Fat, Pretty and Soon to Be Old by Kimberly Dark

Fat, Pretty and Soon to Be Old by Kimberly Dark

"Nothing is more brilliant and juicy to me than a woman stepping fully into her self--mind, body, and spirit, full throttle, without apology. Kimberly Dark has been illuminating the path for a long time. This book is a triumph. This book is a jailbreak from cultural inscriptions meant to keep us locked up, shut up, and conforming." --Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water and The Book of Joan

Fat, Pretty, and Soon to be Old is a moving, funny, and startlingly frank collection of personal essays about what it means to look a certain way. Or rather, certain ways. Navigating Kimberly Dark's experience of being fat since childhood--as well as queer, white-privileged, a gender-confirming "girl with a pretty face," active then disabled, and inevitably aging--each piece blends storytelling and social analysis to deftly coax readers into a deeper understanding of how appearance privilege (and stigma) function in everyday life and how the architecture of this social world constrains us. At the same time, she provides a blueprint for how each of us can build a more just social world, one interaction at a time. Includes an afterword by Health at Every Size expert, Linda Bacon.

Kimberly Dark is a writer, professor, and raconteur. She has written award-winning plays, and taught and performed for a wide range of audiences in various countries over the past two decades. She is the author of The Daddies, Love and Errors, and co-editor of the anthology Ways of Being in Teaching.

Kimberly Dark is a writer, educator, and raconteur who is dedicated to exposing the hidden architecture of everyday life so that we can all recognize our influences and recover our power as social producers. Her stories and poetry have been performed in hundreds of venues throughout the world, and her writings have appeared in a variety of professional and popular periodicals. She is the co-editor of Ways of Being in Teaching (Sense, 2017) and the author of Love and Mistakes (Puna Publishing, 2018). She teaches Sociology and the Cal State Summer Arts Program at Cal State San Marcos.