Kill the Fatphobia: Fat Girls in YA

Kill the Boy Band, Goldy Moldavsky, Macmillan, 2016

Kill the Boy Band by Goldy Moldavsky is a recent young adult Kill the Boy Band, Goldy Moldavsky , Point, 2016novel about a group of fangirl friends who kidnap a member of their favorite boy band, The Ruperts. The first major description given of Apple, the fat girl in the group, is this: “Apple’s forehead crinkled, and having no food on hand to munch on … she did the next best thing: She chewed on a strip of her dyed auburn hair.”

Not long after, we learn the history of her name:

“…Apple’s parents were browsing the orphanage when they spotted the chubbiest baby they’d ever seen eating a piece of fruit out of the trash. I’ll give you one guess which fruit.”

Two chapters in, and here’s what we know about the fat girl:

  • she stress-eats so compulsively she’ll chew on her hair without food around
  • even as a baby she ate so much she’d eat right out of the trash.

Apple’s fatness is what enables the girls to kidnap their boy band member, Rupert P. Apple sees him in a hallway, turns into “a big blubbering mess of tear-streaked flesh and dry heaving”, and tackles him, knocking him out. The book makes it clear that it’s not hitting his head on the floor that incapacitates him. It’s that his assailant was a 267-pound teenager (her weight is repeated for emphasis). The narrator remarks, “This was actually kind of a best-case scenario, under the circumstances, because a tackle from Apple could’ve very well killed him.”

The fatphobia doesn’t stop there. We later learn that Apple likes the ugliest member of The Ruperts because, even in her fantasies, she doesn’t think she can hope for anything better. She also has an oversized suitcase stuffed with popcorn, because, I guess, reasons.

This is spectacularly bad fat representation.

But it’s not just the representation that hurts. What hurts more is the reception this book has received. In the months leading up to its release most of what I saw was praise. In Twitter searches for the title, those who read the ARC pushed it as edgy and hilarious, and others responded with excitement. In the time since its come out, a Twitter search continues to reveal a lot of love and not a lot of talk about the book’s problems. Goodreads reviews are similar—though some have been critical, many more ignore or dismiss the critiques and instead sing the book’s praises.

Because the talk has been so positive, many reacted with shock and confusion when I started tweeting about the fatphobia. Very few people knew about the offensive content. I kept getting the same question: How can so many people praise this book when it offers such awful representation?

At a time when so many in the YA community are passionate about diversity and positive representation, it should be surprising that something like this could slip through. But, the YA landscape is a sad one for fat girls, who have a very small number of positive representations—even fewer if you want fat girls of color, or queer fat girls, or fat girls along any intersections at all.

We mostly have Dumplin’ by JuGabi, Girl in Pieces, Isabel Quintero, Cinco Puntos Press, 2014 lie Murphy. Some might argue for Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell. If you talk to the right people, you’ll get some more titles, like Gabi, A Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero, and My Big Fat Manifesto by Susan Vaught.

But you have to talk to the right people to find fat positive YA. Not all fat teenagers have that access. I’ve spent most of my life reading YA, and before I discovered fat activism I’d accepted that I was never going to see myself in a book. Fat girls don’t go on adventures or find true love. I read book after book about slim girls, and skinny girls, and tall girls with long gangly limbs, and girls who wished to be curvy but just couldn’t gain weight. It hurt in a way that I couldn’t explain. It told me, over and over again, that I wasn’t worthy.

As an adult, I can voice that pain and talk about the void that needs filling, but it’s exhausting. When Dumplin’ was met with rave reviews and a bestseller status in 2015, I got my hopes up. I thought, “They get it now. They get why this is so important. Maybe things won’t be perfect, there will still be bad books along with the good, but the community has our back.”

The response to Kill the Boy Band dashed those hopes. Why have I seen so many people praising it, and so few talking about its problems? You can love a book and still admit to its flaws, and the flaws in Kill the Boy Band don’t stop with the fatphobia (there are also issues of race, mental health, homophobia, and beyond, though I won’t delve into them here).

The response I’d like to see: “This book is engagingly written with an intriguing mystery, but it has significant problems.”

The response I’m seeing instead: “This book is dark, funny, and feminist.”

I guess fat girls don’t get feminism.

People are going to say, “You don’t understand. It’s satire. They’re all awful.”

While this may be true, satire does not grant license to blithely use fat stereotypes, and that’s most of Apple’s character. She’s a fat girl who’s constantly eating, desperate for love, and trying to lose weight (she tweets her descending weight at Rupert P. every day in the hopes he’ll notice her). This kind of representation hurts.

Every representation matters, especially when we have so few to begin with.

Maybe if we had more positive fat girl books this wouldn’t be so big of a deal, but we don’t. Every representation matters, especially when we have so few to begin with.

I love YA. The books. The community. It’s been my passion for much of my life.

But YA does not love me.

Or, it does not love my fatness.

It loves my fatness when it’s popular, ignores it when it’s not, and hates it if given the chance. It hurts me as an adult, as someone who’s spent years in both YA and fat activism. So what about the teenagers? The actual intended audience of this book? What about the fat girls who don’t yet know they deserve better than Kill the Boy Band? What about those that do, but are still learning how to express it?

What about the fat fangirl who reads this book, maybe after seeing it highly recommended by bloggers or authors she respects? What will it do to her? What message will it send about not only what this book thinks of her, but what the people praising it think of her?

If you care about YA, then you care about teenagers.

All I ask is that you care about the fat ones, too.

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Sarah Hollowell

Sarah Hollowell

Sarah Hollowell is a fat girl living in Indiana with her two cats. No one has yet proven that she’s not several raccoons in a trench coat. Her poetry has appeared in Apex Magazine and her nonfiction has been published on The Butter and The Gloss.

9 thoughts on “Kill the Fatphobia: Fat Girls in YA

  1. this is horrifying. i’m so glad i didn’t read this! i recommend lyla lee’s I’ll be the One, about a plus size teen competing in a kpop-idol-discovery-thing competition. the cover model is isabel jones, perhaps THE BEST kpop dancer ever

  2. I just found this post, because I’ve been searching online seeing if anyone has written about the awful representation of the only fat character in Tamara Ireland Stone’s Every Last Word. It was like, comically awful. Like Kill the Boy Band, Every Last Word was a YA book with engaging writing and a unique plot that I would have fully enjoyed and recommended, if not for the terrible depiction of the one fat named character. In Every Last Word, one of the nine poets in the MC’s group is Sydney, who is described as “heavy set” and ONLY WRITES POEMS ABOUT FAST FOOD. Not only that, she only writes them ON FAST FOOD WRAPPERS. At the first mention of her writing a poem on a greasy nuggets lid I was like, “well this is weird” but figured it was one misstep. Nope! Every other poet writes about love and loss and mental illness, but Sydney writes about Auntie Annie’s pretzels. I was so mad at the end I was sure someone else had written about it, but if they have I can’t find it. Ugh. I should go re-read Dumplin’

  3. I will never, EVER forget my first encounter with fatphobia in a YA book (Nothing’s Fair in Fifth Grade, where Elise’s ‘terribleness’ is represented by her weight and her moral turnaround is represented by an interest in fitness and weight loss). One would think authors would have grown beyond this kind of stereotyping.

    Even for a quasi-Heathersian Dark Comedy, this sounds bizarre and a frankly awful character choice.

  4. I know it was supposed to be “dark” satire. But as a woman who knows what it feels like to be a fat child, reading these ill-conceived passages about a fat girl still hurts. More than that, I wonder how the author, a young Peruvian Jew, would feel about reading a “satire” that devastated Latino Jews with stereotypes and epithets? How would the cleverness hold up under her eye for snark?

  5. This book sounds like one of many I read as a teenager that helped to shape how I felt about myself (both as a teen and an adult). This shit is so problematic and now that I’m more aware of stuff like this it makes me so angry. If I ever write a YA book (which I’m now seriously considering), it’s gonna be so very different to this!

  6. I read “Awoken” a few years ago — it’s basically a deliberately bad Twilight parody with Cthulhu as a stand-in for Edward Cullen that was supposed to draw attention to how offensive some of its tropes are — and I feel like the “fat best friend (TM)” in that book was a way more respectful portrait than this one sounds.

    1. Still haven’t gotten to that yet, really want to read it, especially as I’ve always been a fan of Chez Apocalypse.

  7. Just…WOW. I was reading those first few paragraphs, and was viscerally shocked. Even for being traditionally fatphobic, that was just HACKY. Actually no, it wasn’t traditionally fatphobic; traditional fatphobia is…Kevin James’s current schtick. This was…please tell me you’re not alone in noticing this, Ms. Hollowell! I am just stunned here!

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