For our Marginalia web feature, we ask writers to introduce us to one of their favorite works of literature by way of a short piece of prose. This week, Zoë Eisenberg—whose story “Pig Island” appears in our Winter 2025 issue—meditates on a passage from Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman.
“I had hundreds of nudes stored in my phone, but I’d never sent them to anyone.” As a queer woman, I was stunned when I read Lillian Fishman’s novel Acts of Service. After opening the novel with her cache of nudes, Fishman’s protagonist Eve describes herself as traditionally attractive, possessing physical traits she loves but which often leave her feeling both “exceptionally beautiful and isolated”—especially within her relationships with women. This troubles Eve, who has for years identified as a lesbian, and it’s these complicated feelings which inspire her to not only take the aforementioned nudes, but to eventually post them online, kickstarting a chain of events that ultimately lead to an affair with a man.
The affair itself is not as surprising to Eve as her relief at finally having her body—and her vanity—celebrated in a way she understands. This relief is interrogated throughout the novel, and weighed against Eve’s memory of coming out to her father in her youth. His initial response, that it was easier for women to be with other women because they understand each other, immediately feels off to Eve. What exactly did women understand about each other, and did it indeed make it easier to be together? In the following passage, the answer for Eve seems to be held in her body, and in the shame she feels for loving it:
Vanity is such a sin in women, so obviously, grotesquely shameful, that when people loved my body they usually told me in a tone implying that the very acknowledgment, in any but the most tender postcoital context, was trivial and degrading. Even bolder lovers spoke to me as though anticipating I would dismiss their attention in some cloud of embarrassment. Not Nathan.
Almost every time he spoke to me I felt simultaneous relief and fear. For years I’d been getting away with this: nursing my vanity and disguising it as some kind of lofty self-respect. Pretending it was simple maturity that made me say thank you instead of no, stop when I received a compliment. But with Nathan I made no efforts to disguise myself as a lovable girl. I did not need to pretend to be modest; to him I was what I knew I was, the body I loved in its every inch, the body I could not admit to any woman. Even so, I blushed and wondered whether I should deny it.
Oh, stop, Nathan said. I love your vanity. It’s very sexy.
It was exquisite to be found out. In Nathan’s company it all seemed absurd and, as he put it, bourgeois—my fears of immorality, of narcissism.
Here was the body I knew in private, the body I hid from women. Was I wrong about everything? Was this what my body was meant for—despite everything I had thought and believed—the routine, insistent desires of men?
How easy it was. My father, wrong again. It’s easier to be with women. Oh, yes! I know about that. But what could be easier than this—to be valuable in terms that I experienced so deeply I could sometimes be convinced they were the true measure?
Compulsive heteronormativity has haunted me since I came out during adolescence. For me, it looked like a frustration over being equally attracted to women and men, yet returning again and again to relationships with men because I understood those dynamics better.
But what really informed these dynamics? While it was easy for me to say Ah yes, the patriarchy, what did that actually mean?
Elsewhere in the novel Fishman gives me a hint: While I was below Nathan I found that I had been exhausted by all the uncertainties of romance: by waiting, by hoping, by convincing, by attempting, even by succeeding. I knew this was weakness, knew it was capitulation. But it felt as rich as succumbing to sleep.
In my experience, women are often told what our bodies are for, and then we are told to feel shame for it—even, and sometimes especially, amongst each other. So when some Nathan comes in and offers to remove that shame, if only by reinforcing, yes, yes, this is what your body is for, giving in to that compulsion can feel confusingly—even disastrously—like a homecoming. Or, as Fishman says, like sleep. Though I had been thinking about these things in my own life and exploring them in my work, it wasn’t until I read the perspective of Fishman’s Eve that I began to understand the dissonance in my own. This is why we read. I feel so lucky for it.