When people go home to see their folks they often marvel at how things seem smaller than they remembered. But this was very much not the case when journalist Sarah Z. Wexler visited her parents in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., a few years back. “I noticed that whenever one of the houses had been bought, they had been bulldozed and a McMansion had popped up in its place,” she says. “Just about every driveway in this suburban neighborhood had an SUV. And our neighbors were members of a megachurch. I started thinking about all the ways these things might be connected. That we’re basically super-sizing in all these different aspects of our lives. We all know about super-sized food. But we’re also doing it in all of these other ways.”
Wexler examines this phenomenon in her new book Living Large, which contains chapters on McMansions, megachurches, big box stores, the Humvee, and Las Vegas hotels, amongst other subjects. While the tome is routinely critical of America’s big-is-beautiful tendencies, various chapters find Wexler clearly being tempted by the thought of, say, a big Tiffany engagement ring or, in the course of a consult with a plastic surgeon, bigger breasts. “I tried to go into each of the subjects putting aside my preconceptions,” she says. “I wanted to go in with an open mind, which was really difficult to do in some cases. I have a hard time with boob jobs. To me, women who get boob jobs are essentially unhappy with themselves and how they look. But that was something I was completely seduced by. You look at photo albums filled with hundreds of photo albums filled with before and afters and even if you went in with good self-esteem you think, ‘I’m a before.’ And that rocks your self-esteem a little bit. And then getting to try on these huge Barbie boobs and saying, ‘I kind of get this.’ I could not stop staring at myself in the mirror, thinking, ‘Okay, it’s $7,000. How could I pull that together?’ And then I thought, ‘Wait, what am I doing? I had to get out right then. I had to rip the silicone boobs out of my bra and get the hell out, otherwise I knew I was going to be signing up.”
In the book, Wexler also spends time with a group of “freegans,” people whose determination to lead a low-impact lifestyle means they forage for food in dumpsters. The author says that she tried to follow suit, but ultimately balked: “I really tried to eat things out of the garbage. I held the bread up to my mouth and was like, ‘Do it!’ But it was like being on Fear Factor for me, but it wasn’t a live cockroach, it was just bread that had been in a bag in the garbage.”
What message would Wexler like readers to take away from Living Large? “What I came to in the end is this idea of ‘right-sizing,’” she says. “When I first heard that term I hated it. It’s a gross corporate word they use instead of downsizing. But the more I thought about the word, I wanted to reclaim it and use it literally. We should have things be the right size for us. And that’s not saying no one should have an SUV and nobody should have a big house. The Duggars need a huge house because they have four million children. But the average size of the American family is shrinking. Most of us do not need a McMansion.”
Wexler is currently working on another book called Awful First Dates. “I ran a blog where people would submit short anonymous stories about bad dates that happened to them,” she explains. “So it’s going to be some of my stories and a lot of anonymous stories. It’s a lot different from interviewing economists.” And what was Wexler’s own worst dating experience? “I went out with a guy who told me he was manager of a major league baseball team,” she laughs. “And then halfway through our date he revealed he was actually their mascot.”
