“I sat, eased a few M&M’s into my mouth, and flipped to page 132, which turned out to be ‘Good in Bed,’ Moxie’s regular male-written feature designed to help the average reader understand what her boyfriend was up to… or wasn’t up to, as the case might be. At first my eyes wouldn’t make sense of the letters. Finally, they unscrambled. ‘Loving a Larger Woman,’ said the headline, ‘By Bruce Guberman.’ Bruce Guberman had been my boyfriend for just over three years, until we’d decided to take a break three months ago. And the Larger Woman, I could only assume, was me.
You know how in scary books a character will say, ‘I felt my heart stop?’ Well, I did. Really. Then I felt it start to pound again, in my wrists, my throat, my fingertips. The hair at the back of my neck stood up. My hands felt icy. I could hear the blood roaring in my ears, as I read as I read the first line of the article: ‘I’ll never forget the day I found out my girlfriend weighed more than i did.’”(Weiner 4)
On the second page of the first chapter, this passage serves to relay critical information about the main character, Cannie, as well as introduce a major element to the plot. The whole passage revolves around Cannie discovering that her boyfriend had written about her in a magazine article about sex. With the words “sat” and “eased” being the first two verbs we encounter in this paragraph, her diction immediately suggests a softer, more relaxed tone. This first, lengthier sentence is juxtaposed with the next few sentences which are considerably choppier. This conveys a sense that time is slowing down to the reader, and further emphasizes the point at the end of the paragraph which is that Cannie is the aforementioned “larger woman”. To be exposed to the public in such personal and revealing manner would certainly be upsetting. This feeling is expressed to the reader in the following paragraph via considerable imagery. This part of the passage is dominated by descriptions of her bodily reaction to the information. Icy hands, intense awareness of your heartbeat, and the hair standing up on the back of your neck are all sensations that are relatable to within a context of shock. In this way, the reader receives a emotional, vicarious understanding of Cannie’s experience. Both of these paragraphs culminate in the last sentence, when it is revealed that Cannie is a larger woman and is being exposed in a somewhat traumatizing format. This information is the central purpose of the passage.
I did not find it very difficult to close-read this passage. On one hand it was pretty straight forward in its content, being a passage dedicated primarily to plot development. Literarily, there is not too much deep, intellectual writing here; the passage is mostly sensational. the author’s literary tools appear to be primarily dedicated to conveying Cannie’s physical experience to the reader, as opposed to a greater message or deeper insight into character.