been relentlessly addressed in other media, especially television and glossy magazines. I didn’t want to publish dieting tips and slimming recipes, to write a thinly disguised self-help book, to rehash a clatter of conflicting scientific studies, or to go on the political warpath against fast-food companies. A literary novel needs to dig deeper. Aside from nutrition, what do we get out of eating? Is food not more “the idea of satisfaction, far more powerful than satisfaction itself,” a promise that never quite delivers? What is so alluring about food that some of us will imperil our very survival to consume too much of it? When we meet either the grossly fat or the skeletally thin, what do we assume about their characters? Considering the tentative connection we ourselves experience between who we are in our heads and what our bodies happen to look like, why do we continue to take appearance so seriously? What does it mean that the populations of whole countries in the West are getting so heavy? And of course any novel about obesity has to answer the question that paramedic raised in my parents’ living room: How does this happen?

  The second section of Big Brother, in which Edison goes on an all-liquid diet, presented a headache if only in terms of entertainment. Weight loss is slow, and weight loss is dull—qualities no novelist courts. Lo, prose about losing weight can be every bit as tedious as the real thing. Yet I couldn’t simply have you turn a page and Edison’s long, grueling diet is over. I needed the reader to share the sacrifice, determination, and daily application the diet required, but ideally without boring my poor reader senseless. Furthermore, every afternoon I worked on part 2, without fail, it made me hungry. I’d no sooner have returned to chapter 3 in my study than I’d find myself back downstairs, staring soulfully into the refrigerator.

  The other problem was structural. Any story about weight is linear—a shape no more sophisticated in literature than in geometry. I faced a range of obvious end points, none satisfying: (A.) Edison stays fat (static, not a story). (B.) Edison loses the weight and lives happily ever after (didn’t sound like a Shriver novel to me). (C.) Edison loses the weight only to gain it all back again. Now, the latter structure engenders an appealing pathos. Yet as a matter of principle I could not publish a novel with the implicit message that in the long run it’s impossible to lose weight and thus it’s pointless even to try.

  So I chose (D.).

  Would Greg have liked Big Brother? I hope so, though I imagine handing him a copy with apology. Willful, brilliant, and entirely self-made, Greg Shriver was larger-than-life in a grander sense than girth. He was a bizarre hybrid of southern good-old-boy and over-aged hippie—a longhair with a hard hat. He was a magnet for other compelling characters, but also for bad luck, some of which he brought on himself, much of which simply arrived like a letter bomb. (In the mid-1990s, a small private plane freakishly crashed into Greg’s rental accommodation, demolishing that one house and nothing else. Fortunately, Greg wasn’t home, but he lost everything he owned. His roommate survived only because he happened to be reaching for a beer, and the open door of the refrigerator shielded him from the blast. This stuff just doesn’t happen to normal people.) Edison represents a mere sliver of the complicated, formidable older brother to whom the novel is dedicated, “in the face of whose drastic, fantastic, astonishing life any fiction pales.”

  Greg Shriver’s Memorial Tribute

  Durham, North Carolina, 2009

  My older brother, Greg, was a real maverick, so I know what a travesty it is for a conformist, cheerleader opportunist like Sarah Palin to have colonized that word. I probably looked up to Greg for the same reasons that through most of his life he was such a headache for our parents. He was an iconoclast. He was naturally disobedient, defiant, and headstrong. He did whatever he wanted to. His dropping out of school at only fourteen may have pained our well-educated parents, but at the age of eleven, when I was hardly enjoying myself at Frances Lacy Elementary School in sixth grade, I thought his cut-and-run was marvelous. He started Stage and Studio Construction as a teenager. He taught himself everything he knew—which as most of you know was a hell of a lot.

  Throughout my adolescence and young adulthood, Greg was an inspiration to me, not only because he was that contemporary American rarity, the self-made man, but because he stood up to my parents. I know they didn’t always find that pleasant. But like most parents, ours needed standing up to, and Greg taught me how. Greg taught me that you don’t have to do what you’re told. Learning to question and stand up to authority has helped to fashion not merely my family relationships, but my politics.

  The fact is that I’m too stupid to fully appreciate just how smart my brother was. Obviously, he and I could connect talking about the lousy justifications for the war in Iraq, but his real brilliance was technical—scientific, electronic, mechanical—and I’m one of those people whose technical expertise runs to competently affixing a new plug onto a lamp cord and that’s about it. I don’t have the intellectual wherewithal to grasp everything that Greg grasped and everything that he was good at. I remember his close friend and sometime employee Paul Gabriel—another wonderful man who’s sadly left us—trying to explain to me once, “Your brother, you have no idea . . .” Gabe trailed off helplessly, because Greg’s sister wouldn’t be able to understand the myriad situations in which Greg’s intuition, improbably broad general knowledge, and innovative thinking had saved the day. So Gabe just said, “I mean, your brother Greg is really smart.” In fact, I can’t count the number of people who’ve told me at one time or another that Greg was “the smartest guy they’d ever met.” Back when my younger brother, Timothy, and I were kids, we fiercely resented the fact that Greg had tested as having a “genius-level IQ,” a treasured family factoid that our parents trotted out at every opportunity. We thought that meant that in comparison we were dumb. Well, in certain narrowly defined but still impressive respects, in comparison we probably are dumb. Or I’ll speak for myself anyway. In comparison with Greg, I am dumb.

  But there were other respects in which Greg was dumb. If he defined himself by breaking all the rules, he broke some rules that he’d have been better off adhering to. Let’s not beat about the bush. Back in the day, he drank too much; bloody hell, he even drank too much coffee. He smoked too much, and he took too many recreational drugs. Running Stage and Studio, he slept too little, and the only exercise he ever took was climbing scaffolding and feeding plywood to his table saw. In the later years, obviously, he ate too much. Nevertheless, I treasured his appetites, which made him far better company than a militant jogger who lives on herbal tea and celery. I like people with weaknesses. Let it not go unsaid: Greg Shriver knew how to have a good time.

  There were still other respects in which Greg was problematic. I wouldn’t want people at my memorial service to misremember me as perfect; I think I’d find that insulting, and I’d want someone to speak up about the fact that in a lot of ways I was a pain in the ass. So, yeah, Greg could be a pain in the ass. He talked incessantly. In recent times, he often blamed his so-called logorrhea on some drug he’d been prescribed, and I always wanted to interrupt to object, “No, Greg, this isn’t some new pharmaceutical side effect; you’ve always been this way; you’ve never been able to shut up”—but of course he wouldn’t let me get that word in edgewise. Greg wasn’t a good listener, and that’s an understatement. If for no other reason than that, he may have been a nightmare as a husband, and it’s hard to blame two wives for not going the distance. Still, I do wish he hadn’t ended up by himself. It’s the very people who have such a hard time connecting who most desperately need companionship.

  I think it’s worth talking a little about Greg’s last few years. I found his circumstances incredibly painful, and that’s the main reason that I didn’t see him or ring him as often as I wish I had and should have. Especially when I saw him in person, his woeful physical condition moved me to tears. As you all probably know, owing to two nasty accidents a couple of years apart, Greg had a hard time getting around even with a cane; he was in constant pain, and respiratory problems required him to drag that portable oxygen tank behind him wherever he went, like a faithful dog. And again, let’s not beat about the bush, he got fat. Because my brother never did anything by halves his whole life, when Greg got fat, he got fat with a vengeance.

  What pained me most about his weight was that lots of people couldn’t see him anymore. All they saw was some big geez who they hoped didn’t squeeze in next to them on the bus. I hated Greg’s having become at once so big but also, to strangers, invisible. The home stretch of his life was agonizing, and there’s a way in which he died by degrees. That’s the sole thing that’s good about his passing: getting it over with. I will miss him fiercely, but for the last few years Greg was in such a state of constant physical suffering that he seemed to be sticking around in large part as a favor to his friends and family. As I told my mother after he died, that car that broadsided him on his moped, and very nearly killed him? Well, in the end it did kill him. Took a decade, but that car did kill him.

  Still, it’s worth remembering that behind all that bloat and disability was an extraordinary person—a brother, a son, a father, a friend, and, yes, a genius—if only to remember that other distended and damaged bodies disguise unusual people whom families and friends desperately love. That’s one thing I learned from Greg during his latter life; I think he increased my compassion. That’s a compassion that we can all continue to spread around to folks who are still with us.

  So I think it’s fitting to take this opportunity to thank two people who showed so much compassion toward Greg Shriver when his health became compromised, which also made it hard for him to keep making a living. That’s my parents. I probably know better than anyone that Greg was a difficult son. There were whole years during which he didn’t communicate with his family at all, and we had no idea where he was living. But that didn’t stop our parents from coming to his aid when he needed their help. Greg’s determination to visit our parents in New York for Thanksgiving last month was a testimony to his love for them; he was willing to risk a journey that he really wasn’t well enough to undertake. I’m sorry that trip plunged him into a last medical crisis from which he never recovered, but I’m glad for his and their sakes that he was in New York, where our parents could visit every day and hold his hand. I’m hopeful that Greg knew, however dimly, that they were there. I’d also like to thank his close friends Scott and Markie, who really stuck by Greg, and who were always there when he needed them. Greg talked to me about you both all the time.

  I don’t plan on remembering my brother at four hundred pounds and hardly able to walk. I’ll always picture him instead in that cavernous basement workshop on Franklin Street in Raleigh, where I used to visit him in my teens and twenties. You know, with his army truck parked in the drive. The shop was always hazy with sawdust, littered with encrusted coffee cups, and cluttered with salvaged machine parts that Greg just might find a use for someday. It was always dark, not only because it had no windows to speak of, but because Greg, with typical I’ll-do-it-my-way perversity, slept all day and worked all night. That basement was clamorous with shrieks from the table saw and Greg’s shouted directions to his employees above the din. In those days, Greg always wore black jeans shiny with machine oil, and he trooped that concrete floor in lace-up black boots with inch-thick corrugated soles, his long, dark hair swinging—more perversity—in not two but three tight braids. His rimless glasses were tinted yellow, like the tobacco-stained fingers of his right hand. I’ll always remember his signature smirk, with that wisp of a mustache that took years to grow in. I’ll remember my brother as thin. And I’ll remember my brother as vigorous, galumphing across that basement slightly bent forward as if fighting an oncoming gale, lunging from side to side, always clutching another cup of coffee, already cold.

  Greg, if you’re out there? I’ll always regret not having been able to talk to you one more time—since there’s a kind of talk you have only when you both know it’s your last conversation. If I were given that chance, I’d tell you how much I’ve always looked up to you, and how much I still do. How grateful I was when things finally started to go a little my way professionally, but in tragically perfect concert with things going to hell for you. You didn’t fly into a fit of sibling rivalry. Instead I got, “You go, girl.” There’s a way in which you and I were always allies, in collusion, in the end not so much against our parents as against the whole bossy, petty, normative world that told us what we could and could not do. You’ve always given me courage to swim against the tide. I love you, and for your many failings I forgive you, since your failings had a splendor all their own. There will never be anyone else like you. Your life was epic, baroque, outrageous, built on a grand scale, even if you paid for your eccentricities on the same grand scale. Our family is smaller, more ordinary, and more boring without you. Anything I accomplish in future will be a measure less gratifying because I can’t share it with my older brother. I wish that you’d come around for even a few minutes at Saint Luke’s hospital, just so you’d have known that I was ringing every day, and worrying every day. I can’t tell you how much I hate having flown to North Carolina all the way from London this week on your account, and you don’t even know it. Because if you’d only woken up, I’d have so much more gladly flown to New York last month, to whisper in your ear that you were always the renegade, the outlaw, the real revolutionary in our family who had not only talent and brains but guts, and I was proud to be your sister.

  Part II

  “What Did You Do in the War, Mommy?”

  “Fiction and Identity Politics”

  Brisbane Writers Festival Opening Address, 2016

  I hate to disappoint you folks, but unless we stretch the topic to the breaking point this address will not be, as advertised, about “community and belonging.” In fact, you have to hand it to this festival’s organizers: inviting a renowned iconoclast to speak about “community and belonging” is like expecting a shark to balance a beach ball on its nose.

  The topic I submitted instead—for which I was given the official go-ahead months ago—was “Fiction and Identity Politics,” which may sound on its face equally dreary. But I’m afraid the thorny issues that cluster around “identity politics” have got all too interesting, particularly for people pursuing the occupation I share with many gathered in this hall: fiction writing. Taken to their logical conclusion, ideologies recently come into vogue challenge our right to write fiction at all. Meanwhile, the kind of fiction we are “allowed” to write is in danger of becoming so hedged, so circumscribed, so tippy-toe, that we’d indeed be better off not writing the anodyne drivel to begin with.

  Let’s start with a tempest in a teacup at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Earlier this year, two students, both members of student government, threw a tequila-themed birthday party for a friend. The hosts provided attendees with miniature sombreros, which—the horror—numerous partygoers wore.

  When photos of the party circulated on social media, campus-wide outrage ensued. Administrators sent multiple emails to the “culprits,” threatening an investigation into an “act of ethnic stereotyping.” Partygoers were placed on “social probation,” while the two hosts were ejected from their dorm and later impeached. Bowdoin’s student newspaper decried the attendees’ lack of “basic empathy.” The student government issued a “statement of solidarity” with “all the students who were injured and affected by the incident,” and demanded that administrators “create a safe space for those students who have been or feel specifically targeted.” The tequila party, the statement specified, was just the sort of occasion that “creates an environment where students of color, particularly Latino, and especially Mexican, feel unsafe.” In sum, the party favor hats constituted—wait for it—“cultural appropriation.”