#unshrinking

This year I read a lot of great books…but five blew me away. My top five of the year are:

✨There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib

✨Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia by Kate Manne

✨The City in Glass by Nghi Vo

✨The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion by Diana Greene Foster

✨Golem Girl: A Memoir by Riva Lehrer

I was most surprised that four of five of my favorites were nonfiction! I don’t know if I was biased towards nonfiction this year or if that’s just what wowed me this year, but these really are the five books I couldn’t stop thinking about.

Honorable Mention list:

The Gods Below by Andrea Stewart

Road to Ruin by Hana Lee

Blueback by Tim Winton

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar (2025)

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals by Saidya Hartman

Sailor Moon vol. 5 by Naoko Takeuchi tr. Alethea and Athena Nibley

The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

Maybe He Just Likes You by Barbara Dee

Never a City So Real by Alex Kotlowitz

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Small Rain by Garth Greenwell

Jewel Box: Stories by E. Lily Yu

Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler

Koala: A Natural History and an Uncertain Future by Danielle Clode

"Many straight men have a potent sense of entitlement to “hot” wives and girlfriends too: to female sexual partners who rate highly according to the standards operative in their milieu.

To put it simply, such a man is not just interested in what he finds attractive; he also cares, or cares more, about how other men would rate his choice of partner, which is typically inversely proportional to her weight, among other factors.

Whether highly ranked or not, girls and women suffer greatly from this social arrangement—from the shitty men who reject us, to the shitty men who deem us worthy only until we age, sag, or gain weight. (…)

As well as the gross assumption that fat women will be “easy”—again, in being grateful for any male attention—the practice of hogging owes to the ambivalence exhibited by many straight men toward fat women.

They may well want us sexually, but they view our sexual worth as minimal or nonexistent, and are subsequently loath to take us seriously, let alone publicly acknowledge us, as partners.

As the writer Hanne Blank memorably puts it, “Whether someone finds you fuckable and whether someone thinks you’re sufficiently high-status to suit their self-image are two different things.”

As fat women, we may be a cheap, tasty snack, not a proper meal, then: the sexual equivalent of junk food.

Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia by Kate Manne is an excellent book about fatphobia and all the ways it has us in a stranglehold. Manne pulls apart philosophical and moral arguments that being fat is intrinsically wrong or something that society has the right to condemn, all in an accessible, readable way. She proposes body reflexivity, an alternative to body positivity/neutrality that allows us to feel good and bad about our bodies at our own discretion without judgment.

Her philosophical arguments were powerful (and dare I say, healing). There are many arguments that there is something unhealthy and immoral about being fat, and that as such, society has a right if not a duty to help. She proves that this is not the case. A crucial part of her argument: there is no morally acceptable, safe, reliable way to get fat people thin. Because of this, society cannot demand change from fat people. She also argues that even if fat was bad for our health, society allows and accommodates plenty of mediated risks that people take despite it being bad for their health, from drinking to skydiving to motorcycles.

In addition, she shows that science has no definitive proof that being fat itself is bad for your health, showing that the causation links between weight and diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and much more are currently being debated. She shows that dieting and the weight cycling that comes with it, has been proven to be more unhealthy than simply being fat. She pulls apart related issues like what made our culture so disdainful of fatness, its intersections with rape culture, racism, and homophobia, and the horrid ways our culture discriminates against fat people, especially fat girls.

Unshrinking is a powerful and necessary book, and I recommend it to anyone who's felt uncomfortable about fatphobia but didn't know how to put it into words. It also gives helpful insights into how to raise children without them internalizing fatphobia, how to pull apart your own internalized fatphobia, and how to move forward.

"Perhaps the most vital complication, when it comes to the relationship between health and weight, is stigma.

People in larger bodies routinely face social stigma, as we saw in the opening chapter.

And there is now considerable evidence of the adverse health effects of being subject to these biases.

One study divided people classified as obese into two groups: those who demonstrated strong forms of internalized fatphobia—for example, the idea that they were lazy or unattractive because of their weight—and those who did not.

The “high internalized weight stigma” participants were some three times more likely to have metabolic syndrome—a cluster of risk factors including high blood pressure, high blood glucose, abnormal cholesterol levels, and a high waist circumference—compared with “low internalized weight stigma” participants of the same age, race, gender, and so on.

Members of the “high internalized weight bias” group were also six times more likely to have high triglycerides than their “low internalized weight bias” counterparts.

“There is a common misconception that stigma might help motivate individuals with obesity to lose weight and improve their health,” noted the lead researcher, Rebecca Pearl.

“We are finding it has quite the opposite effect.”

And, as the writer and health reporter Virginia Sole-Smith summarizes in connection with this emerging body of research, researchers have found that the stress of stigma increases inflammation and cortisol levels, both of which are associated with negative health outcomes. 

"The new revulsion toward fatness was no accident. It was an ideological tool wielded by a surging capitalist interest: slavery.

It was the coding of fatness as a distinctively Black trait that led to the social construction of the fat body as something “other,” as something grotesque, or even as deformed, Strings argues.

It is not that fat bodies were first stigmatized and then Black bodies became associated with fatness; rather, Black bodies were first associated with fatness, and then fatness came to be stigmatized soon afterward.

As Strings puts it, “Racial scientific literature since at least the eighteenth century has claimed that fatness was ‘savage’ and ‘black.’... The phobia about fat ‘always already’ had a racial element.”

And such fatphobia then served to justify and rationalize the burgeoning slave trade, and enabled white American Protestants to differentiate themselves from the people whom they had enslaved so brutally.