Big Girls Don’t Cry – Q&A with Beacon Press
Susan Swan has never fit inside the boxes that other people have made for her—the daughter box, the wife box, the mother box, the femininity box. Instead, throughout her richly lived, independent decades, she has carved her own path and lived with the consequences.
In her revealing and revelatory memoir, Big Girls Don’t Cry, Swan shares the key moments of her life. As a child in a small Ontario town, she was defined by her size—attracting ridicule because she was six-foot-two by the age of twelve. She left her marriage to be a single mother and a fiction writer in the edgy, underground art scene of 1970s Toronto. In her 40s, she embraced the new freedom of the Aphrodite years. Despite the costs to her relationships, Swan kept searching for the place she fit, living in the literary circles of New York while seeking pleasure and spiritual wisdom in Greece, and culminating in the hard-won experience of true self-acceptance in her seventies. Beacon Press sales and marketing coordinator Frankie Karnedy caught up with Swan to chat about it and about taking up space.
Frankie Karnedy: Big Girls Don’t Cry is your first memoir, but your novels have also drawn from your personal experiences. The Biggest Modern Woman of the World’s giantess Anna Swan is mentioned by name in your memoir, and The Wives of Bath is set in an all-girls boarding school much like the one you attended in your youth. Did it feel different writing directly about your own life and experiences?
Susan Swan: With the exception of my novel about a fraudster like Canada’s Conrad Black, you’re correct to say I’ve drawn from my life experiences for my fiction. Maybe that’s why it didn’t feel strange to write a memoir, a form that distills and dramatizes like a novel. And I had to find a trajectory through my story the way I do when I’m writing a novel. After Margaret Atwood suggested I write about my height, I realized that I was just like my literary character in my first novel, the real-life Victorian giantess Anna Swan, who exhibited with P. T. Barnum. Anna spent her life looking for a home that would accommodate her extraordinary size and never found it, and I have spent my life as a woman and a writer looking for the place where I fit. My search was more rewarding than hers.
FK: In the time since your childhood, tall girls have begun to “take up space”—as you may put it—in pop culture with movies such as Tall Girl, celebrities like Michelle Obama, and now memoirs like yours. What sort of takeaways do you think twelve-year-old you would have if she was growing up in this time period instead of in the 1950s?
SS: When I was a girl, the cut-off point for acceptance seemed to be just below six feet. To be six-foot-two at twelve like me was considered unfortunate. Thanks to the popularity of supermodels, that’s not as true today, but I suspect if I grew to be six-three or six-four now, I would still get put-downs and still be called names. But I have the comebacks I wrote for my daughter when she grew to six feet, so I would be able to put anyone who insulted me in their place.
Unfortunately, people often don’t realize (or don’t want to realize) that teasing others about their size can be hurtful. They see someone who is the same height, weight, and coloring as them every day, so they don’t understand that it’s a strange and lonely feeling if you don’t see anyone else in the world who looks like you.
FK: Your friend Margaret Atwood wrote in her foreword for Big Girls Don’t Cry that she encouraged you to write this memoir. Are there any other women writers who encouraged the writing process for this book, or whom you drew inspiration from as you were writing?
SS: It’s been a thrill to meet a number of impressive young women novelists and short story writers through my work on the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, writers like Talia Kolluri, Daphne Palasi Andreades, Alexis Shotkin, and Fatimah Asghar. But, right now, I take my inspiration from women writers in Canada and the US like Sheila Heti, Claudia Dey, Miranda July, Maggie Nelson, Sarah Manguso, Nell Zink, and Rachel Kushner. They’re writing full out about their lives as women and writers and damn the consequences. I admire how free and brave they are in their work about subjects like selfishness, sexuality, and disillusionment with the conventional paths women are supposed to take. The fact that they’re able to do this so well and be celebrated for it tells me there’s a lot right about our literary culture at a time when our political culture leaves a lot to be desired.
FK: The first part of your memoir is shaped by social and thematic “boxes,” such as the “dutiful daughter,” that you tried to fit yourself into or break out of. What is your advice to women who may feel trapped inside their own boxes on how they can try to break free?
SS: Asking questions and coming up with answers is the key to getting out of boxes or frameworks that don’t fit who you are. Questions like, Why is this box holding me back? Why does it feel so uncomfortable? What is lacking for me in this framework in which I’m currently living? Once you name a problem, you can start to solve it.
FK: What message do you hope readers will take away from your memoir?
SS: Remember that making decisions that seem outrageous and even downright dangerous for you at the time may seem perfectly sensible and the right choice when you have become the person you set out to be.
About the Authors
Susan Swan is a novelist and nonfiction writer, a professor emerita, and a recipient of the Order of Canada. Her books include The Wives of Bath, The Biggest Modern Woman of the World, What Casanova Told Me, The Western Light, and Stupid Boys Are Good to Relax With. She is also cofounder of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, the largest literary prize for women and nonbinary writers in Canada and the United States.
Frankie Karnedy is the sales and marketing coordinator at Beacon Press. She joined Beacon in 2022 after graduating from Johns Hopkins University with a BA in Writing Seminars and English. Previously, she interned at a literary agency and worked with children and teens at her local library. When she’s not trying to get to the bottom of her endless TBR list, she enjoys taking dance classes and baking fun desserts.