When E.E. Charlton-Trujillo’s Fat Angie trilogy kicked off in 2013, it put fatness at the forefront of a troubled lesbian teenager’s journey toward self-acceptance. Two years later, Julie Murphy’s Dumplin’ hit shelves and marked a watershed for genuine fat positivity in YA fiction; the companion novel Pumpkin, published in 2021, is even more of a rarity: its protagonist is both fat and queer, and his story is more feel-good than fraught.
Murphy and other YA authors whose new and forthcoming books feature complex, intersectionally queer and fat characters spoke with PW about joyful representation in the YA sphere. It’s improved since they were teenagers, they say, but it still has a long way to go.
Letter to a younger self
“I have a list of queer authors I love and a list of fat authors I love, but my list of fat and queer authors is much smaller,” says Crystal Maldonado, whose next YA novel is Get Real, Chloe Torres (Holiday House, May). The book follows a fat, bisexual Latina girl who spends the summer before college road tripping to a once-in-a-lifetime boy band reunion show with her two ex-BFFs, one of whom is also a former crush.
Maldonado wanted her “very queer, very fat, very brown” protagonist to have her moment in the spotlight, especially since “most of the books that go viral are about thin, white, hetero, cis characters,” she says. “I’ve seen readers who say they just want to escape into a book and not think. But I don’t get to take off my brownness or my queerness or my fatness. Us fat girls, we can be queer too. We want our love stories to have a place on the shelf.” She’s happy to be on that shelf next to authors like Chatham Greenfield and Christen Randall, whose books about fat and queer characters she calls “life-changing,” adding, “Where was this when I was growing up? I could have discovered so much about myself.”
Randall debuted with 2024’s The No-Girlfriend Rule, which PW’s starred review praised for the way it “navigates serious topics such as mental health and toxic masculinity alongside joyful themes surrounding self-realization and cultivating genuine camaraderie and affirming safe spaces.” Hollis, a fat teen in a crappy relationship, joins an all-girls tabletop role-playing campaign because her boyfriend’s friends won’t let her join theirs, and discovers her queerness along the way. Randall’s next book, According to Plan (Atheneum, 2026), is a romance between two fat, queer, neurodivergent teens.
“I never imagined that I could even write stories about myself,” says Randall, who has dyslexia and notes that when they were younger, they played skinny, straight, neurotypical characters in online role-playing games. “It’s important to me to write stories where queer, fat perspectives are not just tolerated but centered and celebrated, so that my teen readers have a counterpoint to a lot of the messaging we’re getting.”
Bangladeshi Irish writer Adiba Jaigirdar is working on three books, including How to Be a Heartbreaker (Feiwel and Friends), a YA contemporary romance coauthored by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé and featuring a fat protagonist, slated for publication in 2027. Jaigirdar had two YA romances to her credit before writing 2023’s The Dos and Donuts of Love, a sapphic romance that featured her first fat lead character.
“As somebody who’s South Asian, I was so unsure of what to avoid and what to explore in fiction,” she says. “Growing up, I had a lot of difficulty feeling comfortable with my body. I felt like I had to explore some of the things I went through, because I was one of the only people writing that kind of story.” Her first draft of Dos and Donuts focused significantly on body image, but she revised it after a realization: “If I were younger and reading a book like this, would it serve me to read my trauma reflected back at me? It would have been so positive to read a book where a character like me feels comfortable in their body. I think a lot of fat, queer kids struggle with feeling like romance can’t be for them.”
Echoing Jaigirdar, Paul Coccia notes that the fatness he saw in the media growing up made him feel excluded from romantic narratives. He counters that message in the recently published Recommended Reading (Zando), which PW’s review called “a warm and delightful rom-com.” It follows Bobby, a hopeless romantic and devoted bookseller who falls for a lifeguard named Luke the summer before starting college.
Fatness and desire are especially complex for gay men, Coccia says. “We have a lot of internalized pressure that we need to work through. I’ve heard a lot of discussion at the club about guys feeling like they need to lose weight even if they’re already thin. Bodies are seen as currency, and you either have it or you don’t.”
An expansive embrace
Coccia isn’t alone in noting that fat people aren’t always welcome in queer spaces. Chatham Greenfield recalls watching Glee in middle school and struggling with how these two facets of their identity were explored: “There have been a lot of instances in my life where my queer side feels represented while my fat side feels offended.”
Greenfield’s debut, the queer Groundhog Day riff Time and Time Again, won a Stonewall Honor and was named a Reese’s Book Club LitUp Pick in 2024; PW’s starred review called it “a magnetic romance between two disabled teens.” Their next novel, Try Your Worst (Bloomsbury, Sept.), is a cozy mystery in which two fat teens and longtime rivals work together to figure out who framed them for a series of awful pranks. Greenfield is unapologetic about writing fat, queer characters and exploring how those identities intersect with disability and neurodivergence, which can be a harder sell for some publishers.
“There’s this idea that no matter how many marginalizations the author has, they should pick one or two, because otherwise they’re trying to do too much and they’re overwhelming the reader,” Greenfield says. “That’s a harmful message for kids. I never want them to think that they’re too much.”
Sully, the main character of Let Them Stare (Storytide, May), coauthored by Julie Murphy and Queer Eye star Jonathan Van Ness, revels in muchness. When the gender-nonconforming teen’s big-city fashion internship falls through, temporarily thwarting their plans to escape their small town, they regroup with the help of, among others, the ghost of a 1950s “female impersonator” who’s haunting an expensive vintage handbag.
This is Murphy’s first time writing a gender-nonconforming character, and she says she learned a lot from working with Van Ness to develop Sully’s narrative. Murphy’s inclusive book packaging company, Bittersweet Books, is behind Let Them Stare and Recommended Reading, as well as a middle grade novel she wrote with Maldonado, Camp Sylvania: Moon Madness.
Murphy and other authors PW spoke with say that representing fat and queer experiences goes beyond ticking a couple of boxes. “I’ve always found the most freedom in feeling like everyone else—that this thing I’m experiencing is specific to me, but at the same time it’s not at all,” Murphy explains. “I can live the life I want not in spite of the body I have, but with the body I have and the sexuality I have. Those things are what make me, and there’s also so much more.”
Samantha Puc is a fat, disabled, lesbian writer and editor whose work focuses primarily on LGBTQ+ and fat representation in pop culture.
