Author’s Note

John Hughes released his legendary classic, Sixteen Candles, the year I turned sixteen.

The words ‘Sixteen Candles’ are underlined above this image. Two people sit on a blanket. They are facing each other and there is a cake with lit candles between them. The person on the left wears a floor-length dress and has dark hair pulled into a bun on top of their head. The other wears a long-sleeve shirt with rolled sleeves and dark pants. Their hair is dark and short, and styled with a cowlick.

The movie opens with a shot of Molly Ringwald sitting at her bedroom vanity as she assesses her image in the mirror. That was me. Every single day I studied my reflection. Judged my appearance. Except that while Molly wished for an additional “four inches of bod,” I needed to be smaller. Thinner. Always less.

It was the mid-1980s, and I wore my high-waisted jeans so tight I had to lay back on the bed and hook a wire hanger through the zipper to force the fly closed. This was before denim knew the forgiveness of stretch, and so I would penguin about my high school’s hallways, my stride restricted by my dark blue butt tourniquet. Each night it took hours for the red map of seams imprinted on the lower half of my body to fade.

An academic slacker, I spent more time studying fashion magazines than any textbook. I had to bluff my way through the periodic table of elements but never missed a single issue of Glamour. Obviously, my very first diet was a clichéd attempt to look like a fashion model.

By the time I turned sweet sixteen—giggling through Sixteen Candles and obsessed with boys—I had developed a not-so-sweet eating disorder.

Since that time, we’ve all come to see the underlying racism and rapeyness in that film, yet our culture of thinness has grown even more toxic. By current standards, that first pack of supermodels I tried to emulate back in the ’80s would be considered plus-sized. Also in the 1980s, digital retouching was new, and its kung fu was weak. Today, flawlessness has been driven to new levels of aspirational fiction. We are living in a world where half of all six-year-old girls believe they’re too fat, and holy shit, they’re only six.

As a teenager, I swallowed the lie that fat is fundamentally loathsome, aesthetically ugly, and morally evil. I made myself hostage to the back-and-forth number on my bathroom scale. I despised my belly and thighs and especially my butt—I’m talking, I wasted a ridiculous amount of my young adult life focused on hating the size of my own ass.

Two people standing side by side wearing long, flowing dresses. They are standing in a pose reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty with their right arms raised and their left draped across their waists. The person on the left has a fuller figure than the person on the right.

My body-hatred led me to desperation, but even at my worst, I found flickers of hope. As the torch-wielding lady on the Columbia Pictures logo got thinner and thinner, the Statue of Liberty’s mid-’80s makeover changed only one aspect of her appearance. She got a new torch.

So now I’m here to proclaim, “Give me your brainwashed, self-loathing masses yearning to breathe Spanx-free!” And you might want to grab a fat neon scrunchie and an oversized set of shoulder pads, because we’re about to moonwalk back to the 1980s in all its material-girls-just-wanna-have-fun glory.

My hope is that by sharing my story with a mortifying level of honesty, you will see that you and your uniquely you-sized ass are not alone. No matter what shape. No matter what size. Every rear end is worthy of love.

The top of the Statue of Liberty. Only her head wearing her seven-pointed crown and her right arm holding her lit torch are visible.

This book is my torch.

May you, dear reader,

discover the FREEDOM

to love yer butt!

An outline of a lit torch. ‘XO Laurie’ is written beside it. ‘Laurie’ is in cursive.