You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about anti-fat bias, diet culture, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole Smith.

Today I’m chatting with the brilliant Mecca Jamila Sullivan, author of Big Girl.

Originally from Harlem, Mecca is now an associate professor of English at Georgetown University and lives in Washington DC. She is also the author The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora and Blue Talk and Love. Big Girl was a New York Times Editor’s Choice winner of the 2023 next generation indie Book Award for first novel. It was also one of my very favorite books that I read in 2022 and probably of all time. It is an utter delight to talk about writing, fatness, and bodies with Mecca.

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This week we have a reading list—with suggestions from me and Mecca—of other incredible memoirs and novels that tell the coming of age stories we don’t hear often enough.

Episode 113 Transcript

Mecca

I always think of Big Girl as a novel about women, about bodies, about queer people and the paths we take across generations to make space for ourselves in the world. It follows a big Black girl through her coming of age in Harlem in the 1990s. Honestly, a large part of what inspired me to write this novel was living an experience very similar to the main character—her name is Malaya.

In my own experience growing up as a fat kid, and as a big teenager, and as a fat woman, there are so many elements of those experiences that intersect with major conversations about race, about gender, about class about sexuality. It was really important to me, from that standpoint, to bring all of those together in this work of fiction. In many ways, it’s the book that I have always wanted to write. It is the first book that I imagined writing, even though is the third book that I ended up publishing.

Virginia

One big myth that Big Girl explodes right off the bat is this idea that thinness and the pursuit of weight loss is only pushed on white girls by their thin white mothers, that whiteness somehow owns disordered eating, that this only happens in affluent white communities. What does the thin ideal represent to Malaya? And to her mother and her grandmother who are really involved in her body?

Mecca

That Black people and Black communities don’t experience fatphobia and weight bias, and that the priorities of thinness are not internalized in Black communities and Black families is absolutely a myth. And I think it’s a really dangerous myth. We’re talking about power, right? And if we’re thinking about how thinness is a centerpiece of several forms of power, including the power of normative gender, right? The notion that a normatively gendered body also has to look a certain way and has to achieve a certain body weight, right? Class, of course—you mentioned affluence, right? This idea that fitness is a kind of sign of a class mobility, of an affluence also related to power. So in that sense, it only makes sense that then disempowered communities are internalizing those same ideals right? It’s not like there’s some sort of parallel world where Black communities have access to power outside of the dominant American power structure.

Thinking about it structurally, in that way, it makes sense. There’s just sound logic. One of the things that fiction has the power to do is really distill that and make it personal, tell the story. And so for Malaya, my hope is that we see those structures play out in her life in this personal way that perhaps is maybe even more relatable or legible for some readers.

Because she’s this little girl. She has no language for social power structures, right? But what she knows is that her mother and her grandmother are really obsessed with thinness in this way that just doesn’t make sense to her. She sees food as a source of joy, especially early on, joy, pleasure, sort of escape, right? It’s fun, comfort. She loves the colors of food, she loves the smell, sort of a sensory experience of pleasure, joy, and freedom. And yet, she’s very much aware that her mother and her grandmother are looking at food very differently, and are looking at their bodies very differently.

She comes to see that that is informed by this white thin ideal that is very much tied to a kind of class mobility and class ascendancy. As she’s coming of age, part of what she has to do is parse out where the all of these ideas around thinness and around bodies come from and figure out sort of what parts of the messaging she’s getting around her own body she wants to hold on to and what she wants to reject.

And so, to my mind, that has a lot to do with how she comes into her own identity, right? Navigating those structures and figuring out what she wants to say goodbye to, what of these family legacies she needs to just decide are not for her.

Virginia

I thought a lot as I was reading, how it’s all tangled up with their love for her as well. They’re trying to protect her. They’re trying to keep her body safe.

Mecca

And isn’t that always the thing, right? How we define safety, especially when we’re talking about multiple generations of women and families, this notion of safety and how we protect the younger generations of people in our families is always kind of messy and complicated. Because, of course, we are only capable of offering protections that we can imagine.

I think, for Malaya’s grandmother, for example, she does think that the way to protect her own daughter and her granddaughter is to kind of enforce this rigid ideal of body shape and size through diet culture. She, of course, imagines that she’s protecting them from heartbreak from job discrimination, from all kinds of things that she’s experienced in her own life and that are real to her.

Similarly, Malaya’s mother believes that she’s protecting Malaya from all of those things and from the ridicule of her grandmother, right? So there’s this interesting sort of compounding.

Virginia

Protecting against the protecting.

Mecca

Exactly. And so again, Malaya has to sort of figure out what she actually wants protection from and how to protect herself.

I think part of what enables her to do that in a different way is that she’s also aware that she’s got an inner world to protect. And that’s something that is clear to her because of that process we were talking about earlier, where she wants to retain her sense of joy, and her sense of pleasure in food, and also, just like in her body in general. There’s something that very early on, she knows is not quite right about the messaging she’s getting around food and bodies. She doesn’t know exactly how she knows that there’s something internal to her that she wants to protect. And that opens up another space for her to at least sort of look for other ways of engaging her body and engaging in food.

Virginia

And it helps her to be able to understand the harm that’s embedded in their protection. There’s so much truth in all of them. I mean, they’re right. It is easier to be in the world in a thin body. And yet she has the agency to make these different choices.

The book also tells the story of gentrification and the cultural erasure in Harlem in the 90s. The writing of place in this book is so beautifully done. You’re just right there in that neighborhood, walking the streets. It’s wonderful and there are lots of parallels between the attempts to control and shrink Malaya’s body and the way Harlem itself, as a community, is being shrunk.

Mecca

I see Malaya’s body and the neighborhood as constantly in conversation with one another over the course of the novel. When we meet Malaya, again, she has this fierce determination to hold fast to who she is, even though she’s constantly growing and changing. She’s eight years old, when we meet her. The family has actually newly moved to Harlem, so she’s encountering herself through the music of the neighborhood, through the food of the neighborhood, through the visual landscape. And she’s a visual artist, she’s taking all of this in, as kids do. But I think she’s got a particularly keen sense of the meanings and the importance of the sensory world. And so she’s taking all of this in. The neighborhood is an important part of her identity at that age. Then, as she begins to change, as teenagers do, so does the neighborhood.

Suddenly, there are external forces that are coming in, changing the feel of the neighborhood, changing the landscape of the neighborhood, and absolutely trying to shrink the neighborhood. At the same time, there’s an effort of resistance, right? There are community groups that are insisting on claiming black diasporic culture as the center of the neighborhood’s identity and that plays out in the landscape as well. So in some ways, watching the onslaught of gentrification and Harlem’s internal resistance to gentrification is part of Malaya’s own struggle, or at least part of what catalyzes her eventual coming into into her sense of self. That she’s constantly observing the neighborhood efforts to resist and push back.

Of course, on a macro level, the connections between diet culture, and gentrification are similar to what we were just talking about—this idea of a white hegemonic cultural dominance. There is a particular ideal of who is in power, who should retain power, for whom what resources are meant. If we’re talking about the resources of a neighborhood or the kind of inner resources of a body, there is an external ideal. Whoever it is, it’s not Malaya. It’s not the little Black girl who should have power in this space, even when the space is her own body.

Watching Harlem’s resistance to gentrification helps Malaya see and recognize an internal power within herself. It’s not a simple path, certainly, the story of Harlem. It bears this out, that you can’t just will gentrification away and the same way you can’t just will diet culture away. But shifting that locus so that for Malaya, she can decide that she herself is at the center of her world.

I’m born and raised in Harlem. For many of us Harlemites, there’s still that sense that we are really what Harlem is, even if it doesn’t necessarily look that way to that outside perspective.

Virginia

Even though Starbucks has arrived.

Mecca

Yes. That’s right.

It’s so fascinating how a coming of age novel has the power to really speak to these bigger questions that we honestly all need to be asking. I’m just so happy to have a chance to talk that through with you.

Virginia

It was the first time I’d thought about those two concepts in relation to each other, and it just felt like such an important metaphor to explore. Because a mistake we make when we talk about diet culture is if we only talk about it in terms of bodies, right? It’s this bigger thing, it’s related to white supremacy, and it’s related to all these power structures. The same is true with gentrification, it becomes this thing about, like, “We don’t want the Starbucks,” and yet there is a bigger system here that we need to be talking about and dismantling.

I also just absolutely love how you write about Malaya’s body. It’s very visceral and messy and raw. I think writing about fatness can go so wrong—like so very, very wrong—and become fetishizing or objectifying. There’s The Whale, too many examples. We won’t name them. We don’t need to relive them. But I would just love to hear how you think about writing bodies.

Mecca

As a writer, I tend to be drawn to voice and description. For me, I think in some ways, I almost want to say it’s an advantage, but it’s also a real challenge. I tend to write from a deep place within the experiences of my characters or sometimes a deep place within the setting. But either way, I think a lot through, again, sensory detail and description.

When I’m writing bodies, I’m thinking of writing from within the body, by which I mean I’m thinking first of how the body feels. I’m thinking about how the body sort of resonates for the character before I’m thinking about how it might look or how it might smell or that kind of thing. I’m centering the body itself.

In the case of Malaya, where part of what she has to do over the course of the novel is find the language to describe her body, it’s important that the narrator sometimes supply the language that Malaya doesn’t have. So that’s how I approached writing about her body. For example, when she’s experiencing the pleasure and the comfort of eating, the language may slow down because she herself was feeling more at ease and more at peace. There’s a calm, you know what I mean? But then when she’s thinking about the excitement of French fries, the the writing might sort of pick up and it becomes more vibrant.

I really want the reader to feel what the body is feeling in that moment, rather than imposing an external, objectifying gaze. I really am not interested in what the reader thinks Malaya looks like. I want the reader to think about what Malaya’s body is feeling. This is why I feel like writing from the perspective of someone who’s drawn to description is an advantage in a way. I love that stuff. The very first draft of this novel was like 500 pages and it was almost all description. Because I just love it.

Virginia

Was it hard to cut?

Mecca

So hard, so hard, so hard. Because I knew this is what we don’t get to see, right? This is why really why I wanted to write this novel. Living in a fat body is such a beautiful and complicated sensory experience that we just don’t see often enough. We don’t see the complexities of all that bodies in general experience, but fat bodies in particular. So I really enjoyed in that first draft just lavishing in all of it, in the pleasure and the desire, the yearnings and the longing and the pain. I felt that it was important to let the reader in to some of those physical and psychic experiences of fat embodiment in a way that language makes possible. So why not go for it?

Virginia

I think you writing the 500 page version is what enables this version to feel so real. You got in there, even if we don’t get all of it. And I feel for you, because I hate cutting. I’m also an over-writer and it’s so, so hard if you write long, and then they’re like, “We need a little less.” And you’re like, “Do we though? I feel like we need it all.”

Mecca

You do, right? As the author—I don’t know if you feel this way—I feel like I definitely needed to write that first version. Because as you said, like, that’s how I really got to know the character and her relationship with her body, you know what I mean?

Virginia

Definitely. You feel that. It comes through in how embodied she feels and that you are in her body with her, not looking at her body, not objectifying her. I felt the same way about how you wrote the mom’s body and the dad when he’s sick. You embody all of them. And the grandmother’s physicality is really powerful as well. All of it gave me a lot to think about because so often when I’m reading a book that’s attempting to do this, you see when it fails—because you see when the author starts thinking of their character as an object and loses that connection.

Mecca

From a craft standpoint, when I talk with students about this, one of the things I always say is even if you’re using an omniscient narrator, one of the great things about an omniscient narrator is that they do have access to the sensibilities of each character, right? If you ground the description in the sensibility of the character, you’re going to get a fresher and more nuanced perspective.

Malaya happens to always be, or quite often at least, be thinking about both color and food. She’s not going to give an overly familiar simile or metaphor when she’s describing somebody that she’s looking at, because almost everything that she’s seeing is filtered through the vibrancy of the color or whatever food is on her mind at that time.

There’s this built-in way that the character herself can give you a pathway to a more nuanced and maybe richer and more interesting mode of description of bodies. Especially because Malaya is very deliberately observing the bodies of the people around her, especially the women around her, because she’s trying to make sense of what her body means to everyone, including these specific women. So the kind of attention she’s paying to her grandmother’s body, for example, is always sort of about her trying to navigate and think through her own body. So for that reason, too, she’s going to think about it in ways that are very precise and very detailed and very much connected to what’s on her mind and what matters to her.

Virginia

Oh, that makes so much sense. My work is a lot of interviewing people about their relationships with their bodies. So often what comes up is the way a mother or a grandmother, sometimes the father or grandfather but often a maternal figure, talked about the person I’m interviewing’s body, but also talked about their own body. Even if it wasn’t verbal, kids notice. They notice all of it. They see how we look in the mirror at ourselves, they see all the ways we hold ourselves or cover up or minimize and all of that.

I want to be careful to talk about this next part without spoilers, because I really want folks to read the book if they haven’t already, but: Malaya’s body does change over the course of the book. I did not read this as a celebration of intentional weight loss. This is not like the cheesy, ugly girl gets her glow up moment at all. But I am curious to learn more about how you thought about this piece of things and why it felt important for her body to change or not change.

Mecca

It’s true. Malaya’s body changes over the course of the novel. In fact, it changes several times over the course of the novel, partly because she’s growing up. She’s also growing up within diet culture. One of the first changes we hear about is a moment where she’s eight years old and she’s recalling that the one time that she on the Weight Watchers program lost two pounds and proudly reported the weight loss to her grandmother in a letter and then gains the weight back and is ashamed.

Very early on we’re actually seeing her awareness of fluctuations or changes in her body and how much those changes mean to the people around her. Her task over the course of the novel is to find a way to relate to her body as something that is for her rather than something to be commented on or policed or critiqued or even celebrated or valued for its weight changes by other people. Which is a longer way of saying bodies do change, and they change and they change back and they age, and they experience different degrees of mobility, and health, wellness, all of these things.

What Malaya has to do is find a way to define and claim her body for herself, regardless of where it might be in terms of any of these factors, including weight. And regardless of what others may think of it, for better or for worse. So where she ends up is a place where her body is in the process of a change. And the triumph here is that she is deciding that the weight doesn’t matter, right? And that what matters is how her body feels to her, how she feels in her body.

She’s just beginning, as the novel closes, to shift that locus of power again, right? To define the body for herself and really recognize that her body is hers. It’s for her to enjoy, it’s for her to experience and that its value is what it can do for her rather than how it might be evaluated by anybody else. To me that’s the win, you know? In a world and in a life where we are told that our bodies are only supposed to change in one way and then after that, they should never change again. I mean, it’s just ridiculous. It’s one of these cultural stories that really is the underpinning of diet culture and arguably it’s very much tied to patriarchy and heteronormative ideas about family and certainly white supremacy. Malaya gets to say regardless of whatever my body is doing, it’s still mine. And that’s the point.

Virginia

I think so much about how different all of our relationships with our bodies would be if we normalized change with our kids right off the bat and for ourselves throughout life.

This is a little bit of a tangent, but I saw the the Barbie movie this week. I don’t know if you’ve seen it yet?

Mecca

Yeah! What did you think?

Virginia

I mean, I loved it. Most of me really loved it. I also think it doesn’t go far enough. But for what it is, I love it. But to me, the real heartbreak is Barbieland shows all these women—President, Supreme Court—but they are all unchanging and forever thin and beautiful. They’re all encased in that lack of change. And Barbie’s choice is then to go give up power in order to be a body that changes.

Mecca

That’s interesting.

Virginia

There’s some real heartbreak there. I’m curious what you thought about it.

Mecca

I mean, I, too, had similar thoughts about the absence of an aging Barbie or an aging process in Barbieland. There’s that moment where there is a reference to the beauty of an older body toward the end of the film, which felt to me necessary, but as you said, perhaps not enough.

And similarly, there was one fat Barbie. It’s this whole messy trap of representation in a way, right? You see an image. Is that really enough? Is seeing the image the kind of inclusion of this figure in the landscape of Barbieland? Is that enough? Or do we need to have more conversations truly about what that Barbie is doing, what that Barbie experiences?

And as you’re pointing out, what if fat Barbie is not fat Barbie? What if fat Barbie is a person in Barbieland. It could be any Barbie. I see that as sort of a trap of representation, that it does require us to imagine identity as something that’s like fixed and static and completely disconnected from other aspects of identity. Obviously, a lot of this is coming from my perspective as an intersectionality scholar.

Virginia

Well, it’s a fascinating text for that. The way they branded the doll is that there’s a lawyer Barbie, there’s a doctor Barbie. She is only ever one thing. Black Barbie is not also Astronaut Barbie or whatever. So on the one hand, it makes sense that Barbieland is built that way. They even go further it, like Black Barbie as president and Fat Barbie as a lawyer. There is some layering. But then there’s the fact that we’re still frozen. The only way women achieve this power is by upholding the majority of the beauty standards. Maybe you’re getting one box checked. That’s not that different from how our world is right now. I’m still deciding whether I feel like that was a very smart commentary on reality or something that they could have taken further.

Mecca

And it may be both in some ways. I have a lot of similar sort of questions and thoughts about the film. It’s trying to do so many things and appeal to so many audiences. They’re sort of having it both ways, I think.

Virginia

I have talked to women who I think don’t usually feel like feminism is for them, who loved the movie. My hairstylist was like, “It changed me.” And I thought, okay, well, then you know what, this is great. This brings this conversation to folks who really need to hear it. And then I also talked to another person who was like, “I hated the ending. I want the ideal, I don’t want reality. I wanted her to just stay as the idea of Barbie.” And I thought that was like sort of heartbreaking, because what she was really saying is like, “I don’t want her to age. I don’t want to age. I don’t want to change. I want to be able to be frozen in beauty like this.”

Mecca

But I think you’re right. The fact that we are having conversations about patriarchy, about sexism and patriarchy, even if that’s where the conversation stops, I think that’s something. For a lot of people who recognize Barbie and who are invested in Barbie but have not heretofore been invested in feminism. This is a moment where that’s shifting for some people. I think that’s important.

Virginia

Well, thank you for going on a Barbie tangent with me.

Mecca

We’re also both wearing pink at the moment.

Virginia

I think thats what put it in my head.

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Butter

Mecca

My butter is a book called Feelin by a phenomenal poet and scholar named Bettina Judd. Her first poetry collection was called Patient and it was a beautiful collection very much dealing with fatness and bodies and medical oppression and Feelin kind of extends some of those questions and concerns, but she’s talking about creative practice and Black feminist writing or Black women’s writing. It’s a book that brings together scholarly work and poetry. It’s just gorgeous. And I highly, highly recommend.

Virginia

I am ordering immediately. That is a really good Butter.

My Butter is also going to be a book today. I just finished reading Yellowface. Have you read that yet?

Mecca

I haven’t read it yet. I have it.

Virginia

It’s really fun and really smart. I mean, for those of us in publishing, it’s uncomfortably quite accurate.

Mecca

That’s what I’ve heard.

Virginia

She nails it. It just captures all of the writing anxiety and Twitter of it all. And a Chinese woman writing in the voice of a white woman who is stealing from a Chinese woman—like the layers of it and the way she follows that through. It’s really, really uncomfortable and important and it’s still a really fun novel.

Mecca

Can’t wait to read it.

Virginia

Mecca, thank you again! This was absolutely wonderful. Tell folks where they can follow you and how we can support your work.

Mecca

You can find me pretty much everywhere. I’m @MeccaJamilah on all the socials, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or X. I also am on TikTok, I have literally exactly one Tiktok doing the unboxing of the novel. So if you want to see that, it’s there. I’m most active on Instagram, so that’s a good place to find me.

And yeah, in terms of supporting my work, the paperback of Big Girl came out in June and it has a really cool Readers’ Group Guide. So if you’ve already read it but are thinking of sharing it with your reading group or with a classroom or any kind of community setting, definitely check that out. I love engaging with classes and reading groups. So, if you are sharing it with your reading group or your class, you can contact me on my website.

Virginia

Oh, that’s amazing. That’s so generous of you. And because we have a lot of parents in the audience, what age would you recommend the book for? I was thinking about this. I would think certainly high school students would get a ton out of it, but I’m curious what you think.

Mecca

I’m not a parent, so that’s a difficult question for me. What I can say is that I have heard from several parents who have decided to read it with their kids and I just think that’s the ideal way. Hopefully, that will stimulate conversations about these larger questions of eating and diet culture and fatphobia and body shame. I’ve heard a lot of parents say—mothers, especially—that in the process of reading the book with some of their younger children, that they uncovered some things about their own parenting or that helped them think through their own parenting differently. So you know, I think at almost any age, maybe, if you’re guiding the child through it by reading it together. That, to me, would be an ideal way to approach that.

Virginia

That makes sense. That’s great. Well, thank you again, this was really wonderful.

Mecca

I had a great time. Thank you.

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The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

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