Author Julie Gilbert Discusses the Writing of Her New Book ‘Giant Love’
Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia by Kate Manne Keep LARB free! Donations matched through Jan. 13! LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. Donate today and your gift will go twice as far to support our work through a dollar-for-dollar match. Donate IMPROBABLY, THE FINAL GIRL is fat. She stands tall, cut-up and bleeding, but breathing. After confronting the killer and making it out alive, after watching her loved ones—people who couldn’t quite see past her body and into her soul, people who tried, but not hard enough—die at his hands, she rides off into the sunset or stalks out of the woods.In film theory, the “Final Girl” trope refers to the last woman left standing in a slasher movie. The term was coined to highlight the horror genre’s typically moralistic, misogynistic, and racist rules. The “Final Girl” was and is, in most movies, a thin, blonde white woman, who at some point in the film refuses some moralized substance or activity her (now dead) friends enjoy: drugs, alcohol, sex. But in the films Fat Girl (2001) and Piggy (2022), conventionally hot girls are murdered by a killer who harbors a sexual obsession with the fat girl, whom he leaves alive. Raging, sweaty, and buoyant with grace, she has her whole life ahead of her. The image is, tragically, a rare one, at least in mainstream cultural productions. Fat characters star in sad stories or serve as laughingstocks-cum-warnings on reality TV; happy endings are predicated on weight loss achieved through heroic efforts at self-control that usually veer into self-harm. Fat girls are raised to fear a phalanx of dangers: disease, scorn, sexual rejection, social rejection, voyeurism, mockery. Too often, fat girls are raised to believe they won’t even become women—in a figurative sense, as their bodies may not conform to the archetypal feminine form, and in a literal sense, as they face a culture of fearmongering around fatness, which implies (when it isn’t literally […]
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Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
The Mallorcan Joana Marcús is a young bestseller in Spain and America, writer of young adult novels with a romantic
