Our host Vick Hope is joined by body positivity influencer Megan Jayne Crabbe.
Megan Jayne Crabbe is best known for changing the narrative of how women feel about their bodies. She’s amassed over 1.3 million followers on social media, and has built her platform by creating empowering content on the topics of body positivity, mental health, feminism and beyond. She is also a seasoned presenter and podcast host, working with major broadcasters like the BBC, Universal Studios, Channel 4, The Brits and MTV, where she hosts the new digital series Faces, interviewing famous women about their own journeys with their bodies. In 2017 Megan released her bestselling debut book, Body Positive Power, and earlier this year released her second title, We Don’t Make Ourselves Smaller Here, a collection of personal essays which explore the areas of life where women often lose themselves.
Listen to the full episode here and read on to discover Megan’s five most influential books by women.
A teacher gave me this book when I was a teenager and suggested I write my project on this book and it felt like a recognition, a recognition of a part of my identity that was not necessarily embraced and that was sometimes quite difficult to navigate in that area at that time, and it also gave me an insight into what would have been my ancestors experience. I loved the characters, I loved the complicated relationships that the characters had. I just blasted through it.
I read this book in 2015 which is wild because it came out in 1991, and when I read it all that time later it still blew my mind, it still felt so radical. It was the first time I’d seen laid out before me the connection between beauty and capitalism, beauty and patriarchy, with facts and figures of this is how much money is made from us hating ourselves and this is why we’re so fatphobic, and look at these double standards – it blew my mind. It changed everything, it changed the trajectory of my whole life.
I always recommend Diet Land, and I recommend it to people who aren’t necessarily in the body positive world because it’s a fictionalised story that brings you in in a very relatable way.
It makes me think of sitting outside somewhere on a bench, taking that time for yourself to reread, to believe that it’s worthwhile to reread something because you just enjoy it and you want to be transported back to that place and be inspired. Again, another one that was written so long ago and still has so much to say to speak to people who read it today.
I couldn’t resist [reading] this any longer and it was so much more than I thought it was going to be. The relationship building, even just the overall setting and the gaming element that they build video games – I know nothing about that world even though I do love to play video games, I just found it fascinating how accessible that world was and how cleverly done it was and how absorbed I was, and the gut-wrenching twist that comes towards the end… it’s the first book I’ve cried into for a long time. I have recommended it to absolutely everyone and said ‘Yep, it’s worth the hype!’
