Author Carolyn Mackler on Her New Book, and Why We Need Body Diversity in YA

Picture me eight or nine. I was so hardcore about the monkey bars that I could skip bars, bucking my body through time and space. I could do cartwheels, several in a row. I often walked around the house with no shirt on because I had a brother and he did it and I’d read Free to Be…You and Me so much that the pages were falling out.
Now picture me as a young teenager. I was diagnosed with scoliosis and had to hover in plaster while stony-faced technicians fitted me for a back brace. The brace arrived on my fourteenth birthday and I was instructed to wear it twenty-three hours a day. Except the brace was agony on my stomach when I ate my Fettuccine Alfredo and the kids at school knocked on it like it was a front door and as my hips widened, the technicians had to saw holes in the hard plastic to make room for my growing body. I cheated on the brace and only wore it at night and then had to lie to my orthopedist. Forget monkey bars and cartwheels. I grew too tall too fast and gained weight and could no longer hold myself up. Oh, and my upper half was a disaster, too. While my hips were widening just fine, my breasts simply weren’t coming in like everyone else’s.
It was a lonely time. Thank goodness for Deenie and her scoliosis. And props to Margaret in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret for not getting big breasts, either. But other than the Judy Blume books that acknowledged what it feels like to be a teen girl in a body, the novels I read mostly had girls with default thin bodies, straight spines, full breasts. It was like one of the biggest things happening in my world—that my body was not doing what I wanted it to do—was invisible on the pages where I went to feel less alone.

In 2000, when I was twenty-seven, I published my first YA novel, Love and Other Four-Letter words. The protagonist, Sammie, has a lot of other plot going on, but as an aside she disdains the angry red stretch marks on her thighs and she slips her hand under the table after dinner and unsnaps her shorts to liberate her bloated stomach. When I received letters from readers, there was a consistent theme: OMG, I have stretch marks, too. OMG, I have to unbutton my jeans after a meal, too.
And so, for my next novel, I decided to deep-dive in. I wrote the book The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, about a plus-size heroine, Virginia, whose workout fiend mom and babe-ogling dad make her feel like crap about her body. But when her seemingly “perfect” older brother falls from grace, Virginia is forced to reevaluate everything. She starts kickboxing to feel strong—not skinny—and she gets her eyebrow pierced, dyes her hair purple, and begins to celebrate her body instead of hiding it. Virginia was a character I needed to write. Hers was a book I wanted to see on the shelves. And the response was overwhelming—letters and emails poured in from readers thanking me for writing a novel that showed their experiences in the pages.

Over the past decade and a half, there have been several more books with heroines who don’t have the default-skinny body. Most notably, Willowdean burst on the scene in 2015 with Julie Murphy’s Dumplin’. Willowdean is a confident, poised, plus-size teen girl who enters the local beauty contest because why the hell not. One of my favorite lines near the end of the novel is when Will says, “I’m fat. I’m happy. I’m insecure. I’m bold.”
Man, I wish I could time-travel that line back to myself when I was fourteen.
And this spring brings a spate of new novels that embrace body positivity. Leah on the Offbeat, by Becky Albertalli, just came out, starring Leah, BFF to Simon of Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (and the fabulous new movie Love, Simon). Early in the novel, Leah, daughter to a single young mom, hilariously describes herself as “your resident fat Slytherin Rory Gilmore.” In June, Kelly Devos’ debut novel, Fat Girl on a Plane, comes out and it’s packed with smart zingers about what it feels like to be fat and have a body that people criticize, joke about, even ban from airplanes. But Fat Girl on a Plane is not just about that. It’s also a fairytale romp through the New York City fashion world. Also—yessss!—Julie Murphy is back in May with Puddin’, a romcom told in dual voices. One of them is Millie Michalchuk, friend of Dumplin’s Willowdean, who wants to eschew yet another summer at fat camp to pursue her dream of broadcast journalism. So what if viewers aren’t ready to see a fat person reading the news? Millie is going to change that.

As for me, in late May, I’m continuing Virginia’s story in The Universe Is Expanding and So Am I. In the final chapter of The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, Virginia is just getting the confidence to kiss her dorky crush Froggy in public instead of hiding away with him behind closed doors. Well, I wanted to give Virginia more. More of a story. More lust. More love. Introduce hunky Sebastian. The Universe Is Expanding and So Am I is not an easy love story—Virginia and Sebastian’s families are Romeo and Juliet–level rivals—and in one vulnerable moment she asks how someone like him could be attracted to her when he could easily score a skinny girlfriend. It’s a tough conversation, but they muddle through it, and their relationship is stronger for it.
As I look at these novels splayed across my desk, I feel hopeful. Teen girls of all sizes with all sorts of bodies are getting represented in stories. While the characters acknowledge the struggles of being curvy in a weight-obsessed society, this is not everything about who they are. They have love stories, beauty contests, sexuality questions, and career dreams. Like Willowdean saying “I’m insecure” and “I’m bold” in the same breath, these novels speak to the complexity of what it is like to be a teen girl in a body. Any body. So, yeah. Keep ’em coming. Readers need them. We all need them.
The Universe Is Expanding and So Am I goes on sale May 29, and is available for preorder now. The fifteenth anniversary edition of The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things is available now.