In my earliest memories I am already fat. There is no before. My very first self-concepts are all grounded in my size, which is always larger than my peers’. For a time, I think being bigger is a good thing. But this changes. Even in the years from roughly age…

If you walk into the public entrance of the Library of Congress in Washington DC expecting to gain access to the Main Reading Room, you will be sadly disappointed. The main entrance is for tourists and exhibits, and if you just want to sit and write in the reading room…

There is an ad going around the internet; you may have seen it. If not, part of me wants to be all “just watch it!” and not spoil anyone but also part of me wants to be all “content note for implied violence!” I’ll put my own lengthy take below…

A few weeks ago, I wrote a hot take on the pilot episode of NBC’s big fall family drama, This is Us. There’s a lot to say about this series, but I wanted to focus on Kate’s storyline, because Kate is fat. Not like size-16 fat, but fat-fat. Fat like…

I’ll forgive you if you’ve somehow managed to remain unaware of This is Us, NBC’s high-expectation fall dramedy. I almost overlooked it myself, but TV shows with fat women in them have a way of finding me. The series’ premise is that it follows the lives of four people born…

When Huge first appeared on my radar in 2010, I was still a blogger writing about fat activism while working an impossibly boring office day job. The series didn’t sound promising — the YA book providing the source material was panned as terrible and fat-hating by all the smart folks…

I’ve maybe never gotten writing retreats completely right. In collaboration with my dear friend, colleague, and occasional internet doppelgänger Marianne Kirby, I have tried more than once, but the writing has usually been somewhat less forthcoming than the local explorations, and the expansive and deliberate meals, the antique shops and…

Recently I read an essay by an extremely lovely average-sized woman in response to being weight-shamed by a stranger on the internet. I’m not calling out this essay or author in particular, as this isn’t about her (I think she is pretty great) or even the essay itself. It’s a…

I looked into floating locally after reading an article about it as a potential treatment for PTSD. I don’t have PTSD myself, to be clear, only a standard form of decades-long anxiety that I am sometimes good at managing and sometimes not. The science of whether floating in a dark…