Most know me as a romance author, though my day job is as a mental health therapist.
Are these dual careers coincidental? Not even a little.
I sit with people in their rawest moments, help them untangle the stories they have been told about themselves, and gently suggest that maybe, just maybe, they deserve better than the narrative they have inherited. Then I go home, open my laptop, and write romance novels where the heroine is curvy, real, and utterly unapologetic about both.
I write plus-size romance stories because I watch what happens to people when the world decides to summarize them.
A woman walks into a room, and immediately — before anyone gets to hear her laugh or enjoy her wit or witness the specific way she tilts her head when she is thinking something delicious — she is filed away: Plus-Size Female (aka the Friend). Category assigned, story over.
Her size becomes her entire introduction, and everything else — the soul, the wants, the humor, the hopes — gets shuffled politely to the background. The file is sealed.
I write because I refuse to accept that filing system.
In my books, some spicy and some so wholesome you can hand them to your teenage daughter, a woman's body is simply one attribute, like brown eyes. It is not her arc. It is not her obstacle. It is not what her love interest has to "overcome" to fall for her. It is, frankly, the least interesting thing about her.
Nobody falls in love with a number on a scale. They fall in love with all the small, specific, irreplaceable things that make you you; the way you mispronounce one specific word you have only ever read, the way you laugh too loud at your own jokes. And when you are plus-size, those things are so often invisible to the people around you, because no one got past the first line of the file.
While I love writing spicy novels, I deliberately also write cleaner titles for younger women because these are the readers who are still deciding whether they are allowed to want things. I believe, with the same conviction I bring to my therapy work, that a girl who can see her happy ending can begin to manifest it. And when she does, not only her world changes — ours does, too. This has been made clear to me by the response I have received from readers.
I expected some messages of appreciation. I did not expect midnight emails from women saying that, for the first time, they imagined someone wanting them back. I did not expect to hear from male partners reading my books to understand what the women they love experience daily. And I did not expect readers to tell me they felt seen, not as a plus-size woman, but just as a woman. That distinction is the entire point.
When The New York Times wrote about my work, I felt vindicated, on behalf of every woman for whom this genre exists. That a story about curvy heroines finding love, told without apology, had earned that kind of recognition felt less like a personal milestone and more like a long-overdue acknowledgment.
We were always here. We are fun and funny. We are sensual and sexy. We are, in every way that matters, you. The only thing we should be ashamed of is how long we let the world believe otherwise.
As a therapist, I know that the stories we consume become part of the stories we tell ourselves. They are not harmless entertainment. They are one of the most powerful tools we have. They let us rehearse lives we have not lived yet. They let us practice believing.
We need more of these stories. We need more plus-size women falling in love on the page, as people fall in love in real life, in ways that are messy and funny and tender and, yes, sometimes very, very spicy. So, if you have a curvy heroine living somewhere in your imagination, write her. You do not need an MFA. You do not need to be a “real” writer. I started the same way, late at night after full days of therapy sessions, and found tools like Sudowrite that helped me keep going when the blank page was winning.
Love is not a reward for thinness. Desire is not contingent on size. A curvy woman falling apart laughing at 2 a.m. with someone who adores her is not a niche story. It is a human story.
My heroines deserve to be written. So do yours.
