Relationships
My child is being bullied about their weight. What do I do now?
When a child is bullied about their weight, a parent’s first move matters most. What to say at home, what to ask the school,…
The archive
Journal
109 pieces on clothes, rooms, books, food and the ordinary business of taking up space.
Plus-Size Living
Seventeen inches: what actually happened to the aeroplane seat
Economy seats got wider, then narrower again. What that means for booking, which armrests lift, and why width matters more than legroom.
Life
Eleven minutes later, a colleague says the same thing
A field experiment found a 29.1 per cent callback rate for non-obese women against 21.3 per cent for obese women. What that costs at…
Plus-Size Living
Ask what they would investigate if you were thin
Diagnostic overshadowing is well documented and badly discussed. Five things that change how a consultation goes when your symptom has already been explained by…
Relationships
Spectatoring: the half of you that never gets into bed
Not a shortage of desire, but a shortage of attention. On watching yourself during sex, telling a partner about it, and the difference between…
Confidence
The volunteer photographer
She always offers to take the picture. A decade later there is no evidence she was there. On the quiet habit of editing yourself…
Confidence
What I learned from wearing red before I felt ready
For fifteen years I owned nothing red and called it taste. On visibility, colour, and the myth that confidence must arrive before a woman…
Food
The quiet luxury of eating alone in a restaurant
The best meal I had last year, I ate alone on a Tuesday. On the sympathetic head tilt, ordering the pudding anyway, and why…
Life
Sunday afternoons belong to me now
It is twenty past one and I have achieved nothing. On rest that is not earned, the four o'clock dread, and why one protected…
Life
The girl I was before I learned to take up space
I spent a long time carrying other people’s opinions about my body as though they were my own. This is about the girl who…
Plus-Size Living
My body is not a before picture
For years I treated my body as a draft — something to be corrected before the real version of my life could begin. This…
Plus-Size Living
I no longer apologise for the way I take up a doorway
I used to turn sideways in doorways when nobody was coming. An inventory of the small ways women learn to shrink, and what it…