I was getting my MFA in nonfiction writing at Columbia, taking classes with Hilton Als and Leslie Jamison, and I started to do some writing about my relationship with my body, which led to some of the research that became the foundation of the book. How did you get the idea to turn these observations into a book? How could a body part come in and out of fashion? There seemed to be so many cultural and historical factors at play. But later in my life, my butt started to attract a different, more positive kind of attention. In that time and place, having a big butt was not considered desirable, especially for a white woman, and I felt the kind of mundane shame most of us have about our bodies. I have a big butt, and when I was growing up in the 1990s in a suburb of Lansing, Michigan, I was teased about it. How did you become interested in this unusual subject?
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