Guest post written by The Slowest Burn author Sarah Chamberlain
Sarah Chamberlain is a writer, editor, and cookbook translator whose articles have appeared in The Guardian (UK), Food52, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. When she’s not writing witty, sexy contemporary romance, she enjoys making dinner for her friends and family, watching Cary Grant movies, and setting records as an amateur competitive powerlifter. Originally from Northern California, she lives in London. Her debut novel, The Slowest Burn, goes on sale on September 24, 2024.
About The Slowest Burn: Business or Pleasure meets Evvie Drake Starts Over in this delicious opposites-attract romance from debut author Sarah Chamberlain.
CW: Body-image issues, internalized fat phobia
Starting when I was a teenager, I wished I didn’t have a body.
In fairness, no one was ever explicitly mean to me about how I looked, even though my tiny high school worshipped athletes and the popular kids looked like they’d stumbled out of the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. But I felt like I was trapped behind one-way glass, invisible to my classmates, because my body was slow and clumsy and just too big. The only time other people seemed to see me was when I raised my hand in classes, or when they wanted to ask my advice about their history or English essay.
My brain was the only thing I had going for me, so I ignored my body as best as I could, the way everyone else did. It was an unwieldy, inconvenient meatsack for my brain. Something I had to live with, not in.
I went on this way for over a decade, treating my big body at best as something neutral and at worst as an imposition, while striving for whatever success and praise I could get from using my brain. In the meantime I moved to the UK, met a wonderful man and married him, made close friends and did good work. On the surface, everything seemed to be going well. As long as I stayed in my head, I could just drag my body behind.
But then I moved home to California in early 2016 and started working out with a new personal trainer, and she asked me, “Have you ever tried lifting a barbell?”
The first time I put the 45-pound bar on my shoulders and squatted to the floor, then crunched down and deadlifted, it was like a key had appeared out of nowhere for a rusted-out lock in my brain. I had suffered through stumbling up hills with a huge backpack, jogging laps at a pace a snail would have laughed at, trying and failing to catch flying objects.
But this? This I could do.
I started going to the gym three times a week, adding five pounds to my lifts each session. My shoulders and thighs thickened, my hands developed calluses, and I learned the words for all the parts of my body that made it possible for me to move heavy things: glutes and quads, traps and lats, deltoids and triceps.
A few months after I learned to lift, Donald Trump was elected and social media turned into one long primal scream. I needed reassurance that humanity wasn’t all bad and there was something worth hoping for. I remembered my mother’s collection of battered Susan Elizabeth Phillips paperbacks and downloaded her first book onto my e-reader. I devoured it in an evening, then bought another, and another. Then I rediscovered Mhairi McFarlane, then Marian Keyes, and then I found Sarah MacLean’s list of romance recommendations. Before I knew it, I was utterly in love with the genre.
One thing I really noticed as I read all these books, contemporaries and historicals and paranormals? The characters really felt things. Annoyance, anger, attraction, longing, they were all embodied. Emotions translated into gritted teeth and shaking hands, goosebumps and dilating pupils. Sometimes their bodies even knew what was happening to them even as their brains were fully in denial. A lot of those feelings centered around desire, sure, but they were about more of that – they were aware of themselves moving through the world.
At the same time, I was learning to listen to my own body at the gym. Every time I had a heavy barbell in my hands or on my shoulders, the outside world disappeared. At first it was like tuning a faulty radio, my brain full of the day’s static: something that happened at work, or something in the news, or even someone blasting Limp Bizkit in the workout space next door. But once I tuned in to where my body was, my strong points and my weak ones, my anxious brain settled. Nothing mattered except moving the weight, keeping good form, resetting my body before each rep.
What both powerlifting and reading romance novels made me realize: how I felt mattered, just as much as what I thought.
Being in my body meant I was alive. Not just in the medical sense, but in the sense of being open to the world, open to possibility. It meant that I was the subject of every sentence of my story, not a passive side character waiting for things to happen to me.
All the calluses at the base of my fingers from gripping the bar, the sweat dripping down my shins after a big set of deadlifts, the soreness of my muscles the day after training: I appreciate them so much because they go with satisfaction, with triumph, with really feeling happy. The same joy I feel when the main characters in romance truly connect, when they know what they want their futures to look like together, minds and bodies finally aligned.
I suppose you could say that living joyfully in my body is my own HEA.
