Twenty-six-year-old Clarry Pennhaligan of The Love Detective is a generously proportioned size 14. And she’s completely cool with that. She’s healthy, she’s fit, she’s attractive… and she loves food.
“I am not, repeat not, a fitness freak (I’m very happy being a curvy girl), but I do need something to work off my highly indulgent diet. So dutifully I thunder down the bridle paths and through the thickets of Wimbledon Common four or five times a week and this means that I can continue to spread peanut butter on my toast so thickly that I leave teeth marks and still fit into a pair of size 14 jeans.”
In creating my heroine, it was important to me that she looked like a real person. She does not have impossibly long legs or a teeny-tiny waist. Nor does she have a mane of tumbling curls and trembling pouty lips. She looks like a normal girl.
I have all the usual features in all the usual order: Two eyes of a rather nondescript pale blue above a straight-ish nose and a mouth that allows food in and expletives out – so that works – but there is no doubt that make-up improves my face significantly. I should always wear it, but I don’t. I’m told that my best features are my cheekbones and my legs, that my breasts are comforting (whatever that means) and that I have surprisingly large hands for a woman.
Clarry is Body Positive. She may be a fictional character (although very much alive to me) but she reflects the New Activism: Accept yourself… just as you are. Accept others… just as they are.
Get to know her in The Love Detective and in the follow-up novels in the series. I think you’ll like her.
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