Hub and Spoke. Audio Collective.

This is Rumbel Strip, I'm Erica Hyelman.

If you called me up and said, your best friend just died, I would find myself standing in front of

the refrigerator just staring into it, looking for something to eat. If you called me up and said,

you just want a Pulitzer Prize, the same thing would happen.

That's Bill Schubert. He's a writer, a cultural and political commentator.

He has chaired a lot of important boards here in Vermont.

He's really smart and he talks a lot and a lot of people listen.

What he talks less about is that he has struggled with being fat his entire life.

It's not necessarily that he's averse to talking about it. In fact, he wrote a brilliant collection of stories called Fat People in 2010.

His weight has been a central and consequential and painful fact of his life but it doesn't come up in

conversation. The F word. In this show we talk about it. Here's Bill Schubart. It was a hot summer day in Morrisville. The neighborhood

kids and I were running through the sprinkler and I had a bathing suit on and it became time to come in and my mother's mother was

sitting on the couch and she was a source of terror to all of us. She was a very dark woman, extremely

critical and she was sitting on the couch reading and I went trotting by in my bathing suit and she said come here and I

stopped and I walked over to her and she looked at me from head to toe like this and she said,

you look like a hermaphrodite and turned back into her book.

I had no idea what a hermaphrodite was. So I took out my little

dictionary and I looked it up and burst into tears.

The real moment of something's gone wrong.

Somehow I'm different was that moment with my mother's mother.

And from that moment on, I always wore a shirt or a t-shirt.

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