BAD FAT BLACK GIRL

This colloquial debut weaves memoir with cultural studies to illuminate genuine stories of surviving and thriving—and necessary lessons in between.

“I’m fat,” writes Bowen in the first chapter. “Let’s start there.” This frankness sets the tone for the book. Framing the text around trap music, “a hip-hop subgenre that expresses some of the realities and aspirational views of Black folks from the hood,” the author uses specific experiences as points of reference to explain her life’s guiding empowerment principle—what she terms “trap feminism.” Before she named it, Bowen clarifies, this creed “was written into the codes I learned growing up broke, curious, Black, resilient, and female in some of the worst parts of Chicago. It’s what I learned through fistfights, sex work, queerness, and fatness….It’s still how I navigate and make sense of the world.” Throughout, the author, the former entertainment editor for Nylon magazine, compellingly addresses themes of racism, sexism, body politics, anarchy, an unreliable justice system, confidence, money, and sexuality, among many others. In differentiating sex work and sex trafficking, Bowen shares her account of a man trying to pimp her out when she was 14, and she makes a case for decriminalizing sex work. “My love for trap makes me what Roxane Gay would call a ‘bad feminist,’ ” Bowen writes, acknowledging that the music is frequently deemed misogynistic. Still, over decades of listening to female rappers, the author notes, “I learned to prioritize my own desires, ambitions, and pleasures, because for all the ways that they might reflect how men talk about us in their rhymes, these women are also adding a key piece of nuance…women, especially Black women, are inherently valuable.” Of trap feminists, she concludes, “We do what we have to when we can’t do what we want to.” Bowen’s writing will appeal to readers undeterred by profanity who are interested in both contemporary hip-hop and feminist autobiographies.

Direct, driven, occasionally dirty, and undeniably fresh.