Our host Vick Hope is joined by Charli Howard.

Her coming-of-age memoir, Misfit, was published in 2019, which followed her rise in the modelling industry, her battle against bodyshaming and the normalisation of size zero. She’s also the author of children’s novel, Splash, which Jacqueline Wilson called a ‘much-needed book that will strike a chord with so many girls – and help them dare to be different.’ Charli is an ambassador for Refuge and has successfully lobbied the UK government to criminalise the creation of non-consensual deepfake pornography. Her new book, Flesh, is an urgent and powerful series of essays on how society has dissected and sexualised the female body throughout time, and what it means to be a woman in the twenty-first century.

Listen to the full episode here and read on to discover Charli Howard’s five most influential books by women.

‘She writes about guilt and feelings of shame that many people don’t understand. In this book, the main character has a disabled sister, and she has a lot of embarrassment about her friends coming around and seeing her very disabled sister at home, but in the end, her sister saves her and comes to her rescue. It’s really sweet. It’s about sisterhood, friendship, ignoring the bullies, and just being true to yourself.’

‘I loved the way the book was structured. The chapters were sometimes just a sentence, they could be a paragraph, but what I thought was interesting is that she separates it into who she was before her sexual assault, and then the version of herself afterwards. The way she describes the attitude that she has towards her body, I could really relate to.’

‘I thought it was great because it talks a lot about the fetishisation of Asian women, and part of my research for my own book was trying to really understand different cultures, different women’s experiences. Women of colour tend to be described as edible, like mocha or chocolate, and even white women to an extent as vanilla; women’s bodies are constantly seen as these edible, consumable objects.’

‘I give this book to everyone because I think so many women settle and we chase love that is very unrewarding, very one-sided. I mean, I know I probably speak on behalf of myself, but there are so many people I know where I’m just like why are you with this person? And it’s almost like wanting to be loved, but if you don’t love yourself, it’s never going to happen, and you’re just going to repeat the same cycles and the same problems over and over again.’

“I didn’t actually know who Jeanette McCurdy was, but I thought it was really interesting this child star who’s dealt with extreme narcissistic abuse and I’ve definitely dated partners who are a million percent narcissistic so it resonated in that way.’