Guest post written by Vile Lady Villains author Danai Christopoulou
Danai Christopoulou (she/they) is a Greek queer author raised on a diet of myths and tragedies. Danai’s writing has appeared in Glamour, Marie Claire, khōréō, Fusion Fragment, Flame Tree Press, Writer’s Digest and more, nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for a Best of Small Fictions, longlisted for a BSFA Award and featured on the Nebula and Stoker recommended reading lists. Vile Lady Villains, Danai’s debut novel, is out in the UK with Penguin Michael Joseph, in the US with Union Square & Co, and in Greece with Anubis Books. Growing up amid the ancient ruins of Athens, Greece, Danai currently haunts a forest in Sweden. You can find them on social media at @danaiwrites.
About Vile Lady Villains: A sapphic, gothic horrormantasy that’s perfect for readers of S. T. Gibson and Kiersten White, Vile Lady Villains asks what would happen if literature’s most stabby queens, Klytemnestra and Lady Macbeth, met in a limbo realm and had to work together to survive and rewrite their stories. Out May 12 in the US.
Trigger warning: talk of eating disorders and fat phobia
The first time I heard the word “fat” in relation to my body, it was from my mother’s mouth.
Like many, similarly traumatized millennials, I was raised by someone who projected their own disordered views of eating and obsession with thinness into their very young child. I’ve been put on diets from as early as 9 years old, often not allowed much more than two crackers with a slice of cheese a day — while dinner was served on a dessert-size plate. Yet somehow my body kept growing, defying my mother’s wishes and expectations, becoming curvier and bigger by the day. It was my fault, of course, she said. I was clearly thinking about desserts, and we all know that just thinking about desserts can make you fat. (It might amuse you to learn that for years, I actually believed that was true. My mother had told me it was, so I had no reason to doubt it.)
It will probably come as no surprise to hear that I’ve struggled with eating disorders since then. For many years, until I was able to leave home, eating was something done in secret — which led to overeating, and to shame, and to restricting. The cycle of binging, then starving myself, continued from my early teens well into my early 30s, with such extreme highs and lows that I’m honestly lucky to be sitting here now, cozy with my coffee and dark chocolate, and typing these words to you. Because it wasn’t just my mother. Like many, similarly traumatized millennials, it was the whole world around us, praising us for our weight loss and showering us with compliments whenever we managed to adequately shrink ourselves to fit some arbitrary beauty standards.
And it’s now happening again.
While these days I’ve made great progress on a personal level when it comes to healing my relationship with food and my bigger body, it feels like the society around me is going backwards. (In so many ways, not just when it comes to fat acceptance and body positivity.) There is a renewed obsession with skinniness courtesy of the GLP-1 medications that I am observing with dismay and trepidation. And while everyone’s path is personal and these drugs can also help people in many significant ways, I really worry what this Ozempic-chic era will do to young people who are being bombarded with images of skeletal Hollywood stars on the red carpet. I really worry it will teach them that they need to shrink themselves to be loved, just like my mother taught me.
You may be wondering by now what this all has to do with my book, Vile Lady Villains. Short answer? Everything.
Vile Lady Villains might not be about weight loss (although in a sense it is about losing the dead weight that is your husband, if you are Klytemnestra or Lady Macbeth) but it is a book I wouldn’t have been able to write if I hadn’t allowed myself to take up space, literally and figuratively. If I hadn’t learned, through extensive trial and error, that my mother was wrong and that it’s possible for me to exist in a bigger body and still find love, success, and some modicum of sanity. This is a book I wrote unapologetically, when I was languishing on submission for 3 years with other manuscripts that didn’t sell. While most of the books I’d written so far contained some “chunky” character or other, Vile Lady Villains was the first time I allowed myself to not only have a plus size main character, but also make her the most badass character I’ve written so far, physically strong and capable of many great things. Like murder. It was extremely healing to write a Klytemnestra with glorious curves, with zero shame about her body and her sexuality, and with the ability to take people’s breath away. Often because she’s murdered them and is currently covered in their blood. But also because she carries herself with a confidence that is magnetic and undeniable, as Lady Macbeth soon realizes, much to her chagrin. And writing a character like her, giving her an epic adventure and an equally epic love story, daggers to the throat and all, was nothing short of therapy.
We all know representation matters. Especially if, like me, you grew up in an era where the fat character in movies or TV shows would either be the butt of the joke (I hate you, Friends, for Fat Monica’s arc) or the quirky best friend (Gilmore Girls, I can forgive you your numberless flaws just for giving me Sookie St. James). Especially if, like me, you had to read so many romance and fantasy novels before you finally found one with a fat main character. I don’t believe that reading books should be an exercise in self-insertion (although sadly many readers approach them like that lately) but I do believe that it’s very important to see all kinds of bodies depicted in all kinds of media. It’s very important to see fat bodies, especially female/AFAB bodies, that unapologetically take up space and are not shrinking themselves in order to find love or go on amazing adventures. I found that kind of glorious rep in books like Leanne Schwartz’s A Prayer for Vengeance and To a Darker Shore, two young adult fantasies with heroines that kick butts and take names; in contemporary romances like Olivia Dade’s All the Feels; in characters like Nina in Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows and Mercy in Megan Bannen’s in The Undertaking of Heart and Mercy. But I had yet to find such rep in a sapphic book (I’m sure it exists, I just hadn’t come across it). So I wrote it.
I hope you’ll read Vile Lady Villains. And I do hope you’ll like it — for its sapphic romance, its creepy skeletons, its mix of Greek myth and Shakespeare, but also for its plus size main character who looks as good covered in blood as she looks in her form-fitting dress. Mostly though, I hope that if you’ve struggled with how your body looks and how society (or your mother) tells you it should look, that you will one day be able to shut down these voices and allow yourself to unapologetically take up space.
And I hope you’ll find many characters like Klytemnestra that will serve as an inspiration for that. If not, I hope you’ll write them yourself. It will be nothing short of therapy.
