A Local Life: Joyce Davis McGinnis, 45; Hailed for Essay on Obesity Struggle

"It's not something you can talk about," Joyce Davis McGinnis wrote in an essay published last winter. "There are no support groups. The modern workplace offers no reasonable accommodation to the beauty-challenged."

At 5-foot-8 and close to 300 pounds, she was writing about her struggle with obesity and how society deals harshly with the uncomely. She wrote of her confusion at seeing magazines that had little sympathy for those who were not flawless.

"The message is clear: Unattractiveness has been reclassified from an act of God to a personal choice," McGinnis wrote. "Funny, because I don't remember making that choice. . . . I only remember feeling responsible for it."

She titled the essay "Ugly." It was how she long thought of herself, a self-appraisal enforced by a mother who had vanity "deep within her," she wrote. Her mother constantly reminded her that she was not attractive. For many years, she was burdened by her mother's opinion. Combined with feelings of alienation, she attempted suicide in college, according to her husband of 16 years, Mark McGinnis.

Through writing, McGinnis began to deal with her emotional struggles. She enrolled in writing courses while working in Washington for the Court Services & Offender Supervision Agency, a federal office that provides supervision to adults on probation and parole.

With the publication last winter of "Ugly" in the literary magazine Shenandoah, McGinnis was on the cusp of transforming herself into a promising essayist. Two literary agents contacted her about possible book deals, and she won critical admiration.

"If I were a judge for one of those Best Nonfiction or Best Memoir anthologies, this candid, funny, astute, unpretentious, nicely paced personal essay would be on the short list, and nobody would give no sass about it either," James Wolcott, a Vanity Fair contributing editor not known for freely dispensing high praise, wrote on his blog.

McGinnis, a Columbia resident, was 45 when she died Aug. 8 of a brain aneurysm. She had been born Joyce Davis in Wilkes-Barre, a Rust Belt city in northeastern Pennsylvania. Her father, an IRS agent, was a quiet type, she wrote. Her mother dominated the household and criticized her two other daughters about their looks and intelligence. McGinnis also had a brother, whom she did not mention in her essay.

"It sounds more miserable than it lived," she wrote about growing up. "As long as I maintained a carapace of low expectations and kept my eyes on the ground, I got along fine."

According to her husband, she kept "Ugly" a secret from her siblings. Both of her parents died before the essay was published.

Despite her mother's constant criticism, McGinnis spent time caring for her as she became older and infirm. In 1989, after her father died, McGinnis took a leave of absence from work for six months to live with her mother in Pennsylvania.

"She went to great lengths to take care of her mother, because she did love her," Mark McGinnis said. "But she did not try to convince her mother that she had made any mistakes in the way she treated her."