A knot of tension loosened in his chest as he found it. Or rather, it found him.
The model gazed up at him with two pairs of eyes, one sad, the other sparkling out rays of inner joy. As his thumb hovered over the wordslearn more, Emmett wrestled with his better judgment.
He wasn’t dumb enough to be fooled by this. She was obviously Photoshopped, barely even real. This “groundbreaking” weight loss treatment probably wasn’t real either.
But the sick feeling tugging down on his heart, that was real.
The never-ending humiliation and degradation, that was real.
The feeling of being trapped inside his own body, inside his own life: that was as real as it fucking came.
Other than the obvious, what did he have to lose?
Investigative Report Prepared for Monstera BioSciences
BY PRENTICE & DARROW LLP
Excerpt from “Part 1: Background” (pp. 18–19)
In early 2018, five years prior to the commencement of Monstera’s Phase II clinical trial, participant no. 82941 launched a weblog titledThe Messy Adventures of Emmett Truesdale. He posted more than thirty entries in the space of eighteen months, at first weekly, then dropping to twice monthly over the summer. New posts were increasingly sporadic thereafter.
The blog fell dormant in 2020 before being resurrected in late 2022 asThe True Me. The goal of the rebranded site, according to its author, was:
To pull back the curtain on my weight loss journey. To share the good, the bad, and the ugly of getting fit and finding myself. To hold myself accountable, even when my stomach is screaming at me for an In-N-Out Double-Double and fries!!! Most importantly, to peel back the layers of shame, disordered eating, and—yes—FAT, that have been holding me back my entire life.
In other words, to finally expose the person underneath all that extra weight. The real Emmett Truesdale—the “true” me.
A number of the participant’s own blog posts have been provided as appendices to this report as evidence of the facts stated herein.
Appendix A—Blog Post
What Am I Doing with My Life; or, Right Off Target
By: Emmett Truesdale
Published: Feb. 13, 2023
Call me crazy, but I never imagined that I’d be using my master’s degree in education to teach people the benefits of signing up for a Target RedCard. Like many of my millennial generation, I was raised to believe that having done all the “right things” according to society—applied myself in school, gotten my degree, worked hard throughout my twenties—I would eventually be released from this poverty-wage, essential-worker purgatory to the celestial climes of financial competence.
Okay, boomer.
Last month I turned twenty-eight—that’s TWO. EIGHT.—and I’m no closer to being able to afford my own apartment than to convincing Harry Styles to run away with me to a remote island off the coast of Ireland to share a quiet life raising miniature horses and obliterating each other’s buttholes nightly. My clothes are rags. My 2008 Ford Taurus is practically in hospice. The check-engine light has been on so long that the little icon has seared into my retinas. Every time my car makes a weird noise, I’m convinced it’s muttering judgments on my poor life choices. “Anotherseven-dollar iced latte?” it says. “I don’t have air-conditioning, you fat son of a bitch!”
Not that I ever expected to be rich. For the longest time my dream was to be a teacher. Helping people expand their view of the world and themselves through education is something I’ve always been passionate about. So after majoring in social science at San Diego State University, I ended up going back for my MAwith the goal of teaching middle school social studies. What was I thinking?
Denied financial assistance because of my family income—to which I of course had no access, my parents having decided they’d “done enough” by throwing a few thousand dollars a year toward my undergraduate studies—I took out another loan, and even then I only survived by taking up residence in the tiny second bedroom of my mom’s condo in Little Italy.
The property, purchased with the settlement from Mom’s second divorce, was a kooky homage to her proud Sicilian heritage, stuffed with antique furniture, framed paintings of mustached chefs in white jackets, and a daily influx of artisan olive oils, breads, and pastas. The woman kept so much food in the house that it burst out of the kitchen cabinets, spilling luxuriantly over the faux-granite counters. I could barely turn around without sending a baguette flying into the dog’s water bowl.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my mom—seriously, she’s the best. Loving and caring and always the first person to help. We’ve always had a special relationship. Even when the whole world seems to think I’m a pile of crap, Mom is always there with unconditional love and support.
She often tells the story of how after I was born she took me to meet my uncle Gene and aunt Laura, and after ten minutes in my company, Uncle Gene delivered, in his cartoonish New York accent, the now-iconic line “There’s somethin’ special about that boy!” It’s since become a kind of shorthand between Mom and me. Whenever she’s feeling particularly proud or sentimental, she’ll do her Uncle Gene voice and it never fails to cheer me up.
Still, living with her in my twenties wasn’t the life I’d imagined. The apartment was overstuffed with furniture and pets. Mom’s lifestyle was chaotic, borderline nomadic, with her constantly leaving town to visit her sisters and long-distance boyfriend, Hal. But more than anything I longed for the day I could detach from her obligatory generosity, strike out from the suffocating muchness of her small life, and carve out a space in the world all my own.
In some ways, it felt like a pipe dream. The housing crisis only seemed to be getting worse. I would struggle to afford rent on even the cheapest apartment.
And yet I was forced to do just that when, in typical Mom style, she announced that she was selling the condo and moving to Las Vegas to marry Hal, whom my siblings and I had barely met.
