Wonderful review of Limited by Body Habitus in Brevity!

"Narrative tension pulses through Jennifer Renee Blevins’s essay collection..."

July 10, 2020

We love the work Brevity does, and so we were thrilled to read Stacie Worrell’s review of Jennifer Renee Blevin’s Limited by Body Habitus: An American Fat Story. Stacie’s review is both insightful and personal, allowing readers to think about how these issues may have deeply affected them or their loved ones along the way. Below we’ve shared an excerpt from the review, but we hope you’ll take a moment to read the piece as well as all that Brevity has to offer!

Blevins’s book encourages readers to recognize socially-trained impulses and move past them. “Decades of conditioning” tell Blevins to see fat people as repulsive, but her father’s gastric bypass surgery helps her realize that a fat person is “someone living in a world that wasn’t built for them—a world that, in fact, actively seeks to annihilate them.” Blevins’s book outlines how American society tries to “annihilate” fat bodies at the cost of people’s health and well-being. Blevins’s book is important to read at a time when even the medical community continues to see fatness as inherently unhealthy, putting lives at risk to make people skinnier.

You can find the full review here!

Filed under: Review