Fat Characters in Literature

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books had a wonderful post recently about plus-sized heroines in romance novels.

Yesterday I requested Such a Pretty Face, a sci-fi/fantasy anthology about plus-sized women, from my public library. I look forward to reading it.

A few weeks ago I read Too Big to Miss and I honestly did not enjoy it that much. I felt preached to, which I think is a risk any author takes when she creates a character who has to justify something about herself to other characters or to readers. I also didn’t think the characters were developed as much as I’d like, but it’s a series so I might read the second one and see if I like it any better.

The only book with a fat heroine I recall reading before that was Pigs Don’t Fly, which I found in the library all the way back in middle school. The narrator is the daughter of the village prostitute, but can’t follow in her mother’s footsteps because she is fat (“I was a huge lump of grease, wobbling from foot to foot like ill-set aspic”) and therefore so ugly that no one would ever pay to sleep with her. Part of the plot is her losing weight and becoming more attractive, naturally. Even years before getting involved in fat acceptance, I found it ridiculous.

As for fat male characters, the only one I can think of off the top of my head is the title character of the Thraxas series, which I enjoy greatly despite its flaws. But I don’t know how fat positive that really is; although Thraxas is generally unashamed of his size, he is also portrayed as eating about six times as much as a normal human and is mostly asexual.

This has all got me thinking about my own stories–should I ever have time to work on them again–and how I could include more variation in body type without making fat the central aspect of a character’s personality. I have some ideas so far; hopefully they’ll work out. One is for a chubby, ass-kicking female vampire and her male sidekick/narrator, who has alternately been, in the story’s planning stages, a private investigator, a romance novelist, and an elementary school teacher. I’m still not sure where I’m going with that one.