Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls, Jes Baker
Baker’s first book, Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls, published in 2015 (already 10 years ago, can you believe it?), is a manifesto for living outside of the narrow realm that diet culture tries to push all women into. Its advice and recommendations are simple and sensible, a precursor to the more sophisticated dialogue to come in regard to the diet industry, perceptions of fat people, rejection of beauty ‘standards’, and even the reclamation of the word ‘fat’ itself (as a neutral descriptor, just as ‘thin’, ‘short’, and ‘tall’, for example). Filled with personal anecdotes and witticisms, Baker’s intention is to write about academic topics in a non-academic way that is accessible for everyone.
All Fours, Miranda July
July’s novel follows a 45-year-old woman re-discovering herself in perimenopause through a series of weird and chaotic actions that eventually lead to her marriage becoming non-monogamous. If it feels as though no one can shut up about non-monogamy (it does and they can’t), then the opposite is true about perimenopause (and even menopause)—no one is talking about it. For many women, it is like the elephant in a room that is becoming hotter and more claustrophobic by the year, and July’s novel is a welcome relief, shining a spotlight on something that all women will go through and that feels like a secret. In fact, the protagonist discovers this herself when she asks some of her friends a simple question—“What’s the best thing about life after bleeding?”—and receives dozens and dozens of answers not only from her friends, but from friends of her friends and so on and so forth. All Fours is a quirky novel that feels significant and prescient in the best of ways, signaling perhaps that this will simply be the first of several novels in a new(-ish?) genre: fiction about perimenopause and menopause.