Author Christen Randall talks about writing the book she needed as a teenager
BY CHRISTEN RANDALL
As a fat, bisexual teen, sharing my body with a girl made me anxious.
Boys, after all, were so critical of it. They speculated about the size of my nipples (pepperoni, probably) or shape of my butt (like a frog’s), followed behind me in gym making sound effects for my jiggling thighs. Poking and prodding in front of the mirror, I convinced myself someone who had actual knowledge of those parts would be even more aware of how critically flawed mine were.
I found no counters to the argument that played over and over in my head in the early 2000’s queer media I consumed. What little I had access to featured slim, fashionable twenty-somethings who lived in big cities, led scandalous lives. I can’t remember a single queer fat person in any of the shows I watched or books I read. The ones that did have (cisgender, straight) fat characters cast them as support or, more insidiously, the “problem” lead who got skinny to get the guy.
Because I couldn’t imagine myself fitting into the world where I lived or the stories where I escaped, I concluded it was simply too much to be both queer and fat at the same time. I was doing queer wrong.
It wasn’t until my early 30’s that I believed for the first time that I wasn’t – that it was okay to love and live in my body as a queer body. This revolutionary understanding came with a sorrow for all the time I wasted fearing it. It came, too, with a fierce joy.
Sharing that joy is the heart of why I wrote The No-Girlfriend Rule, my geeky young adult love letter to fat queers and the magic that happens when we take that first brave step into our truth. It is also – as I have heard so many of my fellow queer authors echo about our work – the book I needed as a teenager. If I had grown up with a character like Hollis, who is queer and fat and, ultimately, finds love and acceptance from her friends and herself, I might have found those things sooner.
In creating space to root for queer, fat characters being loved not despite their bodies but fully embraced within them, we allow those who look and love like them to believe they are worth rooting for, too. Characters like Hollis provide the self-loving counterargument I needed for the rising generation – and for the anxious, queer, fat teens that still yearn to be seen within so many of us: we are worth taking up space within our community exactly as we are.
The No-Girlfriend Rule is published by Pushkin Children’s Books. You can find it here.
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