In Rainbow Rowell‘s Cherry Baby, fatness isn’t a punchline. It’s not a flaw, or a personal failing — it’s an inherent part of her protagonist Cherry’s person, and one that feels more vital for the author to tackle head-on than ever.
Rowell, who’s also the author of such beloved books as Eleanor & Park, the Simon Snow trilogy and Slow Dance, among others, says her characters’ size has always come up, whether she emphasized it or not. And in the era of weight-loss drugs like GLP-1 medications, it felt like the time was right to talk about it.
“I noticed that often when people write about my books, they will mention that the characters are plus size, as if it’s really important,” she tells PEOPLE. “It’s something that we as readers pick up on, and that we’ve decided is really important. And I thought, well, what would happen if I wrote about a character who actually does think about her weight a lot?”
Rowell, like most Americans, has “been aware of GLP-1 drugs for a long time,” and she’s seen how much the medications have changed people’s lives and society as a whole. “Everything is changing so quickly with these drugs, and really, they’ve kind of changed what it means to be fat,” she explains. “So my whole life, one of the things that kept my head up is you don’t have that much of a choice … you can be healthier or less healthy, you could be, you know, fatter or less fat, but your body type is kind of stuck where it is. And so what has changed is you do have a choice now.”
Credit: Rainbow Rowell
In Cherry Baby, the protagonist’s husband, Tom, is in Hollywood making a movie based on a popular webcomic — whose main character “Baby” is a fat woman who is, in turn, based on Cherry. But what people don’t know is that Cherry and Tom are separated, so while Tom is off putting a caricature of her on the big screen, Cherry is at home taking care of his giant dog, and trying to figure out how to put herself back together too.
When she runs into Russ, someone who knew her before Baby (and has never heard of the webcomic), Cherry’s got a choice to make. And unlike a lot of will-they, won’t-they novels, the right choice isn’t clear to anyone, least of all the reader.
Because this isn’t a book about fatness, despite the central plotline. It’s a book about love, and choices, and what it means to suddenly look at your life and have to evaluate everything that’s gotten you to a crossroads and what that moment of reckoning means for what’s come before.
“In any love story, or any real love — marriage, or long relationship — you don’t end up just with second chances, you have like, a myriad of chances you give each other, right?” the author explains. “I think of the Bible scripture about forgiving someone seven times, and seven times seven times, so I wanted to really kind of dig into what it means to give someone a second chance.”
Her early readers, much like in real life, are torn on whether Cherry makes the right choice in the end. And (no spoilers here!) but what Rowell wanted to investigate what happens when life gets murkier than fiction.
‘Cherry Baby’ by Rainbow Rowell
Credit: HarperCollins
“Normally, I write a book where there’s a clear choice, and I think this book has a couple of them. I think you can root for both of the guys in this book, and already, I feel like I’m setting it up in a way that it’s not a traditional love triangle,” she teases. “I’m a huge Twilight fan, but this is not a Jacob or Edward situation.”
That’s more than a little bit down to the fact that her characters are fully adults, with histories and yes, baggage.
“When someone gets a divorce, their friends sort of say, ‘He was terrible. He was always terrible,'” Rowell says. “But then, was that whole life a mistake? Did they have no good times? Like, she says most of their memories are good memories. What is she supposed to do with them? Is she supposed to recast them as bad memories? Or look back at them and think they’re sinister in some way, because she couldn’t see the end coming in those happy moments?”
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That unspooling of lived experience is one of the biggest differences between YA and adult fiction for Rowell. The other one? Sex. Her characters have it — and she doesn’t want anyone flipping past the steamy scenes.
“If I were to not write about them having sex, we would miss some big stuff about who they are and how they relate to each other,” Rowell explains.
“You can’t skip the sex scenes. We’re gonna just totally miss so much of the plot if you do that. Because they’re not there as cookies,” she adds, with a laugh. “You can enjoy the sex scenes. I hope they’re, like, good sex scenes, but they’re not meant to be a break from the plot.”
And readers who already know and love Rowell’s prose aren’t going to want to miss a word.
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Cherry Baby is on sale April 14 and available now for preorder, wherever books are sold.
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