The Market for Fat Representation in Fiction

In recent years, nonfiction exploring fat positivity has sprung up on bookstore shelves. But fiction, especially for adults, hasn’t made the same strides and still abounds with fat characters treated as immoral, lazy, and/or sleazy, a trope that persists across genres. The fatness of villainous characters is often written in ways that equate their misdeeds with their size.

While body positivity in young adult novels is so prevalent as to warrant lists of popular titles, in the adult realm, there’ve been fewer novels starring fat characters whose weight isn’t seen as a negative, with some notable exceptions, like One to Watch by Kate Stayman-London (The Dial Press, 2020) and Dietland by Sarai Walker (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), which was adapted for a TV show that aired on AMC for one season in 2018. Fat characters have made inroads in genres such as mystery, with Sue Ann Jaffarian’s Odelia Grey series starring a plus-size sleuth, and romance, with fat representation becoming more common, but there are still major holes in the market for fat representation, especially in science fiction, fantasy, and mainstream fiction, according to authors and readers.

To counter these troubling portrayals, literary agents are actively looking for fat characters whose weight isn’t treated as a personal failing. Tara Gilbert, associate literary agent at The Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency, has tweeted about her manuscript wishlist including “Fat girl stories where their weight is not the plot.” In an interview, Gilbert said, “Fat isn’t something someone can be; it’s something in everyone’s bodies and is something we eat, not something we are.” And for her, this topic is personal. “I’m fat. I want to see characters like myself out there doing great things. I want to help give children the rep I didn’t see as a kid,” she said.

Specifically, Gilbert wants to see “plus-size characters in roles that aren’t just evil, lazy, sad, jolly, or alone. We should have a badass fat person slay a dragon, be a lead in a rom-com, or the superhero you love. I want to see fat characters in all kinds of roles, but I think what I really crave is more fat characters in rom-coms, but where their size and looks aren’t a plot point. Instead, it’s just who they are. I’d also love to see a fat assassin or morally ambiguous fat characters because I love characters that fall strictly in the gray areas.”

Along those lines, Gilbert praised author TJ Klune for his 2020 novel The House in the Cerulean Sea. The main character, she said, “is described as having a bit of a belly. Although the main character does learn to love himself and stops eating only salads, the book isn’t about his weight. It’s just something that is. I love how Klune handles body diversity in his novels. I’ve read most of his works, and he always has a range of body types, and they are all beautiful and extraordinary.”

Linda Camacho, literary agent at Gallt & Zacker Literary Agency, told me she’s looking for “stories with fat protagonists in both the adult and children’s categories across all genres, really. I do have a soft spot for horror, romance, and women’s fiction, but I’m pretty open to everything. I prefer that the fat characters don’t lose weight by the end of the story to find happiness. I’d like to see more fat characters just living their lives with as much depth as thin characters.” Similar to Gilbert, Camacho says, “As a fat person, I’ve always wanted to see myself represented in novels.” The fat characters she read growing up “were usually sad sacks who only found happiness when they lost weight or evil villains who didn’t deserve love.” Camacho has represented Here to Stay by Adriana Herrera, a contemporary romance novel with a plus-size protagonist, and says what drew her toward the book is “that the protagonist didn’t feel self-conscious about her weight and she got the sexy guy in the end.”

The lack of varied fat representation has created an eager market for these types of books, as evidenced by podcasts and websites discussing fat representation. Mary Warren founded the website Fat Girls in Fiction after reading romance novel Spoiler Alert by Olivia Dade in January 2021, which “changed the way I read,” she said. “I had never read a book with a fat main character who was confident and sexy. She was written about in a desirable way. She was wooed by a movie star. She had a career. And she did all of that while being unapologetically fat. I have been fat my entire life, and I did not know how much I needed this story until I read it.”

Warren went on to read the rest of Dade’s backlist and that of romance author Talia Hibbert and other authors portraying fat people, especially women, in non-demeaning ways. “I wanted to make lists of these books so other people could read them and feel more beautiful and more confident,” explained Warren. Those lists were the precursors to the website and online community she’s formed. Now the site has a Facebook group and a book club, which has read romances such as The Love Con by Seressia Glass, Sweet Disorder by Rose Lerner, A Sisterhood of Secret Ambitions by Sheena Boekweg, and Dade’s aforementioned Spoiler Alert. Warren posts frequently on TikTok about books featuring fat and plus-size characters, and the TikTok hashtag #fatgirlsinfiction has been viewed over 1.9 million times.

Warren says that authors like Dade and Hibbert in adult romance and Julie Murphy (Dumplin’) in young adult are especially welcome. “Growing up in the ’90s, the only fat characters I remember were shorthand for being gross or lazy,” she recalled. “I’m thinking of the Dursleys from Harry Potter and the Gloops from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This representation is clearly harmful. There were a handful of romance novels that came out around 2000; without fail, they featured a fat heroine who lost weight to win the affections of a man—again, not ideal representation.”

Asked about how fat representation compares between fiction and nonfiction, Warren says the two are connected. “I think good fictional representation comes from authors who have a true understanding of what the leaders in nonfiction are saying. Unfortunately, our fatphobic society ascribes a great deal of exceptionalism to the ‘good fat people,’ which the average fat person internalizes and has a hard time relating to. Fiction bridges the exceptionalism gap; it can place ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances and show them rising to the occasion and thriving.” To that end, she praises Hibbert’s books, where “weight is never an obstacle people have to overcome; it is just a part of who they are. They are generally strong confident women of color who happen to be fat. So we get to see what life looks like when we have done some of the work to rid ourselves of the internalized fatphobia we all have.”

Like Warren, actor and voiceover artist Abby Rose Morris, who hosts the podcast More Than Tracy Turnblad, about fat representation in entertainment, was dismayed by the way fat characters were treated in popular books she read as a kid, noting that many either mocked fatness or featured characters battling eating disorders. In response, as an adult, Morris initially read memoir and nonfiction by fat writers instead “because that representation was always more realistic and positive.”

On the upside, Morris praised Walker’s Dietland and Julie Murphy’s If the Shoe Fits, a retelling of Cinderella with a plus-size protagonist. Morris says Murphy’s fat representation “was great because, while weight stigma was acknowledged by the main character, Cindy, it was always clear that it was coming from outside herself. You could tell the book itself was not fatphobic, even though fatphobia still existed in the world of the story.”

Bottom line: If you’re reading this and thinking you’re going to make a quick buck by throwing some fat characters into your manuscript, it’s not that simple. The literary agents recommend doing research and using a sensitivity reader if you don’t have the lived experience of being fat. Camacho said there’s a lot the author can get wrong, and she “can usually tell when the author has never been fat when they write awkward descriptions of the fat character’s appearance.” Gilbert goes one step further and suggests sensitivity readers even if you are fat. Why? Because “sometimes your internal bias can be harmful, and we don’t all see things the same way. If you can’t afford a sensitivity reader, ask a friend you trust to read it.”