In August 2015, 37-year-old Gabrielle Deydier went for a job interview which she passed with flying colours. The job was for a position as a teaching assistant at a Parisian special needs school and the interview panel, including the school’s headmaster, had been so impressed with Gabrielle that they even told her they were worried in case she left for a better-paid job, reports The Observer.
There had been only one uncomfortable moment: it came at the end, as Gabrielle was walking out the door. The headmaster said: “The teacher you’ll be working under can be rather difficult.” Gabrielle barely heard him, she was so delighted about her new job.
It wasn’t long before she realised that “difficult” was a colossal understatement. “You’re Gabrielle Deydier,” was the first thing the teacher in question said when they met. “I don’t work with fat people.” Gabrielle tried to laugh it off, but the difficult teacher wasn’t smiling. “It wasn’t a joke,” she said.
Gabrielle has two degrees, a pleasant and open manner and weighs 150kg, or 23½ stone. She also has the misfortune of both being French and living in France, which means that her physical appearance counts for everything, including her employability. In France, she says (and all the facts of her experience seem to bear this out), being fat is considered to be a grotesque self-inflicted disability. At any given time, 80% of Frenchwomen are thought to be on a diet. In the south of the country, there’s a lively gastric-band industry (50,000 operations a year).
There’s currently a vegan craze sweeping the land – a way for some people to cover up eating disorders. “Frenchwomen,” says Gabrielle, “pride themselves as being the most feminine in Europe. There is this feeling that women have to be perfect in every way.” Is it surprising then that the publication of Gabrielle’s book, You’re Not Born Fat, has attracted keen interest – a combination of both admiration and moral panic?
For Gabrielle the past 12 months have been like waking up from a nightmare, if nightmares were real and lasted two decades. At one point in our meeting she’s tearful – but they are tears of happy disbelief. Suddenly, at 38, Gabrielle, who’s been told her entire adult life that she wasn’t fit for work, is being called an intellectual break-out hero. She’s been profiled in Le Monde, Figaro, the political news magazine Le Point, and appeared on France’s most serious TV shows.
The day before I meet her a councillor under Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, called Gabrielle to ask whether she would consider organising the capital’s first anti-grossophobia (sizeism) day. Deals to write a film script and a novel have been made. Italian Vanity Fair wrote about her, and an Italian publisher snapped up the book. The English-language rights have not yet been sold.
What it means to be fat in France is for the first time up for discussion in France. “I decided to write the book,” she says, “because I no longer want to apologise for existing. Yes obesity has doubled in the past ten years, that’s much too much. But it does not mean we discriminate against the obese in telling them they can’t work and insulting them.”
Gabrielle, who couldn’t even look at a picture of herself until six months ago, has prepared herself for this moment. “My publisher said: ‘You will be on TV and it will be hard.’ So, with a friend, we started doing pictures of me in a swimming pool so I could accept how I looked in a swimsuit.” (On France’s beaches, disgusted passers-by have told her to “Please cover up.”) “Because I was doing it for a purpose, it had meaning.”