Katie Sturino’s New Novel Tackles the ‘Revenge Body’ Narrative

With Sunny Side Up, her first novel, Katie Sturino introduces us to Sunny Greene, the kind of divorcée you rarely see represented. As she recovers from her breakup, the 35-year-old publicist doesn’t look to weight loss to increase her confidence. The concept of the revenge body, and the idea that women need to change their appearances to move forward, bothers Sturino, a body acceptance advocate and founder of Megababe Beauty. It’s a message that she received after her 2016 divorce, and she finds it destructive.

Sturino wants Sunny to be an example of a larger woman living a wonderful life, a narrative that she feels is rare. “Something that’s really interesting is if you look at my Goodreads reviews, the negative reviews really don’t like the way that Sunny has success. What I think is so ironic about that is that same characters in romantic comedy books or movies have had those things always,” she says. “When a bigger girl comes in and has success in those areas, it seems ‘unrealistic,’ but we don’t question it when the thin main character has it all.”

Sturino spoke to ELLE about the myth of the revenge body, what she and her protagonist have in common, and why writing a novel was a whole new kind of challenge.

Sunny’s life is already great. She’s already successful. She’s got a great wardrobe, she’s got good friends. So often in stories of breakups or your life kind of crumbling, there’s this theme that you now need to get better, and you get better by either getting the new job or getting the new body or getting the new wardrobe. There isn’t a focus on [the idea that] you’re good now, you just weren’t in the right life.

In my own life, I certainly have received the message quite often that the reason you don’t have a boyfriend, or a promotion is because you are not thin, and that only thin people deserve success. It was really important to make sure that in my book you had someone who had success, who had the nice apartment, and didn’t have to change her body to get them.

I have things in common with Sunny like some of the professional aspects; we live in the same neighborhood, and I wanted her to have my Midwest roots. The story really is not my story, but I wanted to get the energy of what I needed during my own real-life experiences into this book.

I needed a main character who could show me that I could find myself, find love, have success, and not have to start doing two-a-day workouts and eating delivery meals at a calorie deficit. I think there’s a common message for people who either have a breakup or get divorced, that the first thing that they should think about is losing weight. It’s not going to therapy or [understanding] what your life priorities should be, or figuring out how you let yourself stay in a relationship that wasn’t right. That is just the wrong first step, but if you polled anyone, often the first response would be, “I’ve got to get in shape. I have to lose weight.”

Sunny Side Up: A Novel

I hope a reader finds this book funny and I hope that they walk away just feeling like they can do whatever they want to do and that they don't need permission from anyone else.

The editing process was the most surprising part of it, because from the draft you turn in is so different from the book that is printed. Learning and watching that process was so interesting to me. You have to let go of what you thought it would be, because your precious baby gets changed and redlined. It’s an exercise in letting go of control.

This interview has been edited and condensed.