The Not So Subtle Art of Being a Fat Girl: Loving the Skin You're In

By Tess Holliday

A plus-size supermodel tells her powerful personal story and offers inspiration and tips to women everywhere to help them survive and thrive.

Mom. Feminist. Plus size. Supermodel. Loud. Proud. Body Activist. Beautiful. Businesswoman. Homemaker. Cat owner. Funny. Outspoken. Wife. Daughters. Lover. Fighter. Survivor…

Tess Holliday is many things and perfect is not one of them. But she loves her imperfections—after all, they’ve formed the woman she is today. Tess’s number one rule in life is to love yourself ­no matter who you are, what your faults may be, where you come from, or what dress size you wear! It’s this discovery that has helped her through life—from being abused and bullied about her weight, to raising a kid alone and fending off social media trolls.

Now here in this amusingly candid account, the woman at the forefront of the body positive movement—who has been credited with transforming the fashion industry—explains why you should be happy to make mistakes but how to properly learn from them, as well as how to love your imperfections and be comfortable in your own skin, ­no matter how much you have.

“[Tess’s] determination and drive to take all the bricks life has thrown her way and build a life full of beautiful experiences…makes this book a page turner. You’ll also be left with so many gems of wise advice, you’ll be ready to not so subtly step into your greatness too.”—Danielle Brooks, star of Orange is the New Black

#effyourbeautystandards

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781681884035

Tess Holliday

A UK size 26 and US size 22, Tess Holliday is the largest supermodel to be signed by a major modelling agency, MiLK Management, and has fast become a global phenomenon. Tess is credited with really shaking up the fashion industry, forcing it to question the norm, and spearheading the body positive movement with her #Effyourbeautystandards campaign. A hugely popular social media star, she has more than 1.5m followers on Instagram and 1.7m on Facebook from around the world, especially the UK and Europe, US, Canada, ANZ and Mexico. Tess attracts a lot of press attention – she was a cover star for People Magazine and makes regular appearances on Mail Online, The Telegraph, Buzzfeed, The Guardian, Independent, Marie Claire, Glamour and Cosmopolitan. She was voted one of the top six plus-size models in the world by Vogue Italia and made TIME magazine’s 30 Most Influential People on the Internet. Loud, proud and very funny, Tess’s humorous yet emotive take on life as a modern woman will follow the trail blazed by Bryony Gordon, Caitlin Moran, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey with her distinctive voice. Tess is married and lives in LA with her husband and two children.

Book preview

Introduction

I didn’t always love the skin I am in.

Like many of us often do, I cared too much about what other people thought. I let bad people and exper­iences break me down. I listened to bullies, critics, and trolls on the internet. I let cruel, uninvited comments influence how I felt and acted toward other people. I allowed mys elf to be shamed and set the bar low with my expectations of how I should be treated. There were times when I looked at my body and saw nothing but how flawed I was or wished I could look different. I allowed men to abuse me or put me down. I was too soft with people I loved, too grateful for attention or too willing to let people take advantage of me.

When I look back at my life to date it sometimes feels like a soap opera. It’s hard to imagine the rollercoaster that has been my life and everything that has happened, or even my own reactions to it. I’ve made good and really bad decisions, recoiled and rebelled, procrastin­ated and just said fuck it and did the best I could. I’ve felt worthless and beautiful, been timid and outspoken and reserved and reckless. I’ve felt both beaten down and unstoppable. I still have a lot to learn, but now, as I navigate my thirties, I feel like I’m a little less of a dumpster fire.

I’ve realized that throughout my life there have been moments that have shaped me into who I am, and people who helped me along the way to get to where I am now. It hasn’t been an easy journey and I don’t have it all figured out; I don’t have all the answers. Hell, half of the time I don’t even know what I’m doing—but I can honestly say I am happy with the woman I am today, regardless of what others think.

So this book is for anyone who was told they weren’t good enough, for anyone who felt like they didn’t matter, that your dreams were too impossible, that you didn’t deserve a space in this world because you are different. Sometimes I feel like everyone is looking at me and thinking why her? and I get that. I wonder the same thing sometimes. The reality is, I was born to stand out, to make people question things they thought they knew, and to exist fearlessly in a space that we are told bodies like mine don’t deserve to be in. I hope when you read this book you learn a thing or two, or take away that you deserve everything you can dream, and maybe take a little advice from the mistakes I’ve made. I’m here to tell you that the impossible IS possible, YOU matter, and that almost everything is better fried. Time to dig in!

Chapter 1

Your Dad’s an Ass and I’m Leaving Him

It’s hard to talk about my childhood. While my life seems relatively glamorous now, long before I was living out my dreams in Los Angeles as Tess Holliday, I was Ryann Maegen Hoven, the name my parents chose for me, and my legal name to this day.

I feel like my mom always did the best she could for my younger brother, Tad, and me, but you just can’t sugarcoat the fact that growing up was, in a lot of ways, pretty terrible for us.

By my ninth birthday, I had moved more times than I can remember and witnessed my parents’ marriage reach its inevitable end, due mostly to the fact that my dad was fooling around with anything in a skirt. Still reeling from the upheaval a divorce thrusts upon a family, and just weeks before I turned ten years old, I was told my mom would be a vegetable after her boyfriend shot her in the head.

I’ve told the story so many times now that I have a tendency to phrase it quite bluntly. More often than not it’s met with stunned silence and teary eyes. I know it’s shocking to hear this stuff, and bizarrely it is often me comforting other people as they process it. Sometimes I surprise myself that I can be so emotionally detached after what my family has been through. Looking back, I honestly think I’ve become kind of numb to it as a way to protect myself. It’s hard to remember how some of it made me feel, and maybe elements of my childhood are just too painful to recall. I’ve seen a therapist on and off since I was a kid to help me process it, long before I ended up in LA, where every man and his dog has a therapist. This sounds like a joke but there are literally dog therapists here. Classic La La Land!

From a young age my life was simply about surviving. I was dealing with circumstances no child should ever have to deal with and finding a way to keep going no matter what. It taught me to be tough and rely on myself when adults were letting me down.

Later in life when people told me my dreams weren’t realistic, I would always think, Really? I’ve had some of the shittiest things happen to me and survived them. When I look at my life as a whole, carving out a new niche in the modeling world is far from the most ridiculous hurdle I’ve faced. I’ve never listened to people trying to limit me, and I never will.

I was born in Laurel, Mississippi, in 1985, and finished high school in the same town in 2003. But for the first decade of my life, I lived in a couple of dozen cities in almost as many states.

I don’t remember everywhere we lived or why we moved there, but I do remember how uneasy it made me feel when suddenly we were uprooted and on the road to a new place.

One of my earliest memories is being in kindergarten and coming home thinking it was just a normal day, only to find a moving truck outside of our house. That night we just up and moved to a different city, which is pretty fucked up when you think about it. This set the tone for that period of my young life—I’d just get used to a new school and we’d be off again.

My dad worked for an auto-parts retailer and I remember being told that he would get paid more to move jobs quickly. It’s true that he was always a hard worker who was in demand and frequently got promoted, but now that I’m older I’m not so sure that’s the whole story. The reality was my dad had several affairs we know about (and surely countless others we don’t), and whether he was following his dick to a new conquest or running from her likely armed and angry husband, I suspect that his cheating might have been the real reason behind our nomadic life. I remember once we moved in the middle of the night.

It seemed to me that Dad always had a pretty fluid concept of the truth, bending it to suit his agenda. Even with the benefit of hindsight it’s hard to separate the fact from the fiction.

Like the time we were watching Forrest Gump and Dad casually claimed he used to have braces on his legs just like the hero of the film. He always maintained this story was true, despite the fact that there is no photographic evidence and his own family members say it never happened.

By far Dad’s most obvious lies were to Mom to cover up his cheating. My father’s biggest weakness would always be women, and his fraternizing began even before Mom married him. Mom recalls getting a card in the mail a month before their wedding telling her not to marry Dad because he was screwing around.

Here’s my two cents’ worth, the sender had signed off anonymously, next to two pennies taped to the paper. Dad, of course, denied everything. He’d often claim he had to drive into the city for work or that he was off for a weekend deer hunting.

He said he was hunting four-legged bucks, but he was busy chasing two-legged does, Mom told me later.

I’m not the cheating type, so his motivations are still a mystery to me, but I would think that most men who are cheating on their wives would at least have the good sense not to take their young children with them on a date. Not Dad though—his confidence often strayed into the territory of arrogance—and in that spirit he once took Tad and me to the movies with a woman whom now I can only believe was his mistress. I was five years old and Tad was four. When we arrived home I inadvertently outed Dad as I rushed to tell Mom about the nice lady who had taken me to the bathroom at the movie theater. When Mom questioned why Dad had allowed a complete stranger to accompany his daughter into the restrooms he grew defensive.

It was just a lady I know from the store, he claimed. I’d never fool around on you. I love you! He never wavered from the deny everything! defense, and I guess we’ll never know for sure.

Mom was no idiot and knew in her heart my father was messing around, but she struggled to find the strength to leave him. Being so far away from her family was hard. Time after time, as they arrived in a new town with no support system, Mom would find herself afraid and overwhelmed. She was isolated with two young children, with friends few and far between. How could she leave now?

There was no doubt their marriage was failing and all four of us were miserable. I can’t count how many times screaming matches between my parents escalated to physical fights as Tad and I cowered out of the line of fire of my dad’s explosive temper. Crying and begging them to stop only intensified his anger towards my mom. Sometimes he hit us too, taking off his belt and beating us across the ass and legs.

Their worst argument I witnessed I can remember vividly. It ended with Mom on the floor and Dad pushing a wooden dining room chair against her neck. I remember watching my mother gasping for air. Had Mom’s friend Susan not been visiting I don’t know what would have happened. She intervened and pulled Dad off her before he could do any long-term physical damage, though we both wear the mental scars to this day.

When his anger subsided he would be as sweet as pie, playing the part of a remorseful and attentive husband and father until inevitably the volcanic pressure built up again. As I’ve met women around the world and heard their stories, I have come to realize he exhibited a lot of the traits of a classic abuser. I think a big part of his anger problem came from the fact that he just couldn’t stomach being criticized and he never faced up to the flaws in his character. He was nineteen when I was born, and I imagine it was pretty hard to find himself a parent so young. I can empathize with this as a parent now myself, but still he let me down in my youth. He could not understand that when you commit to something, people feel let down when you don’t see it through. It seemed to me that his interest in anyone and anything could wane at the drop of a hat.

Tess Holliday’s Advice for Life #7: If someone says they are sorry but continues the same bad behavior, trust their actions and not their words.

When he wasn’t womanizing and dragging us from shithole to shithole across the South he was collecting (and then discarding) a menagerie of domestic and exotic critters. He claimed he loved animals, but in truth he had neither the patience nor the compassion for the poor animals that drew the cosmic short straw in meeting my dad.

Once, right before we moved, he acquired a pet crow—from where, and how, remains a mystery. The poor thing was shoved unceremoniously into a box with holes poked in it and completely stunk out our moving van. Then there was the very clearly wild rat he found at work and proudly brought home to be our new pet. It lived a sad, solitary life in a fish tank in our front room until the fateful day he told me I could pet it. The rat was obviously not domesticated, so when I reached into the tank, naturally it saw me as a threat and bit me. I cried. Without hesitation Dad snatched up the rat and hurled it into the backyard, where—much to my horror—our five pet dogs proceeded to rip it apart. The dogs’ fate was slightly better: they lasted until my parents eventually split and then were unceremoniously palmed off on the people who bought our house.

Years later Dad owned a boa constrictor theatrically named Cleopatra. She was his pride and joy until the day she twisted around his waist and squeezed through his jean belt loops. Suddenly Dad was in grave danger of being crushed to death by his pet. He whipped out his pocket knife and cut through the belt loops to free himself. Perhaps a normal person would have found a new home for the snake, but not Dad. He turned the knife on the snake and cut her head off, and then bitched for weeks about ruining those beloved Tommy Hilfiger jeans. It was a similar fate for a miniature pig that—in a turn of events that would surprise absolutely no one—grew too big for its tiny makeshift home in a townhouse pantry and sadly ended up at the butcher.

It was 1993 and we were living in Lenoir, North Carolina, when Mom finally told Dad she’d had enough.

That day, after school, Dad instructed Tad and me to sit with him on the couch. His face was like thunder. He’d told Mom it was down to her to break the bad news, but he wouldn’t allow her to sit with us.

In an act of bravery and defiance, Mom announced from across the room, arms folded, Your dad’s an ass and I’m leaving him.

Before Tad and I knew it our house had been sold and I was bidding goodbye to my only friend at the time, my dog Shadow. She looked quite like a wolf but had the heart of a lamb. Mom’s plan was to rent another place in Lenoir and raise us by herself. It had taken her ten years to find the courage to kick her abusive husband out—but within twelve months she met the man who almost succeeded in taking her life.

On the day it happened, Tad and I were staying with my father at his girlfriend’s house in Tennessee. Dad had moved to a different state after he had separated from Mom and had wasted no time in finding a new love interest.

Dad of course still couldn’t keep his dick in his pants, and in a scene that could be straight out of a National Lampoon movie, I remember him behind the wheel speeding down the highway while precariously scribbling down his phone number for an attractive woman in another car who had caught his eye.

As he held the paper up to the window with a twink­ling and self-assured smile, it was obvious his new girlfriend (not to mention his children in the back seat) were the furthest thing from his mind. It was all about the thrill of the chase. He was a handsome man who always had good clothes and his hair slicked back with gel, so getting attention was easy for him. I can remember him looking in the car mirror and singing, I’m so vain, to the tune of the Carly Simon song. He wasn’t even being ironic.

That year we were supposed to be with Dad for the whole of summer break, and he did his best to keep us entertained. There were fun trips to the movies and baseball games but also fits of temper as he lost patience with us. It was probably the first time he’d had to look after us full time without Mom, so I’m sure he found it challenging. The threat to send us back to our mother occurred at least once a day, so at first when he said we were driving back to North Carolina, we had no idea if he was for real or not.

Your mom has fallen and hit her head, he revealed, ushering us into the back of his girlfriend’s minivan. He wouldn’t tell us any more but stopped at the store to buy us toys and coloring books for the ride. We didn’t think much of it at the time because he constantly attempted to buy our affection.

Dad sped and drove erratically the entire six-hour trip. We arrived to the sight of my distraught grandma. It was then we learned the true reason for our frantic journey: Mom had been shot at our home. She was in a drug-induced coma following emergency surgery to remove two bullets from her brain.

The doctors say she probably won’t walk or talk again, Grandma sobbed to my father within our earshot. She could be a vegetable. I wasn’t sure what being a vegetable meant, but in the South they are mostly brown and soggy and come from a can, so I knew it couldn’t possibly be good.

We sat around at the hospital’s neighboring Ronald McDonald House, a charity set up to help house family members of those who are hospitalized, and other members of our family began to arrive—my mom’s sister Marilyn and her brother Hal. They patted us on the head and shared concerned looks.

I kept my eyes glued to my coloring book as the grown-ups talked in hushed tones:

They can’t see her like that…No, they’re not going back to Tennessee…He wants us to take them…I think he’s been drinking…

My grandma confirmed her suspicion by making him do a basic sobriety test—walk a straight line—which he quite obviously failed. Eventually a decision appeared to have been made. The next day, it was announced that Tad and I would be heading off to stay with relatives 600 miles away back in Laurel, Mississippi. I would live with Aunt Marilyn while Tad stayed with Uncle Hal. Neither of us knew if we would see our mom again.

But Mom wasn’t a vegetable. Three days after the shooting she woke up. The attack had damaged the left side of her brain, partially paralyzing the right side of her body, but she was able to communicate. She couldn’t form her words very clearly but seemed to understand what people were saying to her. She still had her long-term memory, but her short-term memory had been affected. It would be a long journey back to learning how to walk and talk again.

Still scared for her life, she claimed she didn’t know who had attacked her. The detectives on the case had a hunch, though; they were already suspicious of Mom’s boyfriend, Tim, who had been the first person on the scene and raised the alarm. Tim claimed that after returning home from his job at the furniture factory across the street he had discovered Mom lying lifeless in the bath with two bullet wounds to the back of her head. After making the grim discovery he ran to the volunteer fire station next door to get help. When the paramedics told him Mom was still breathing, the color drained from his face.

While the house had all the hallmarks of a home invasion—a severed phone line and stolen jewelry—it was obvious to police that the windows had been smashed from the inside. Then there was Mom’s reaction when Tim came to the hospital to visit her. He was her boyfriend of almost a year, but when he leaned across the bed to touch her toes, she recoiled in terror. Tim was arrested and Mom began to reveal the full, horrible details of her attack to a kindly female police officer.

On the morning of Mom’s attempted murder, Tim had pretended to be sick and stayed in bed. As she got ready for work he’d pulled the covers up to his neck.

I’m staying home today, he told her. I’ve got a killer headache.

Mom said she went to the bathroom and was preparing to shower when she heard a noise in the hallway. Through the gap in the door she saw Tim lurking with a handgun. She immediately slammed the door shut and tried to lock it, but Tim forced his way in.

Get into the bathtub, he told her. Turn around and face the wall.

For a crazy moment Mom thought he was going to shoot himself, but then she heard ringing in her ears and knew she had been shot. For six hours she drifted in and out of consciousness and had visions of all four of her deceased grandparents. She says that they sat vigil with her, as clear as day, sitting around the bathtub singing church hymns to keep her going.

They walked me through my memories, and I believe they were guiding me to the next life, she said. But then the paramedics arrived and I got a second chance.

When she finally reached the hospital, hours and hours after the shooting, things didn’t look good. When the doctors set to work trying to remove the bullet fragments, they had no