hi griefbacon subscribers. recently, someone asked me on twitter if the title of this newsletter had anything to do with the German word kummerspeck, and I realized that I’ve never actually talked about the title and its origin in this version of this letter. as of today, the substack version of griefbacon is one year old, but counting the time back when it was a tinyletter, I’ve been writing and sending these for a little over three years (which feels absolutely wild to me). Thank you so much, all of you who have read these over the past year, and all of you who’ve been here since the tinyletter days - having a continued audience for this writing is bizarre in the best way, and wonderful, and I’m so grateful for it.
Anyway, as a small way to mark that anniversary, I figured I’d resend the first griefbacon letter I ever wrote, which I sent to a small handful of tinyletter subscribers back in the fall of 2015. It’s very short, but it explains the origin of the title a little. at the end, I’ve also included a link to a longer piece I wrote on the same word. I might write more on this in the future, but for now, enjoy a small retro vintage griefbacon.
also, a quick housekeeping note: I said in the last letter that these letters would be less frequent in the future, but by that I just meant that this week they have been and will be unusually frequent because I’m making up for the accidental hiatus in December. For at least the next year, these letters will show up in your inbox once a week, with three only for paying subscribers, and one free for everybody.
The title here is one of those “untranslatable words” that have been mistranslated and misquoted until they become a meme. The German word “kummerspeck” supposedly translates as “the excess weight gained due to sorrow,” or more literally “kummer” = “grief” and “speck” = “bacon.” “Speck” can also just translate to “layer of fat,” which is probably how the word is meant to be translated, but “griefbacon” is the kind of perfect little giddy sad joke that goes viral. The seriousness of grief, and the bro-ish silliness of bacon. Two things from entirely opposite universes of significance colliding, the second undoing the significance of the first.
Grief is always ridiculous. Sorrow lives right on the edge of the kind of outsize behavior at which we understand we’re allowed to laugh. This is why clowns are heartbreaking, and why videos of people having mental breakdowns go viral as humor before we realize what they are and that we’re not supposed to be laughing. A video was briefly massively popular a few weeks ago in which a woman yells hysterically at a bear who is stealing her kayak. I laughed the first few seconds into it because bears are adorable and great when there’s not actually a bear anywhere near you and because one of the basic forms of humor is a person doing a very illogical thing with absolute determination. But then I read the rest of the description of the video and learned that the woman in question subsequently had to swim in freezing water until she reached a boat that was kind enough to rescue her and take her to land so she could get food and shelter, because that kayak had been her means of getting herself to both, and now it was gone. (note: I’m sure we found out horrible things about the video, or the woman, since then. I can’t remember if we did and I apologize if so, but anyway at the time it seemed like a useful metaphor.)
I think about all the humiliating things I’ve done when I was afraid I was going to lose access to food or shelter or livelihood, when suddenly what I had counted on to get me from one place to the next place was taken away without warning. When I’ve loved someone who didn’t love me back; when my phone died just before I needed to send a text. We all turn into that voice at the edge of that strange recording, that high-pitched, whining thing edging into a keen, the thing that abandons logic and good politics to plead just don’t take my things away. Grief is the place past the border where it no longer matters whether you appear attractive, or pleasant, or correct, where the whole notion of public and private and why you should care fritters away into nothing. Grief is reasoning with a thing that can’t understand you and will probably only get angrier as you make high-pitched sounds at it, not reasoning because you believe reasoning will work, but because grief lives past the equations of cause and effect, past the logic that bargains results.
Griefbacon as a (sort of fake) word has always struck me because it refers to this same aspect of grief – the ridiculous, the outsize, the humiliating. The breakdown that happens in public, the kind of crying that involves a lot of snot. In our society, women are made fun of and reviled for two things arguably more than anything else: being fat, and being sad. Women are also defined by these two things; crying and fat often stand in for the female. As a women above all else you are cautioned, implored, and mandated not to be large. But grief is luxuriant. It is fat. It is demanding and overwhelming and impolite. Grief leans so far in that it pushes everyone out of the room, grief refuses to negotiate. To me, to gain weight in grief seems in some way to do the grief justice, to manifest it in one’s body and refuse to let the world look away, refuse to let the fact that we are all walking around suffering, that we are all the voice terrified of the bear breaking our kayak, be politely denied. We are not supposed to wear ourselves on the outside.
Griefbacon is undeniably funny, too, just like suffering is the only thing that’s actually funny. Being funny is another way for women to be large, and another thing written out of canonical femininity. I like the impoliteness of griefbacon, the funny ugliness, the ugliness that wants to be ugly, and wants to be funny, and wants to point out that most things are horrible and hilarious at once, that our bodies are a cruel slapstick and will one way or another betray us and someone will think its hilarious when they do (most old-fashioned filthy bodily humor, like incontinence, becomes an indicator of tragedy if you shift the context over just a few inches).
Here’s more from me on griefbacon (and food and bodies and manners and Miss Piggy), if you want to keep reading. happy 2019, friends. thank you again for reading. x