There is, of course, no mandate that Rooney populate the landscape of her fiction with fat bodies as some kind of feint toward inclusion, even if those bodies do happen to comprise almost half the US population. But consider a reversal: If another writer, even one of Rooney’s stature, populated her novels with a similar number of fat characters, that stylistic choice would be interrogated in a way that Rooney’s is not. Rooney’s slim characters are able to detach from their bodies in ways that it’s often assumed fat people cannot, by sheer virtue of the fact that our physical forms have always connoted a lack of discipline that thin people are spared.
Thin has long been the unexamined default in literary fiction. As novelist and journalist Emma Copley Eisenberg wrote in The New Republic, thinness is “routinely associated with morality and fatness with immorality,” while “characters are often made fat as a shorthand to tell the reader that they are gross, weak, evil, cruel, stupid, unimportant, or mentally ill.” Rooney’s novelistic point of view is not so crudely binary, but that’s partly because it’s impossible to be gross or weak or evil or stupid if you’re not there in the first place.
To find yourself outside the narrow space that Rooney has carved out for her protagonists by virtue of your biography or identity is not unique. In a 2021 essay for Electric Literature titled “I Love Sally Rooney’s Novels, But They Aren’t Written for Me,” Malavika Kannan notes that Rooney’s focus on “white, pointedly thin, elite-educated women with miraculously attractive lovers” leaves her wondering: “Where are the Normal People of Color?” Still, there is something about the emphatic physicality of Rooney’s characters that makes you wonder whether a fat Rooney heroine could ever exist. One hallmark of a Rooney protagonist, after all, is the kind of willful disappearance—into an affair, into BDSM, into friendship, or, indeed, into the hollows of one’s own body—that fat people are rarely afforded. The world might explicitly wish for us to shrink or disappear, and we might wish it for ourselves, but we’re almost always visible.
Novels certainly aren’t required to mirror their readership, and I’m a lot less starved for sympathetic, well-developed representation as a fat reader than I was even just a few years ago. But as I encounter yet another crop of protagonists who dream of a better and more principled world, I find myself wondering where fat people fit into it all—or, more to the point, where we don’t fit.
