From One Fat Girl to Another, or, Dear FUTURE PERFECT

I received this book for free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Future Perfect by Jen Larsen
Published by HarperTeen on October 6, 2015
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Buy @ Barnes&Noble • Buy @ Amazon • Genres: young adult contemporary
Source: Galley from the publisher

Every year on her birthday, Ashley Perkins gets a card from her grandmother—a card that always contains a promise: lose enough weight, and I will buy your happiness.


Ashley doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with the way she looks, but no amount of arguing can persuade her grandmother that “fat” isn’t a dirty word—that Ashley is happy with her life, and her body, as it is.



But Ashley wasn’t counting on having her dreams served up on a silver platter at her latest birthday party. She falters when Grandmother offers the one thing she’s always wanted: tuition to attend Harvard University—in exchange for undergoing weight loss surgery.


As Ashley grapples with the choice that little white card has given her, she feels pressured by her friends, her family, even administrators at school. But what’s a girl to do when the reflection in her mirror seems to bother everyone but her?


Through her indecisions and doubts, Ashley’s story is a liberating one—a tale of one girl, who knows that weight is just a number, and that no one is completely perfect.

 

Dear Ashley (and Jen Larsen),

The picture above was taken in April of this year. I am sunburned in it. I am happy. I am in love with my girlfriend. 

I am fat. 

I am the heaviest I’ve ever been. I won’t talk about numbers. That is for me alone, and my weight isn’t about a number, any more than anyone’s is. There is no perfect number, no magic number that frees you from society’s standards. That’s a construct. 

The number my scales show me has always impacted how I feel about myself. My esteem, whether at a higher or a lower point, has always come from within. It’s plummeted when I let society whisper into my ear that I wasn’t pretty, wasn’t thin, wasn’t this, wasn’t that, wasn’t enough, wasn’t — 

You understand. 

___

I am well-versed in euphemisms. I learned them years ago, when I didn’t lose my “baby fat,” when I graduated high school and gained the “freshmen 15,” when a life-changing, important relationship ended and my weight began creeping above a number I could control. When I shied away from saying, “I’m fat,” choosing instead to call myself, “heavy.” As if saying the word “fat” would diminish everything else about me. 

I didn’t step on a scale for years. I bought flattering clothes. I exercised. I lost weight. I gained weight. I lost a lot of weight. I gained a lot of weight. My body and I volleyed love and hate back and forth in equal measures. Even when I fell in love and flew across the country, through clouds and time zones, and walked with Katie beside the ocean — even then, taking my clothes off felt at least partially like removing armor.

Sometimes, I’d stare in the mirror, letting my vision blur and looking past what I saw as if I could find the girl inside — the girl who could run for miles and lift weights and be noticed when she walked into a room. 

I never found her. 

___

I read a book this summer. Your book. FUTURE PERFECT examines society’s obsession with weight and weight/beauty through the unapologetic eyes of a fat teen — a girl who loves herself as she is, despite, or maybe because of, her body. That girl is you, Ashley, and I want to say thank you. 

Thank you for loving yourself and your body, equally. 

Thank you for being sex-positive. 

Thank you for the message that I hope teens read and receive, that there is nothing wrong with being fat. 

Thank you for insisting you are worthy of love. 

Thank you for demanding to be treated as an equal. 

___

I looked in the mirror again the other day, after a long, hard day of battling various whispers. Some of them are related to things I can’t change right now. Others stem from things I can. 

This time, I wasn’t looking for the thin girl inside of me. I wasn’t wishing to be anything other than what I was in that moment. 

I was simply looking at me. The girl blessed or cursed with wide hips from both sides of the family. The girl with brown eyes and brown hair, the girl who occasionally snorts when she laughs. The girl who cries because of the right song, or when she’s reunited with her girlfriend. The girl who is in love — and in love the way she never dreamed she could be. 

That girl is fat. 

I am fat. 

And finally, finally, I’m starting to love myself, not despite my perceived flaws, but simply for who I am. I still want to be healthier, but I’m not chasing a far-flung dream of the impossible standards magazines and movies force upon us, as women. I’m also not hiding behind euphemisms anymore.

And I won’t be anything but a friend to my body. 

___

While reading FUTURE PERFECT, I felt tender, scrubbed raw. Like so much of the discomfort with myself I’d refused to acknowledge had disappointed under the positive force of Jen Larsen’s book. Reading about Ashley, I couldn’t ignore who I was. I couldn’t ignore the fact that people love me exactly as I am. 

Watching Ashley come to a deeper understanding of herself and her body made me take a look at myself and at mine. For the first time, I saw not too much skin, but just skin. Not something to dress in outfits that would flatten my shape, but simply my shape. 

My dream isn’t a number anymore. It isn’t a pants size. 

It’s to be healthy. 

And to love myself, along the way instead of only after. 

To Jen Larsen for writing a book that has the potential to change the way teens feel about their bodies, thank you. From the bottom of my changing heart, thank you. I can only hope it resonates with teens the way it did with me. 

 

Love,

Molli