Amy's Robot

Remember our "fat chick lit"

Remember our "fat chick lit" post the other day? We got a response from Dangerously Curvy Novels, a website dedicated to the genre that we mentioned in the original post:

You both raise some valid issues about size-ism in your blog, but I do hope that you'll consider that there are lots of "curvy" books, chick lit and otherwise, that aren't necessarily out to simply reduce women to a size, which, ultimately would be a sizeist act in itself.

For many of us larger women (and men) our size does influence our emotions and our experiences, so I wouldn't necessarily equate "branding" a character as large means that a particular author was being lazy about defining the character unless (s)he expected that number to somehow fully express that character's life story. That's considered cheating in the writing world no matter what stereotype you slip in there. Yes, stereotypes exist and there is sometimes even a little truth in them. But overall they are very limited and don't tell us much about individuals. Authors are supposed to show, not tell, the reader what an individual character is like through action and dialogue, not exposition and narrative summation.

So I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that readers want to identify with the people who appear in the books they are reading. This is exactly why there are women searching out novels with larger heroines. They want to see themselves in the pages of those stories. Yes, they can read any number of non-curvy books and feel a connection to the characters. I know that from personal experience. But there is something special about being able to pick up a book that speaks to you about something specific in your life, like weight issues, that can say to you "You are unique, yet you are not alone".

That's really all anyone on this planet wants--to feel connected to others like themselves.

If you'd like to read an interesting Curvy Novel, I recommend "All of Me" by Venise Berry, which I finished only last night. It can get a bit preachy in sections, but overall I think the author did an excellent job capturing some of the darker issues that large women sometimes face.

I think A. and I are both in favor of any book that treats its characters as characters and not as marketing devices, and as with any genre, some books do and some books don't.

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posted by adm at 12:09 PM | #