This post was written by Julie Murphy, author of Faith: Taking Flight »
Fat girls aren’t super heroes. They aren’t love interests or main characters or winners or thrill-seekers…. At least that’s what I thought when I was a kid.
I’m most well-known for my novel, Dumplin’, which I’m lucky to say has had a long life and is beloved by readers around the world. It’s a story I wrote just for me, but seeing how many other people it resonated with has been one of the most affirming experiences of my life. I’ve always felt so fortunate to have that experience, but I never imagined that I would get to continue on, writing more books about fat people doing both ordinary and extraordinary things.
“Faith’s greatness is not in spite of her fatness, but because of it—and many other things.”
It’s no secret that I’ve partaken in my fair share of nerd culture, but one aspect that I never really connected with was super heroes. I could imagine myself attending a secret boarding school or even being the witchy best friend of a vampire slaying badass, but the world of super heroes felt like something that a person with my body was explicitly excluded from.
It felt unattainable.
So while I’ve always been a casual consumer of super hero culture, I never found a character who made me want to call them my own patron saint super hero. Until Faith—the bubbly girl who’s full of warmth and believes in good and is the ultimate fangirl herself. She’s loyal and she’s funny and a little bit naïve, but smart too. And she’s a fat girl, because fat girls can be super heroes. And love interests and main characters and winners and thrill-seekers and everything else under the sun you can imagine, because fat people can be and do anything. They can even just be plain old ordinary. Faith’s greatness is not in spite of her fatness, but because of it—and many other things.
I’ve fallen in love with Faith in a big way. Her optimism and effervescence has rubbed off on me, and I think those are two things we could all use a whole lot of right now.
xoJulie
This blog post is part of our on-going Real Talk blog series where we ask authors to get real about some of the most controversial and important topics of today.
About Faith: Taking Flight
Faith Herbert is a pretty regular teen. When she’s not hanging out with her two best friends, Matt and Ches, she’s volunteering at the local animal shelter or obsessing over teen drama The Grove.
So far, her senior year has been spent trying to sort out her feelings for her maybe-crush Johnny and making plans to stay close to Grandma Lou after graduation. Of course, there’s also that small matter of recently discovering she can fly….
When the fictional world of The Grove crashes into Faith’s reality as the show relocates to her town, she can’t believe it when TV heroine Dakota Ash takes a romantic interest in her.But her fandom-fueled daydreams aren’t enough to distract Faith from the fact that first animals, then people, have begun to vanish from the town. Only Faith seems able to connect the dots to a new designer drug infiltrating her high school.
When her investigation puts the people she loves in danger, she will have to confront her hidden past and use her newfound gifts—risking everything to save her friends and beloved town.
The post Julie Murphy Gets Real: “Fat Girls Can Be Super Heroes” appeared first on Epic Reads.
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