NELLE 9 | 2026
My mother is on the phone. She is eager to talk about Michelangelo.
The long-dead artist is the only way she can articulate what life has been like inside her chronically obese body these past 83 years. This is the body I love, with the soft folds that will always say “Mother” to me, the body I’ve tried and failed to protect from snide remarks and the endless indignities of everyday life as a big woman with big opinions. More than once, my mother has been dismissed as a “Fat Bitch.”
While living abroad studying Italian renaissance art history three decades ago, I took my parents to see Michelangelo’s David, because that’s what you do with tourists in Florence: fill up on gelato, then traipse to the Accademia to pay homage to David, a biblical figure famous for bringing down the giant with just a sling and a rock.
But the Michelangelo sculptures tugging at my mother’s imagination all these years later are four smaller male nudes that are easy to miss, given their placement in a hallway leading up to a 17-foot-tall Carrara marble rock star like the David. Known variously as “The Prisoners,” “The Captives,” or “The Slaves,” the men’s bodies appear to writhe as they struggle for liberation from the coarse stone that cleaves to them.
“That’s me,” Mom confides. “I’m trapped in the stone.”
The sculptures are considered non finito, unfinished, by some; others insist that the raw marble represents a different aesthetic choice—Michelangelo’s version of the messy bun. Certain portions of the larger-than-life forms are rough-hewn, while other areas are meticulously defined.
Finished or unfinished, we are bearing witness to a transition. And like so many of the body’s transitions—birth, adolescence, surgery, death—the process suggests agony. These people want out.
My mother is saying: My body is not a temple; it’s a prison. But I cannot release her.