More often than I’d like, I’ll spend a day hunched over my laptop, ignoring my aching back or my neck, making little Rice Krispies noises when I turn it. I’ll eat standing instead of sitting. I’ll spend hours and hours tuned into a series of smaller and bigger screens instead of my senses. And then, something will happen. I’ll remember I can go for a walk. As I flex my legs and my arms in the sun, and feel a breeze, and see magnolia blossoms and dog shit and row homes and Squid Facts Hotline stickers on traffic posts, I’ll realise: Oh, I have a body. Oh, there’s the world. 

“We have four million books that are like, ‘where is the missing girl?’” Emma Copley Eisenberg says, “but give me the books that are like, ‘where is my missing body and why did it go missing in the first place?’”

In her new collection of fictional short stories, Fat Swim, a most anticipated book of 2026 from Playboy and Literary Hub, Eisenberg explores what it means to inhabit a body: young bodies, old bodies, fat bodies, thin bodies, trans bodies, all sorts of bodies, highlighting those existing with gorgeousness and pleasure outside of normative societal beauty and gender standards. Eisenberg’s work espouses body neutrality: the simple tenet that everyone just, you know, has a body. And that those bodies each provide similar experiences of numbness and sensation, heat and cold, pain and pleasure – and that each, by nature of their existence, deserves autonomy and dignity. 

In the book, an eight-year-old girl becomes enamored with a group of women at a Wednesday public pool fat swim; a woman starts a make-up video series where she becomes Ursula the Sea Witch, contours abs onto her stomach and adds fat rolls to her calves, ankles, and forearms; a viral Swiffer sex video circulates (”It’s not so bad,” Swiffer girl says, “Of course it’s very bad, but we survived it”) and campers on a wellness retreat attempt to reconnect with the five senses.

Below, the bestselling Philadelphia-based author of Housemates and The Third Rainbow Girl, speaks with us about anti-ergonomic desk chairs, beauty start-ups, and the elusive mystery of our embodiment.

These stories grapple with what it means to inhabit a body. Why is this so vital? 

Emma Copley Eisenberg: It’s really confusing to me how having a body is one of the great mysteries of being a person and yet we so rarely see that mystery investigated in fiction. I was raised with almost no connection to my body, which I thought was a fine way to live until it started to ruin my life. For example, I bought an ergonomic desk chair and put it together wrong and then sat in it that way for two years until my back was irrevocably fucked. I trusted the chair’s written instructions more than I trusted my own pain. 

I feel this so deeply—I’ll go months without addressing a pain I’m having, or even being fully aware of it. How does sexuality relate to this idea of embodiment? 

Emma Copley Eisenberg: I think for a lot of people, sex is one of the easiest and most obvious ways into feeling connected to having a body, but having it be the only way can lead to trouble. When all the physical sensations a person is capable of noticing are via sex, the erotic sphere can become overcrowded like a stuffed suitcase or a garden plot full of trash. It’s hard for anything else to grow. We get so many conflicting messages about how we are supposed to value our bodies and also how we are supposed to make them better because actually they are still disgusting and wrong. I saw this meme the other day that was like, ‘the body can stop keeping score like omg bitch we get it’ and I cackled for so many minutes. 

Now we’ve added ‘not loving our body enough’ to the list of things to feel bad about. But all these messages come from our phones and our TVs and our friends, not the smartest artists of our day. It seems we’ve ceded the body to the territory of therapy and memes and multinational corporations or influencers that profit off of our confusion. Over the years it took me to write the stories that became Fat Swim, I kept looking for a place where I could take all the ingredients of this dilemma, turn them into a stew and then swim in it, so I kept writing characters who were looking for that too. 

Your work always feels deeply embodied to me. What is so important, or liberating, about visceral depictions of the body in literature? 

Emma Copley Eisenberg: I am maybe one of the least embodied people I know (see above) so it’s always really strange to hear this. So many people in my life have much easier and more pleasurable relationships to their bodies. But in another way it makes sense. The short story writer Grace Paley once said that ‘where you are kind of dumb, write a story or a novel, depending on the depth and breadth of your dumbness’ so I guess I am very, very dumb about embodiment considering I had to write ten stories that add up to a book about it.

In “Beauty,” a character has a trajectory from founding a toxic beauty startup into creating its essential opposite, in a provocative make-up tutorial video series. How does this arc reflect the dynamics of the book as a whole?

Emma Copley Eisenberg: The character in “Beauty”’s name is Marion as an homage (pejorative) to the main character in Jonathan Franzen’s super fatphobic book Crossroads. My Marion starts out extremely far away from herself and her body. She doesn’t have a strong sense of what it means to have friendships or what being beautiful means, and so she lets the world’s definitions fill in that lack. She also falls in with two women who believe that beauty is assessed by buying things and being thin. But at a certain point, that becomes untenable for Marion, and she is actually pushed out. It’s not a leaving of her own making, which is maybe what makes it extra painful. 

I think that is true for many of us: that in order to leave those old definitions of beauty, we don’t always leave of our own accord. That hurts. But once we are pushed out, we find that there is something more interesting out there, and that is what Marion finds.

Characters here have eating disorders, mourn the loss of thinner bodies, and take Ozempic. How did you navigate this as a writer interested in fat liberation?

Emma Copley Eisenberg: I am a writer interested in representing the world as it is, with all its bizarre and painful and funny contradictions. It is true that while I have found solidarity and comfort in fat liberation communities, what I believe and feel in private about my own body is still often ugly or cruel or numb or avoidant. My feelings about my own body are not an argument; they have no logic, they are not moral or immoral. 

I wanted to show in this book that what we want to believe or where we want to go is often very different from what we actually believe and where we are. There is a part in “Beauty” where the main character realizes her current body is her past self’s nightmare. That’s a complex thing to know. The day-to-day real experience of being human and embodied does not fit neatly into any intellectual or social framework. We live in a world that still tells us that to be fat is to be disgusting and less than, so it would be impossible to write true stories in which that core pressure is totally absent.

What does it mean to you to participate in fat liberation or bodily liberation? How can stories be a part of that heritage? 

Emma Copley Eisenberg: As Emma, I believe in being part of a movement for fat liberation, but my stories have no opinion or message because people have no argument or message. That’s what I love about reading and writing fiction. In my fiction, I am striving for something closer to body neutrality, meaning that every body on the planet deserves to be cherished and has the right to safety, housing, employment, etc. Body neutrality often goes hand-in-hand with larger movements of fat and disability liberation, but it is in some ways even more about simple bodily autonomy: everyone has the right to make choices about their own bodies for themselves. My fiction is more body neutral than it is body liberatory, I think, in that it takes no stance and does not advocate. In my life, I consider myself a fat activist, but my fiction is not activism. It is art.