Write Something Fat
Dear Sarah,
You’re sixteen and you’re participating in your first National Novel Writing Month. You’re embarking on a wild adventure—writing a fifty-thousand-word novel in the thirty days of November. You’ve never written a novel before, but it’s all you’ve wanted to do since you were ten, so here you are. You build a fantasy world full of magic and angels and pirates and brothers turned into rabbits. You imagine a million details to fill out fifty thousand words.
You don’t imagine that it’s a world accepting of fat people.
Your heroine is small and slim, because that’s what heroines are. The beautiful people she meets are slender, because that’s what the beautiful people in fantasy novels are.
You sit there and type away, and it never occurs to you that any of the characters in your book could look like you.
You’re fat. You have been for as long as you can remember, and for as long as you can remember, you’ve been the fattest kid in school. Part of you is still in first grade, being weighed with the rest of your class for a science experiment, and you remember seeing that your number is higher than anyone else’s—and not by just a little.
So, yes, you’ve always been fatter than everyone else in school. You know what it is to be hated for nothing more than the crime of taking up space. There were girls you’d hardly interacted with but who were cruel to you anyway. Another fat girl—smaller than you but still fat—confides in you that those girls just hate fat people. They’re mean to her, too. They’re not nice to anyone who isn’t skinny.
You and those girls are eleven years old.
(It’s too young for any of you to conceive of the idea that a body is worthy of hate just for existing.)
It’s a miracle that you made it to eleven before you learned your body was a good enough reason for some to hate you.
Luckily, you have a way out. For precious minutes and stolen hours, you can escape in books. You’re a reader from a family of readers. You’re poor, so you can’t buy that many books, but you live close enough to the library to walk there. You take a backpack and you fill it, and next week you come back to return those books and fill it again. You read and read and read.
You love science fiction and fantasy and horror. You love Harry Potter and The Thief of Always and Dealing with Dragons. You also love romance and drama. You’ve read every V. C. Andrews book your library has to offer, and you bashfully hide paperback romances among Nancy Drew and Sweet Valley High novels as if the librarian won’t be scanning them individually anyway.
You read and read and read, and it will be a long time before you understand why there’s a pit in your stomach every time a fat character is introduced and, inevitably, mocked. The fat characters you know are Dudley Dursley with his greedy sausage fingers, and “pleasantly plump” Bess Marvin, who never has a scene where she isn’t eating. Fat characters have angry red pig faces, clumsy hands, bad memories, and food stains on their clothes. They’re mean relatives who are jealous of the heroine’s good looks. They mess up the hero’s plans with incompetence. They’re the villain the hero is fighting.
You read and read and read, and it will be a long time before you understand why there’s a pit in your stomach when every heroine and leading lady is tenderly described as slender, as slim, as having a waist the hero could encircle with his hands, as delicate with long fingers. Sometimes the books will try to make it awkward, describing them as gangly and skinny, but there’s always someone waiting to make them see how beautiful they are.
The Dudleys and Besses don’t get that.
You don’t get that.
You worry that you never will.
I know this isn’t something you’re thinking of when you write, but it’s in us, spreading like poison. The books we read taught us by example that if a girl is going to master her magic powers, have a love triangle with a nice boy and a brooding boy (never mind you’d rather there be another girl in the mix, too), and save the world, she’s going to have to be skinny.
So when you write that first novel, your heroine is skinny. She’s skinny when she runs away from her oppressive home, skinny when she convinces a pirate captain to help her find her brother, skinny when you write her clumsy romantic subplot because you like reading romance more than you like writing it, skinny when she’s kidnapped, skinny when she uses her wits to escape, skinny when she finds her brother and gets a happily ever after.
Months after writing that first novel, the 2007 Hairspray movie came out, and you’ll spend years clinging to Tracy Turnblad like a lifeline. You don’t know why, but I do. You haven’t learned about fat oppression or fat activism. You don’t even know about body positivity yet. You just know that Tracy is fat and beautiful and the hero of her story. You know that Zac Efron’s Link looks at her like she’s a miracle. She sings and dances not like no one is watching but like everyone is watching and they’re lucky to be seeing her. She chases her dreams without stopping to think, “I can’t do this until I’ve lost x amount of weight.”
Books will take a lot longer to give you someone like Tracy. This will suck to hear, but you won’t really see a fat character who makes you cry with relief until you’re in college and Julie Murphy brings Dumplin’ and Willowdean Dickson into the world. It’s not fair that you have to wait that long. I wish I could give her to you now. I thought of you the whole time I was reading it and wondered what it would have been like if you’d gotten books like Dumplin’ just a little sooner.
But right now, you’re sixteen, you don’t know Tracy or Willowdean, you’re writing your first novel, and you don’t know that a heroine can be fat.
If I could tell you anything from over a decade in the future, it would be this:
You can write the representation you’re craving.
The heroine of that first novel can charm a pirate captain while she’s fat. She can fatly learn about her magic, fatly sail the seas, fatly rescue her brother.
Your next NaNoWriMo novel, the one you don’t finish, with the girl obsessed with flowers and their magic? She can be fat, too.
The overpowered psychic girl in novel number three?
Make her fat! Make their friends fat, too. Throw in some fat love interests.
Your fat heroine can save the world from anything—a Reign of Fire–style dragon apocalypse or alien invasion. She can kick ass in a red dress as well as Resident Evil’s Alice. She can be part of a team on a mission of questionable scientific accuracy tunneling to the center of the Earth to restart the core. All your favorite stories could have a fat girl in them.
Also, like, not to bum you out, but where I’m at, the world of science fiction and fantasy still needs a boost in fat representation. Contemporary young adult is seeing a boost—not enough of one, never enough—but the SFF side is still severely lacking.
We need you. We need us.
There still seems to be an idea that fat people can’t lead fantasy armies or explore distant planets. Science fiction can be especially egregious about this because—as I’m sure you’ve noticed—when people imagine a better future, it’s a future without us. It’s a future where fatness is shaved away with a pill, a code, a twist to the DNA.
I know what you’re feeling when you read those stories. You’re wishing it could be you losing weight so easily, but at the same time, you’re hurting, wondering why that would have to be you.
You’re wondering why the you that you are couldn’t stay as you are. It hurts to know that writers imagining wild, unforeseen futures can only imagine your body as something that needs fixing.
And that’s why we need you.
You live in that body every day. We’ve been living in this fat body since we were small, and barring some terrible wasting disease, we’re not gonna stop having this body.
OK. I know what you’re thinking. (I’m you. Of course I know what you’re thinking.)
You’re thinking that this fatness is temporary. You just know that one day you’re going to be skinny and beautiful and you’re going to achieve your dreams.
What you don’t know is that a decade from now, you’re beautiful and achieving your dreams and you are fatter than you’ve ever been. We went to Japan and Ireland, and we did it while fat. We have the kind of friendships you can’t even conceive of right now. We’re in love with someone who loves us. We have our own apartment and two adorable cats. We’re getting paid to write. We have agents and editors reading our essays and short stories about fat characters and asking, “Do you have more?”
We’re doing all of it while fat.
Eventually, you’re going to start writing fat characters. You’re going to write short stories and novels where fat girls do amazing things.
I want you to know that while I had to wait until I was twenty-four to realize I could do that, you, Sarah? You, anyone reading this? You, at fifteen? At sixteen or seventeen or eighteen?
You can do it right now.
A year before you embarked on writing that first novel, you made a new friend. She’ll be your first kiss, and she’ll be the first person to tell you you’re beautiful. You’ll be sharing a computer during a free period, and out of the blue, she’ll say your body is like a goddess’s—like the Venus of Willendorf.
I know you remember that, because even though you’re still struggling to believe that your body is anything other than shameful, you cling to that moment. You’re in complete awe of those words and you keep them close.
I want you to take those words—that feeling—and apply it all to your characters.
Why does your heroine have to be slender? Why couldn’t her silhouette be more like the Venus of Willendorf, like yours? Her stomach can roll over her thighs. Her back can be like the hilly southern Indiana landscape. Her waist doesn’t need to be encompassed in two hands. She’s too vast and infinite for that.
We’re more infinite than that.
You’re so powerful, and you don’t even know it. Some of the greatest minds in writing can’t imagine a future where people haven’t gleefully eradicated fatness. They can’t conceptualize a person being fat and making first alien contact, being fat and exploring a mystical forest, being fat and expertly wielding a sword, but you can.
You can write fat characters, and they don’t have to be Dudley Dursley or Bess Marvin. It feels like there’s a script of what characters are and you have to follow it, but I want you to rip it up. You’re going off book, and you’re going to create something new.
It’s not always going to be easy, but it’s going to free us. In all the moments when you’re wondering if anyone would want to read a book where the fat girl saves the day, where she gets to be a person instead of a prop, when you’re wondering if this isn’t all just some kind of wish fulfillment? I want you to know that I believe in you, and I need you to write that book.
So, what are you waiting for?
Get writing.
Love,
Sarah
PROVIDED BY AUTHOR
SARAH HOLLOWELL
is a fat Hoosier writer working to up the magic quotient of Indiana. Her work has been published on Huffington Post, Fireside Fiction, and Apex, among others. She spends an awful lot of her non-writing time listening to podcasts, playing Breath of the Wild, and needle felting cryptids. She can be found at sarahhollowell.com or on Twitter as @sarahhollowell.