The batter hit a pop fly to center field, just deep enough for the 13-year-old boy on third base to score. He left the bag, returned in confusion, and then raced toward home plate. But, as David Lazar recalls, his size 36-Husky frame moved in slow motion as though his “legs were singing work songs.” He was out.

It was just a game, but the young boy knew his “lumpen sack of flesh and confusion” had blown it. “I was so ashamed of my body,” Lazar says. Only recently was the essayist ready to write about growing up fat and other intimate details of his Brooklyn childhood in the 1960s and 1970s.

In The Body of Brooklyn, a book of personal essays published last spring by the University of Iowa Press, Lazar intertwines memories of his Jewish heritage, childhood obesity, and emerging sexuality. “It’s impossible for me to think of Brooklyn — whether it’s about food, neighborhood, or childhood angst — without those experiences being about the body,” says Lazar, an Ohio University associate professor of English and editor of the literary journal Hotel Amerika.

He says it felt liberating to write down things he’d previously admitted only to his closest friends. And a bit frightening. The essay’s anything-goes nature meant he had no idea when he began writing what he might reveal. But Lazar seems to relish the risks. “The real fun of writing the essay comes when it gets scary, when you sense you’re going to have to say the thing that either you’ve resisted saying or you’d simply rather not say,” he says.

Body Triple

Wearing a small earring in his left ear, silver-framed glasses, and his signature black T-shirt, Lazar these days appears trim and energetic, belying the youth he describes as 60 pounds overweight by age 14. His essays sear with selfloathing at being fat. He writes of the adolescent boy with a double chin and bulging middle who stood in front of a mirror naked, squeezing folds of fat and repeating “You are so disgusting.” He recalls his father saying that he’d be handsome, if he weren’t fat.

He enjoyed playing sports, but self-consciousness about his lumbering body made him inept. “I couldn’t believe that anyone whose stomach protruded that far could slide into second, or make a lay-up when guarded by a lither opponent,” he writes. But after losing weight, he says his shots “started going in and I started hitting the ball out of the infield.”

Other essays include subtle elegies to his mother, who took him on treasured shopping trips to the city for clothes that made him feel svelte. (He loves shopping still.) “My mother is one-quarter of the book emotionally,” Lazar says, adding that the book’s title conflates her body, his, and the geographical one of Brooklyn. In a story that he admits was painful to put on paper, Lazar tells of betraying his mother, in large part by rejecting her cooking.

There was little about Brooklyn and his upbringing that wasn’t about food, Lazar says. One essay pokes fun at his family’s Old World-meets-New World diet of “gefilte fish and Pop Tarts” and gives a typical week’s menu. He particularly savors the memory of Friday night dinners: “Homemade chopped liver with a sliced tomato, chicken soup with a single large carrot in every bowl, and roasted chicken. What could be bad?”

Bullies could be, particularly junior high school “Mafia kids” who found their chubby classmate a perfect punching target. But Lazar recalls the period of terror with comic irony, describing the “complementary deficiencies” that created his unlikely alliance with Vinny, a school thug who protected Lazar from a group of bullies in return for answers on vocal music exams.

At some point during junior high, he writes, he vowed to keep private some central parts of his life, “let’s say for a very long time.”

Percolating Memories

Lazar waited to write these childhood stories until recently for a number of reasons. Decorum, for one. “Writing autobiographically, you’re always aware of the relationship of what you need and want to say to the pain it might cause,” Lazar says.

Even now, he steers away his 84-year-old father from reading upsetting passages. For instance, one essay shares a memory he harbored for years: the time he overheard his father, in a fit of rage, screaming to his mother that he had never loved David or his brother. “I remember it so clearly, my brother and I sitting on the stairs, shrinking as we heard this,” Lazar says.

His brother appears in other stories as well. After reading the book his brother had “about 15 points that he wanted to take up on how I’d depicted him,” Lazar says with a laugh.

And what about classmate Debbie Whalen, the subject of the adolescent Lazar’s erotic fantasies? “I’d be charmed if Debbie ever read it,” he says. He adds that he uses actual names when he feels there’s nothing slanderous, libelous, or needlessly painful in doing so. “What I said about Debbie was rather normal and, in fact, flattering.”

Understanding childhood experiences also takes time, Lazar says. In fact, few writers have made a mark on the essay form in their youth, in part because it’s difficult to sort out confusion while living amidst it, writes essayist Phillip Lopate in The Art of the Personal Essay.

Lazar says that letting the memory of his father’s outburst percolate for years helped him to contextualize it. “I learned there was part of my father that was a pressure cooker — a result of his residual rage at growing up with 10 people in a small apartment and his own will to succeed,” Lazar explains.

The scariest experiences to articulate are not the big, operatic events of life, he says. Rather, it’s the smaller moments, such as when he and his brother took an oath to never fight again. Although Lazar describes the scene comically, he says it was hard to publicly share the moment’s “desire for intimacy, for the closeness that had cheated all other closeness.”

Baggy And Quirky

While considering questions of childhood, Lazar also is exploring the experimental essay. He likes its “great baggy nature,” which let him mix prose, poetry, even a photo essay of old family photographs, to create The Body of Brooklyn.

Lazar says he doesn’t write personal essays as therapy or “to solve or salve something.” Rather, he enjoys surrounding a topic from many angles and seeing where that process leads. As he tells graduate students in a writing workshop: “You might catch yourself with dubious motives or lies, but you leave it in. It gives you credibility.”

Nor does he write to entertain readers. He believes the essay’s intimate and storytelling tone, along with the writer’s unique voice, will draw in readers. Whether or not readers respond to his specific voice is a “great toss-up,” he admits. A friend once described his voice as a combination of Oxford don and Brooklyn brat, he says. “What is it in that Brooklyn voice that is still in me — that still interests and bothers me?”

Some questions are meant to be raised, not answered, in the essay. Lazar may have figuratively shed some weight with words, but he knows he’ll never leave the subject. “I’ll always have this love-hate relationship with my body,” he says.

“I’m reconciled,” he says. “To hell with self-esteem.”

David Lazar's Webpage
http://www.english.ohiou.edu/faculty/lazar/index.html

The Body of Brooklyn
http://www.uiowa.edu/uiowapress/lazbodof.htm