In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado explores the relationship between the thin self and the fat self as a form of inner doppelganger. In the story "Eight Bites," Machado's narrator despises her body as it is—its heaviness, softness, and sagginess: "I was tired of flat, unforgiving dressing room lights; I was tired of looking into the mirror and grabbing the things that I hated and lifting them, clawing deep, and then letting them drop and everything aching." So she undergoes bariatric surgery and shrinks down to a more socially acceptable size. But the narrator is haunted by what she first thinks is a ghost and then discovers is something much creepier: the fat she shed as a result of the surgery, one hundred pounds of it, which has taken a featureless human form in her home. It is a fat golem, the self she could not bring herself to love and so chose to cut away. "I kneel down next to it," the narrator says. "It is a body with nothing it needs: no stomach or bones or mouth. Just soft indents. I crouch down and stroke its shoulder, or what I think is its shoulder. It turns and looks at me. It has no eyes, but still, it looks at me. She looks at me. She is awful but honest. She is grotesque but she is real." The narrator then beats her double with terrible violence.

XREF: Echoes the doppelganger motif in Gothic fiction and body-horror narratives like Kafka and early Cronenberg. FICTION: The fat-golem conceit is a striking metaphor for the self one cuts away — rich material for a body-horror or literary-fiction story.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 578