Lee Kofman Interview

Interviewer: Samuel Elliott

About the author:

Dr. Lee Kofman is a Russian-born Israeli-Australian author, who has edited two anthologies and penned five books. In addition to her long-form and editorial work, her poetry, short stories and creative non-fiction pieces have featured in a wealth of publications, including Harper’s Bazaar, Meanjin and The Griffith Review, among numerous others. Beyond her own writing, Kofman has also interviewed several literary luminaries, including Heather Morris, Ceridwen Dovey and Sofie Laguna.

About ImperfectHow our bodies shape the people we become:

By the time Kofman had turned eleven and was living in the Soviet Union, she had undergone multiple major operations, for both a defective heart, as well as for injuries resulting from a horrific bus accident. These operations left Kofman with a constellation of disfiguring scars that shaped her sense of self and the world.

Blending cultural critique and personal memoir, Kofman incisively investigates the myths and challenges the conventions of physical perfection that society, both past and contemporary, have perpetuated. Her own life’s story is balanced with those of people of all shapes, sizes and configurations she encountered during her exhaustive research, in order to take an earnest and unflinching look at the way in which both culture and mainstream media delineate how our bodies should and shouldn’t be.

Imperfect is now available from Affirm Press, here: https://affirmpress.com.au/publishing/imperfect/

 

INTERVIEWER

You make mention early on of some of the imperfections, or unique qualities of your close family, including your son. How does our appreciation or awareness of the physicality of those close to us affect our viewing of our own physicality? Did it help shape, or largely influence, the writing of Imperfect? Did it even possible serve as a large driving force behind the book?

LEE

This is a great and complex question. It’s hard for me to generalise onto various family dynamics, so I’ll just discuss my own experience.

My second son, Ollie, has albinism, which means he has low vision. Many people with albinism have very fair skin and hair. Ollie’s skin and hair are fair but not to the degree that attracts curiosity. He does, however, have another visible difference common amongst people with albinism – nystagmus, an involuntary eye movementsometimes poetically called ‘dancing eyes’. His diagnosis, and my experience of parenting him, were crucial to my decision to write Imperfect, and that decision was bound to my sense of shame around my own body, my scars.

The thing is, I’ve carried this book, or rather variations on this book, inside me since my teens. In fact, my very first novel was called, surprise surprise, Scars andwas a lightly fictionalised account of how my body has impacted me. It was published when I was twenty and it was bad. In fact, it was so bad that I almost quit writing after that. And when I resumed, I stayed away from my scars. Or sort of stayed away. During my late thirties, I wrote a PhD that explored the experiences of women with non-facial scars. So I did keep skirting around my story. It was pressuring me from within to be told, but I couldn’t find the courage to reveal my secret, to reveal that I was a sphinx, as I thought then. Half-woman, half-creature.

But while my husband and I were coming to terms with Ollie’s diagnosis, one day I thought, it’s time I got over my shame and wrote the book I needed to write. Now for Ollie’s sake too. In this way, the fact that Ollie has a bodily difference helped me to change my attitudes to mine. And because of him my book had also changed shape. Once I had Ollie, I was no longer interested in just my own story, but also in the stories of any people who have what I call, ironically, “imperfections” (appearance that deviates from the current norm) including those like Ollie, where imperfections are not concealable. I wanted to talk about their, our, experiences, honestly and bring this conversation out into the world, including, hopefully, Ollie’s future classroom.

INTERVIEWER

The very nature of Imperfect ensures full disclosure, an unvarnished truth of the totality of you. That said, did you ever find certain thoughts or memories taboo, or did you ever feel an urge to omit them? Why, or why not? And was there any process spent of overcoming perennial stigmas still within yourself? Does one ever reach a point where they are totally comfortable with their body and its myriad of (what they perceive as) imperfections?

 LEE

I wouldn’t say that this book represents the totality of me, but I’m glad you felt like this as a reader! I believe all humans are so complex, so multidimensional, that it’s both impossible and also unnecessary to showcase ourselves in all our, as Robin Hemley writes in A Field Guide for Immersion Writing, ‘duplicitous glory’. For Imperfect, I picked and chose to write those aspects of myself which I felt were most relevant to the book’s focus on how my body has shaped me, just as in my previous memoir, The Dangerous Bride, I explored in depth my love life, but not as much my appearance.

In terms of taboos and stigmas I needed to overcome in Imperfect, as I was saying earlier I found it difficult to uncover what I’d previously hidden for so long – my scars. However, what I found even harder to disclose was the fact that in my younger years, my scars notwithstanding, I also pursued some beauty ideals, whether by dieting or walking around on impossibly high heels, or overusing lipstick. I was surprised to realise that I was even more ashamed to be deemed as ‘vain’ than to reveal myself as imperfect.

I did push through that shame though, as I also felt strongly that I needed to write honestly about my supposed vanity to expose this double-shame that I’ve experienced, and that many women these days experience, about both not being beautiful enough and also about trying to beautify themselves. See, while today there is sky-high pressure on people, particularly women, to be beautiful, at the same time our society also likes pretending that looks don’t matter. We like to say beauty is skin deep and all bodies are beautiful. We urge women to accept themselves as they are. These messages are meant to counter the pressures of impossible beauty standards and I’ve known women who find them liberating. But I’ve spoken to even more women who, like me, feel burdened both by beauty demands andby additional expectations for unconditional self-acceptance.

And this brings me to the last part of your question, about bodily self-acceptance – is it truly possible?I think self-acceptance isn’t something most of us achieve easily, or permanently. Some notable researchers of appearance, such as Nicola Rumsey and Diana Harcourt, think of imperfectionsas an underlying stressor, a kind ofAchilles heelthat might be dormant for years, then resurface in times of adversity or change.They say most of us fluctuate between acceptance and grief, depending on what else is going on in our lives.This view resonates with me and I came to think of bodily self-acceptance more as a verb than a noun, a verb of ongoing negotiation.

INTERVIEWER

You mention your love of reading, but particularly in the aftermath of being hit by the bus it was used as a form of escapism. If reading can transport someone away from their plight and suffering, do you think, and have you found in your own experience that reading has the power to also restore one’s acceptance of oneself physically? Or to finally achieve it if it were hitherto denied them?

 LEE

I haven’t experienced, or heard of, such causal relationship between reading and physical self-acceptance. Or any self-acceptance, for that matter. However, for me reading has always been a profoundly soul-soothing activity, and I apologise for the lofty language, but this is exactly how I feel when I read. I love reading even more than writing and not only because of the escapist possibilities, but also because reading – of good books that is – also slows me down and brings me into the space of reflection, and deep contemplation. Reading, as well as writing, are my secular versions of religion. When I read or write I feel I am bettering myself, and this sensation is also deeply soothing.

 

INTERVIEWER

You mention the god of disfigurement and society’s well documented aversion to it. In your research and findings have you found that this aversion has waned in accordance with more exposure to the god of disfigurement’s handiwork? Have we as a society progressed further than the days of the ‘Ugly Laws’ you also mention?

 LEE

I like how you used my metaphor here! (Well, actually it’s not even mine, but is borrowed from the writer Craig Sherbourne…). By god of disfigurement, I meant scars and amputations, and this metaphor evokes for me the almost mythical terror humans can feel at the sight of mutilated bodies.

The Ugly Laws, which made it illegal for people with visible disfigurements to appear in public spaces, were practiced in America (in some places tragically, even until the 70s), and now they no longer exist. However, nowadays, in my observation, mutilations are still publicly almost invisible and we still fear mutilations. I think this state of things has a lot to do with the fact that we’re a less religious society, which, understandably, also means our fear of death is more intense, and so too our faith in the powers of modern medicine.

But mutilations highlight the limits of medical potency and remind us of our animal, and therefore finite, nature. The absence of people with mutilations in the public sphere, be this on the streets or television screens, renders them even more strange when we do encounter them, even though in reality, at least scars are very common. So, although we’ve made some progress in that I can’t imagine having a punishing legislation ever again, on the other hand it seems to me we fear the god of disfigurement just the same, if not more.

INTERVIEWER

You detail how scars are still much more socially accepted for men and are effectively glamorised, as the assumption oftengoes that they could be earned gloriously, mostly through acts of bravery and heroism. You even point out the disparity between Harrison Ford’s chin scar being written into the character of Indiana Jones and yet Catherine Zeta Jones and Sharon Stone have spent their careers covering away their neck scarring.

 LEE

Yes, that’s right, gender politics seem to be playing themselves on the surfaces of imperfect bodies too. In most popular narratives – be this Hollywood or television series or fiction – if any characters bear scars they are usually portrayed either as evil or as miserable, tragic characters. And yet for men with scars there seems to be a little more room for alternative, more positive representations.

The violence associated with mutilated flesh sits easier with how we traditionally understand masculinity – an active, risk-taking state of being. To some extent,man’s ravage is something to be expected, even admired. As long as it’s moderate, of course. In popular culture’s unwritten laws, severely disfiguring facial scars on men signify evil, but milder mutilations are more ambiguous and can occasionally belong to the good guys, sometimes even enhancing their appeal.

Femalescars, though, are often depicted to be self-inflicted, evidence of a wounded psyche, mental instability. Or they might be inflicted by men and then signpost victimhood. Perhaps this is why the gorgeous Sharon Stone and Catherine Zeta-Jones conceal their scars so meticulously with necklaces, make-up and clothes – not to be thought of in such miserable terms.

INTERVIEWER

You also mention about a dating site, Beautiful People, removing clients from its site that are shown to have gained weight – do you think that this is also symbolic of social trends and sensibilities? Or is this an isolated case? Is a person’s weight as stigmatised as their scarring?

 LEE

That site’s decision is surely representative of our zeitgeist!

Like mutilations, today larger bodies are yet another ‘imperfection’. (I use the words ‘imperfect’ and ‘imperfection’ ironically, to indicate these bodies’ relation to the so-called norm that is increasingly edging closer to the impossible standard of perfection, or what we see in today’s west as perfection.) Larger bodies are possibly stigmatised even more so than scarred bodies. While certain scars, particularly men’s facial scars, can be associated with criminality, mostly we don’t so much blame as pity people who have scars.

With weight, it’s a different story.The fat stigma is tightly bound with blame, with assumptions of self-inflicted bad health, and the associated assumptions of ‘poor self-control’, ‘laziness’, ‘greed’ and such. But careful reviews of obesity science actually show that weight may not be as strong a predictor of health as we think, particularly when it’s possible to be both larger and fit. Excessive weight can cause serious health problems, but it doesn’t always. Plus, many people’s size isn’t as mutable as we’d like to believe; not every body is meant to be slim, so the ‘self-inflicted’ part of the blame is also very questionable. In fact, the prejudice can affect larger people much more than health issues.

INTERVIEWER

You touch on how humans lack some of the heightened senses of animals, such as smell and hearing, and therefore rely heavily on eyesight and the ability to read the Body Surface. Therefore, are we innately conditioned to view larger people negatively? Or is that still more a social construct? How much do you believe one shapes the other and is it ever possible to totally separate the two?

 LEE

That’s right, humans rely on their vision to gather information about the social world. However, howwe read human bodies is often socially conditioned. In many ways, bodies are tourist guides to the societies they inhabit, their norms and customs. The way we speak of Body Surface, what we read into it, what we believe should be done or not to it, speaks volumes about our anxieties and obsessions. Attitudes towards larger bodies have differed greatly across times and places, for examplethey’re particularly admired in societies where food shortages and disease are rife, indicating there the opposite of what they stand for in today’s West − good health and wealth.

So yes, the current negative views of larger people are socially constructed and can, and should, be changed. I’m very pleased to see that there is a considerable number of activists now working towards this. For example, Sydney-based artist Kelli Jean Drinkwater has been doing great work in challenging fat stigma.

INTERVIEWER

You detail meeting Andy, a poet with Marfan syndrome, and much of which is written on him in Imperfect is done so in a way that would suggest he has inspired you, particularly with his fronting of audiences and reading his work, along with expressing himself in his work.

LEE

You’re right – Andy definitely inspired and continues to inspire me! He inspires me with the frankness with which he discusses body differences, which is something I also aspired to in the writing of Imperfect; hence my book’s title – to signpost my wish to speak boldly about body diversity and to avoid euphemisms. It has meant a lot to me to hear this deeply intelligent person saying the same thing I’ve been feeling for a long time now – that the current trend of saying that all bodies are the same is not necessarily helpful for people who have imperfections. This common wisdom can gloss over the difficulties we may encounter in our daily lives.

INTERVIEWER

Have you found that the Tel Aviv in which you spent much of your youth was emblematic of the zeitgeist of the time – you mention diving into the sea of beauty and not realising how deep the pressure was at the bottom – do you feel that it represents contemporary society, be it across all cities, including Sydney?

 LEE

Yes, absolutely! Tel Aviv is not unique in its sweeping love affair with the beautiful body, or at least the kind of ‘beautiful’ as we understand it today in a fairly narrow sense of this word. I think all big cities, including Sydney and Melbourne, are body-conscious, filled with glittering advertisements and beautiful people inhabiting their chic restaurants and nightclubs. But the beauty we see a lot in such places can be also quite tedious in its uniformity, particularly that it is often enhanced and maintained with cosmetic technologies that strive towards a certain homogenous look (you know it when you see it – plump lips, high cheekbones, all that…).

It’s not that I am against the sheer existence of beauty. I actually want to see even more beauty around me – on screens and streets and glossy pages and paintings. But by ‘more’ I mean that I want to see not just this fashionable beauty that requires performing Herculean labours, but also a more natural, sometimes ragged and somewhat worn out beauty, also beauty that is, say, larger or shorter than what we currently consider to be ‘acceptable’, beauty with scars or port wine stains, and so it goes.

INTERVIEWER

At one point you mention that the contemporary zeitgeist is imbued with two contradictory ideas – ‘women have a duty of beauty, and that they shouldn’t be concerned with their appearance’– how can we as a society, ever overcome or eradicate this?

 LEE

This may sound paradoxical, but I believe that until we stop saying that beauty, or any appearance really, is ‘skin-deep’, until we concede how much it matters, we cannot make it matter less. To change private lives and public attitudes, the conversation about Body Surface must first move beyond clichés and politeness, make space for any genuine feelings, be thesejoie de vivrearound beauty or frustration and grief. We need to simply let individual women be, and validate their feelings and desires rather than try to fit them into some ideology. I also want to mention that increasingly men are also experiencing this beauty paradox, and so what I am saying about women in my book, to a lesser extent but still unfortunately can be applicable to today’s men as well.

INTERVIEWER

Lastly, what advice would you give to any and all readers that might potentially be harbouring issues with their own body? What advice would you give to your teenage self if you could?

 LEE

This is such an excellent question, thank you! I wish I was asked this more often…

There are many strategies how to live better in our bodies that I discuss in the book, but of course I don’t have sufficient space here for an exhaustive list. So I’ll just mention one strategy that I, and some of the people I interviewed for my PhD and for Imperfect, find very useful – exhibiting confidence. This confidence doesn’t have to be genuine; it can be just as effective when you fake it. In my younger years I must have already guessed this, because I often pretended I was at peace with my body. For example, even during the dreaded exposures to new lovers, I never apologised for or lamented my scars just as I never complained about, say, my cellulite. If you conceal your insecurities, others have less room to express their own judgements, and you don’t give them new ‘ideas’. Even fake confidence can make us more attractive to others.

But while even as an adolescent I instinctively performed confidence, there were so many things I didn’t know. If I could, I’d assure my teenage self that she is not as alone, not as a freak, as she thought she was. I’d say that even if she doesn’t see anyone else around looking like her, there are plenty of people out there, often covering themselves as she does. I’d advise her to reach out to them, find her tribe however she defines it – women with scars, women and men with scars, or perhaps any imperfect people. (Although, she wouldn’t have had then the benefits of online connection that now make it so much easier to find your peers.)

I’d be also telling her that while covering her scars can be adaptive, she doesn’t need to do this as hermetically, that it’s not a bad idea to experiment with exposure sometimes, to go out in public showing at least some of her scarring and test people’s reactions to her and how these impact her. Another thing I’d like to say is that the verbal concealing that she does, the not-telling her friends about how she feels in her body, isn’t good for her nor for her relationships with people. Finally, I’d be saying that as paradoxical as this may sound, but one of the best things she could do, one of the best things I’ve ever done as an adult, would be to take pressure off herself to ‘fully accept’ her body. As paradoxical as this may sound, but it was only once I gave myself permission to grieve over my scars, both privately and publicly – by writing Imperfect, that I’ve felt my grief significantly reduce.


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