Fat Bubble: Fat Chance, Charlie Vega
Today I want to take the opportunity to focus on a book I read in October, when I took a great week off for rest, recharge, and a lot of reading! It’s a Young Adult fiction book called Fat Chance, Charlie Vega, with a central fat character, and phew, what healing lies between the covers for those of us who grew up in bigger bodies!
Fat Chance, Charlie Vega is written by Crystal Maldonado, and is a lovely soft read – warm, wholesome and fun, and the main character is absolutely lovely to spend time with.
Charlie is a young, brown, fat girl, living in Connecticut and navigating high schools and dating. The book explores fatphobia, dating when fat, and how to manage being close to someone still deeply immersed in diet culture. Charlie likes her own body and believes she’s entitled to as much body freedom as her slim peers, but still reckons with many of the social struggles of fatness – finding cute clothes that fit, comparison with others, pressure to diet, and avoiding internalising anti-fat hate. The book also explores existing between two cultures - reconciling her paternal Puerto Rican heritage with her American identity.
As adults, reading fat positive, weight neutral YA fiction can be a powerful opportunity for us to offer healing down to our wounded inner teen, who had to navigate society and culture and their changing body, and then also have to deal with a whole other source of confusion and hurt, as we realised how unacceptable society deemed our bodies to be. What I would have given for a fat positive role model, rather than the inaccessible bodies of the Wakefield twins in Sweet Valley High, or Bridget bloody Jones. I *truly* do not remember a single non-pathologised fat role model of my age as a child and teen, or even as a young adult.
And this is where I think that reading YA fiction can be a powerful source of retrospective healing. When I read Fat Chance, Charlie Vega, my inner teen reads it too. When I enjoy the lovely company of Charlie, my inner teen does too. Believe me, I’ve gathered quite the collection of fat positive YA fiction, and when I experience the solidarity of reading stories of fat teens who face the same challenges as me – finding jeans in the shopping centre, avoiding diet crap, maintaining self worth in a fatphobic culture – my inner teen does too. And my inner teen also gets to read about fat main characters with affirming best friends, an inherent sense of value, a rebellious spirit, and a sparkly romantic life, my inner teen does too. It’s a process I describe as ‘sending the healing down’ - both down the timeline, and also down into the body.
As teens, maybe we never really acknowledged that if we ever saw a fat character, it was always as a side kick – a best friend, one of the gang. It’s such a passive way that we internalise that we don’t get to have Main Character Energy, and it diminishes our expectation that we should be able to truly see ourselves in the world around us. And teens have to see themselves represented, at multiple times in multiple ways, as they develop a strong sense of self and a concept of their place in time and space. The younger we can start our Fat Bubble, the better. So stay tuned for more book recs in the future, both adult and teen, as we retrospectively build some of that representation!