Richard Jewell / Tania Head

The news story that came out yesterday, about Tania Head, a woman who has for six years presented herself as a survivor of the World Trade Center attacks, but who apparently had no connection to them, is weird and surprising.

I can't imagine what motivated her to develop her story and to continue to build on it, volunteering with victims' groups and giving tours of the WTC site. Did she mean for it to go this far? Did she start by telling a story that was mis-heard, and then took it farther and farther with each retelling?

Apparently she was fairly subdued, if not in the details of her story, in her telling of it. She would hold back parts of her tale until prompted, but then would claim that she'd been one of the few survivors from a floor above the crash site in the second tower, saved by a man who later died, given an inscribed wedding band by a fatally burned man (which she later returned to his unnamed widow), badly burned herself, and lost a fiance (or husband, depending on the telling of her story) in the collapse of the first tower. Her supposed rescuer and supposed fiance are real men, but neither has a demonstrable link to her. She won't name the dying man or widow who are part of her tale.

Others will hash over her story. But here's what has worried me since I saw the article about this in the New York Times: Head is a fat woman. And our society so vilifies fat people that it was just a matter of time before people started associating her behavior with her size, and in many ways blaming it on her size. Did she decide to attract the attention accorded a 9-11 survivor because nobody wanted to pay attention to an average fat woman in America? Did she need to create a fictional husband because she can't find love? Whatever her motivations, whatever happened, there is no doubt whatsoever that she will receive more criticism for carrying out her charade as a fat woman than she would have if she were a size six.

But why should her size matter at all? Thousands of people died on September 11th! Families ripped apart! Two cities scarred! And for whatever reason this woman took advantage of that moment of collective horror to embed herself into the culture of 9-11 survivors. (I doubt that she is the only one.) So why, why, WHY must fat become a part of this narrative? It trivializes the lives of the victims of 9-11 to focus editorials on this story on the size of Tania Head's body. I want to know what was going on in her mind! What did she feel in her heart! What difference could it possibly make to this story to focus on what the number on her bathroom scale reads?

Remember Richard Jewell, who was falsely accused of having planted Eric Rudolph's bomb in Olympic Park in Atlanta? Not only was he vilified by the press, but criticisms often focused on or at least alluded to his size. Somehow his body was offered up as visible evidence of flawed ethics, of a criminal mind. Those criticisms were unfounded. He was not only innocent, but a hero who led people away from the bombed park. But the insults that were hurled at him in the media plagued him for the rest of his life, until he died, young, earlier this year.

Gina Kolata does a wonderful job in her recent book, Rethinking Thin, of demonstrating that body size is not a behavioral choice or an outward manifestation of emotional flaws. Some people are fat, some are skinny, and the difference is almost always determined by genetics. But Americans don't see things that way.

America likes to judge people, and wants to think that people can be judged by looking at them. Fat people are easy targets, standing out from the crowd with a physical trait that the thin like to think indicates sloth, greed, laziness, stupidity.

It took less than a day before Tania Head was tarred by that brush. All that remains to be seen is how thoroughly will she be slandered not as a tragic and bizarre psychological case but as a fat woman.

I just did a google search on "Tania Head" and "fat", and the first page of hits tells me that I'm sadly, disappointingly, right.