Here are 100 books that Fat Girl Dancing fans have personally recommended if you like
Fat Girl Dancing.
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Being overweight presents an intriguing paradox: being physically large and hard to miss, but also being essentially invisible and easy to ignore. Having struggled with weight for my entire life, I’m very familiar with this juxtaposition of opposites. I wanted to write a novel with a plus-sized protagonist set in a different time, the late 1970s in this case, before the notions of size positivity and body diversity had come to life in society’s collective imagination. For me, this was a way of making fat people more visible in books, especially as main characters. I put together this list of books for the same reason.
This book is a memoir of the childhood and early adulthood of a woman overshadowed by her own weight.
The writing in this book is beautiful and evocative, particularly the descriptions of food and eating. That being said, this work is, otherwise, a tough read. The author feels unwanted and alone. She never achieves self-love or the sense of belonging she desires. Moore grew up long before size positivity existed and so she focused her energy and strength on changing rather than accepting herself.
Though it is, at times, an excruciating chronicle of pain, this memoir is an important work because it reminds us how destructive anti-fat bias was in the past, highlighting, as well, how it continues today.
A angst-filled memoir of one woman's obsession with food and one's body offers a poignant coming-of-age story that sets the author's love/hate relationship with food against her painful longing for a family, love, and a sense of belonging. By the author of Never Eat Your Heart Out. 35,000 first printing.
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
As a queer, fat disabled Black woman in America, I am all too familiar with the experiences and history that these 5 aforementioned authors detail when it comes how deep fatphobia is embedded in this country. And how it harms us everyday—even if you’re not fat. I remain passionate about the eradication of fatphobia in our society because too much is at stake in terms of housing discrimination, employment discrimination, disability discrimination, healthcare discrimination and etc. for one notto care. - Clarkisha Kent, author and culture critic.
Yeboah is my favorite in this genre because she really nails the perils of dating as a fat Black woman during these modern times.
What we have to go through (fetishization, degradation, etc., etc.) is so ridiculous and she is able to speak to this in a way that is [sadly] honest, but still a bit humorous. Which is hard to do.
'I love Stephanie... She's one of my favourite truth tellers online, she pulls no punches and empowers so many women with her own commitment to equality... This book is going to mean a lot, to a lot of people.' - Jameela Jamil
Stephanie Yeboah has experienced racism and fat-phobia throughout her life. From being bullied at school to being objectified and humiliated in her dating life, Stephanie's response to discrimination has always been to change the narrative around body-image and what we see as beautiful.
In her debut book, Fattily Ever After, Stephanie speaks openly and courageously about her own…
I have been a feminist for as long as I can remember. I recall seeing a billboard featuring Sophie Dahl sprawling on a sofa, completely naked. I recognized that I had no control over the images that dominate the visual landscape I inhabit, and I wanted to change this. These books might seem varied, but they all critique aspects of contemporary culture and offer ways to change things. In my academic writing and artwork, I examine these issues through a queer, feminist, and anti-capitalist lens, and these books offer a glimpse into the struggles that I think are important and the methods for change that I think could work.
This book deals with a subject that I feel strongly about–fat discrimination. It includes diet culture and the damage caused by the medicalization of fat. Lupton’s book was the first I read on this subject, and it is a brilliant, concise introduction to the social and political meanings of fat today.
Importantly, it debunks things like the BMI (body mass index commonly used in medicine to determine a person’s health level) and introduced me to movements such as the Health at Every Size Movement. It describes ways that anti-fat biases are being fought against, and I try to practice them in my life and academic work.
In contemporary western societies, the fat body has become a focus of stigmatizing discourses and practices aimed at disciplining, regulating and containing it. Despite the fact that in many western countries fat bodies outnumber those that are thin, fat people are still socially marginalized, and treated with derision and even repulsion and disgust. Medical and public health experts continue to insist that an 'obesity epidemic' exists and that fatness is a pathological condition which should be prevented and controlled.
Fat is a book about why the fat body has become so reviled and reviewed as diseased, the target of such…
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
I’ve spent most of my life fascinated by what happens when women stop editing themselves. As a former television reporter, health educator, and memoirist, I’ve lived on both sides of the polished story and the private reckoning in my search for truth. Writing my own memoir forced me to confront how often women are encouraged to soften conflict, spiritualize pain, or tidy up the truth to make it more palatable. I’m drawn to books that refuse that impulse—stories where healing isn’t performative, and transformation isn’t neat.
I love this book because it refuses to sanitize childhood chaos.
I know Cea personally, and knowing what it took for her to tell this story makes the book even more powerful. Her upbringing was wildly unconventional—often unsafe—and she doesn’t soften that truth to make it more inspirational or digestible.
What stayed with me wasn’t just the extremity of her early life, but the clarity with which she tells it: no victimhood, no theatrics, no moral clean-up. This book reminded me that resilience doesn’t come from pretending things weren’t messy—it comes from looking directly at what was, and choosing consciousness anyway.
Sex, drugs, and . . . bug stew? In the vein of The Glass Castle and Wild, Cea Sunrise Person’s compelling memoir of a childhood spent with her dysfunctional counter-culture family in the Canadian wilderness—a searing story of physical, emotional, and psychological survival.
In the late 1960s, riding the crest of the counterculture movement, Cea’s family left a comfortable existence in California to live off the land in the Canadian wilderness. But unlike most commune dwellers of the time, the Persons weren’t trying to build a new society—they wanted to escape civilization altogether. Led by Cea’s grandfather Dick, they lived…
When I first enrolled in college, I expected to be a science major who was also interested in history, but I ended up becoming a history major who was also interested in science. I earned my Ph.D. in history from George Washington University in Washington, DC, after earning my B.A. from Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. My Ph.D. dissertation on the U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service during WWI and the 1920s became the basis for my book Behind the Gas Mask.
This book provides an answer to a question that historians of arms control have asked since WWII ended: Why had the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield not become widespread in WWII, in the same manner it had in WWI? Focusing on Britain, Canada, and the United States, Holding Their Breath explores Allied reluctance to use chemical weapons and their formulation of a joint policy on chemical warfare. M. Girard Dorsey shows that the potential for chemical warfare in WWII profoundly influenced the course of the war’s events.
Holding Their Breath uncovers just how close Britain, the United States, and Canada came to crossing the red line that restrained chemical weapon use during World War II. Unlike World War I, belligerents did not release poison gas regularly during the Second World War. Yet, the looming threat of chemical warfare significantly affected the actions and attitudes of these three nations as they prepared their populations for war, mediated their diplomatic and military alliances, and attempted to defend their national identities and sovereignty.
The story of chemical weapons and World War II begins in the interwar period as governments and…
I am a historian and a social geographer whose main interest is in examining why some of us are embraced (legally, politically, economically, culturally) by the society we live in while some others are excluded. Probably due to my status as someone who is an immigrant to Canada and also a person with a disability, the topic of belonging and exclusion fascinates me.
This is an exceptionally well-written and meaningful study that has greatly helped me understand how the national subject is conceptualized in Canada. As an immigrant to this country who became a citizen through a challenging and demoralizing process, this book has enabled me to see how some of us are framed as belonging while others are excluded from the Canadian nation. I have also learned how (above and beyond the national mythology surrounding it) multiculturalism has been deployed to boost Canada’s profile as a liberalizing nation while, at the same time, operating as a tool to control ethnic and religious minorities.
Questions of national identity, indigenous rights, citizenship, and migration have acquired unprecedented relevance in this age of globalization. In Exalted Subjects, noted feminist scholar Sunera Thobani examines the meanings and complexities of these questions in a Canadian context. Based in the theoretical traditions of political economy and cultural / post-colonial studies, this book examines how the national subject has been conceptualized in Canada at particular historical junctures, and how state policies and popular practices have exalted certain subjects over others. Foregrounding the concept of 'race' as a critical relation of power, Thobani examines how processes of racialization contribute to sustaining…
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
I have always loved history and art. Combining the two makes perfect sense and provides the inspiration to keep writing. I can spend hours in a museum, just soaking up the magic in Impressionist paintings. I never get tired of researching the artists or their paintings, and I relish the unexpected discoveries.
I love the way there is a mystery within a mystery. A group of actors is staging a play for the benefit of the passengers on a transcontinental train trip across Canada. The protagonist, who is undercover and posing as a waiter, befriends the lead actor and takes a page out of Hamlet, using the play to pressure the villain into making a mistake and incriminating himself. Accurate details about working as a waiter lend a sense of ‘David versus Goliath’ to the storyline.
To the Jockey Club, the racing world would be a better place without Julius Apollo Filmer. An expert in corruption with a devastating line in witness intimidation - and proving to be a slippery character to put behind bars.
Baffled, they call in undercover security agent Tor Kelsey to keep an unflinching eye on Filmer and his associates. A mission that takes him from the finest of English racecourses to the wild Canadian interior - on a luxury transcontinental train journey to end them all.
On board, a troupe of actors are playing out a murder mystery for…
I am a Canadian freelance writer, who has a BA in honours history from Smith College, an MA in history from McGill University, and a Bachelor in Journalism from Carleton University. As I have a special interest in Canadian history and Canadian biography, I have authored books in these subject areas. These include an award-winning biography of Sir William Van Horne, a polymath and railway general who pushed through the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and Cairine Wilson. Canada’s first woman senator, who was celebrated for her work with refugees in the 1930s and 1940s, and a best-selling survey of Canadian immigration and immigration policy, Strangers At Our Gates.
Journalist, author, and retired United Church minister, Kenneth Bagnell has written a vivid account of the thousands of slum children (not all of them were orphans) who were dispatched to Canada from 1869 to the late 1930s by well-meaning philanthropists, philanthropic rescue homes, and parish workhouse schools. At the time, this seemed to be the ideal solution to a two-pronged problem: what to do with the tens of thousands of children from the slums of Britain who faced a bleak future there and how to meet the soaring demand for cheap labour on Canadian farms.
The Little Immigrants is a tale of compassion and courage and a vivid account of a deep and moving part of Canadian heritage. In the early years after Confederation, the rising nation needed workers that could take advantage of the abundant resources. Until the time of the Depression, 100,000 impoverished children from the British Isles were sent overseas by well-meaning philanthropists to solve the colony's farm-labour shortage.
They were known as the "home children," and they were lonely and frightened youngsters to whom a new life in Canada meant only hardship and abuse. This is an extraordinary but almost forgotten…
I was born and raised as both an anglophone Canadian and a diaspora Jew. After living in Montreal, Jerusalem, and New York for a total of about 15 years, I returned to my hometown of Toronto and took up the position of the J. Richard Shiff Chair for the Study of Canadian Jewry at York University, where I work as a professor of history. I teach undergraduate students, graduate students, fellow academics, community leaders, and the wide public about all sorts of dimensions of this very religiously diverse, culturally diverse, socio-economically diverse, and politically diverse community of 400,000+ souls, with its 260+-year-old history.
I love this book’s choc-a-block presentation of actual archival fragments from Jewish life in the British colonies that would eventually become Canada.
I also like that the book’s husband-wife, antiquarian, author team aimed to fuse together two objectives in one book: on the one hand, to paint a relatable picture of what Jewish life looked like during this period when Upper Canada was still being formed, and on the other hand, to account for the step-by-step process of Jews gaining civil rights in the new world.
When I teach Canadian Jewish history, I not only read this book with my students but also bring them into the archives that contain Godfrey’s trove of archival fragments of early Jewish Canadiana, which they collected before and while writing the book.
Mapping the history of Canadian Jews from the arrival of the first settlers before 1750 through to the 1860s, Search Out the Land introduces a new set of colourful players on Canada's stage. Ezekiel Solomons, John Franks, Jacob Franks, Chapman Abraham, Rachel Myers, Moses David, Samuel Hart, Elizabeth Lyons, and a host of others now take their appropriate place in Canadian history. Focusing on the significant role played by Jews in British North America in the fight for civil and political rights, the authors compare the development of Canadians' rights with that in other British jurisdictions of the time and…
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
I am a historian and a social geographer whose main interest is in examining why some of us are embraced (legally, politically, economically, culturally) by the society we live in while some others are excluded. Probably due to my status as someone who is an immigrant to Canada and also a person with a disability, the topic of belonging and exclusion fascinates me.
I really love this study because it provides a crystal-clear example of how colonialism and dispossession have worked in Canada from the legal, cultural, political, and social angles. It also delves into the topic of the histories we, as a country, choose to remember and those we choose to forget, as well as the issue of who is forgotten in the process.
1919 is often recalled as the year of the Winnipeg General Strike, but it was also the year that water from Shoal Lake first flowed in Winnipeg taps. For the Anishinaabe community of Shoal Lake 40 First Nation, construction of the aqueduct led to a chain of difficult circumstances that culminated in their isolation on a man-made island where, for almost two decades, they have lacked access to clean drinking water.
In Aqueduct: Colonialism, Resources and the History We Remember, Adele Perry analyzes the development of Winnipeg's municipal water supply as an example of the history of settler colonialism. Drawing…
