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Fat Girl Dances with Rocks
It's the summer of drinking and driving, disco and diets, fake IDs and geology, and fat 17-year-old Char is wondering if she is animal, vegetable, or mineral. What does it mean when your best friend French-braids your hair, kisses you on the lips, and leaves town? Char gets a summer job in a nursing home, and meets people with bodies and abilities as various as the textures of the rocks her friend Felice collects. Fat Girl Dances with Rocks is a novel about the many shapes of beauty: the fold of a belly, the green swelling of seedlings, the sharp edges of granite, obsidian, and flint. Fat Girl Dances with Rocks is a coming of age story. It is a coming out story, and for Char, it is a story of coming into her own body -- all the way to the edges of her skin.
179 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1994
1 person is currently reading
256 people want to read
About the author
Susan Stinson
9 books24 followersSusan Stinson's novels are Venus of Chalk (2004), Fat Girl Dances with Rocks(1994) and Martha Moody(1995). Spider In A Tree is her novel in progress. Belly Songs, a collection of poetry and lyric essays, was published in 1993.
Her work -- which has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Seneca Review, Curve, Lambda Book Report and The Women's Review of Books -- has received the Benjamin Franklin Award in Fiction as well as a number of fellowships. She was born in Texas, raised in Colorado, and now lives in Northampton, MA.
Susan has given workshops and been a featured speaker at Dartmouth College, Amherst College, Wheaton College, Hampshire College, University of Massachusetts, and Smith College, as well as conferences such as the National Women's Studies Association, Nolose, NAAFA, OutWrite, and Saints and Sinners Literary Festival.
Honors
Grants and fellowships from the Vogelstein Foundation, Millay Colony, Blue Mountain Center, Money for Women/Barbara Deming Fund, The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and others. Venus of Chalk was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist.
Her work -- which has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Seneca Review, Curve, Lambda Book Report and The Women's Review of Books -- has received the Benjamin Franklin Award in Fiction as well as a number of fellowships. She was born in Texas, raised in Colorado, and now lives in Northampton, MA.
Susan has given workshops and been a featured speaker at Dartmouth College, Amherst College, Wheaton College, Hampshire College, University of Massachusetts, and Smith College, as well as conferences such as the National Women's Studies Association, Nolose, NAAFA, OutWrite, and Saints and Sinners Literary Festival.
Honors
Grants and fellowships from the Vogelstein Foundation, Millay Colony, Blue Mountain Center, Money for Women/Barbara Deming Fund, The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and others. Venus of Chalk was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
August 26, 2022
Fat Girl Dances With Rocks should be part of every queer literature recommendation list, and it's a shame it hasn't received the hype it deserves. This is a rich, brief, and subtly transformative text about a fat teenage lesbian, Char, coming-of-age in the shadow of social tradition: she and her best friend / lover explore rock formations as a way of deepening their relationship and making sense of a world in flux; at the same time, Char must navigate the simmering, abolitionist politics of the nursing home where she works and the everyday violence metered out on her as a fat young woman.
Stinson masterfully explores the erotic in all of its forms, sexual and beyond, and depicts fat, queer, aging bodies not as sites of disgust but as landscapes of sublime pleasure. Equally, she handles with a light touch issues of forbidden love/longing, institutional violence, and parental abuse, avoiding polemics while also making her radical politics clear. In many ways, it's the abundance of beauty and joy –– in food, in sex, in drinking and sneaking out –– that makes this text most radical of all, because it reminds us that, regardless of fear, joy will persist.
If I had had this book as a teen, I would have felt cared-for and comforted by her gentle, radical politics, and taken Char as a friend and comrade in a world hostile to marginalized existence. Today, I place it alongside works like Good Kings Bad Kings in its ability to speak to marginalized childhoods and their complex relationships to harm and happiness. Stories about the hard and beautiful work of ongoingness are vital to preserving queer, fat, disabled lives, especially for young people, and Stinson offers a story whose hope is palpable, and whose embrace of hitherto rejected bodies is loud and unconditional.
Stinson masterfully explores the erotic in all of its forms, sexual and beyond, and depicts fat, queer, aging bodies not as sites of disgust but as landscapes of sublime pleasure. Equally, she handles with a light touch issues of forbidden love/longing, institutional violence, and parental abuse, avoiding polemics while also making her radical politics clear. In many ways, it's the abundance of beauty and joy –– in food, in sex, in drinking and sneaking out –– that makes this text most radical of all, because it reminds us that, regardless of fear, joy will persist.
If I had had this book as a teen, I would have felt cared-for and comforted by her gentle, radical politics, and taken Char as a friend and comrade in a world hostile to marginalized existence. Today, I place it alongside works like Good Kings Bad Kings in its ability to speak to marginalized childhoods and their complex relationships to harm and happiness. Stories about the hard and beautiful work of ongoingness are vital to preserving queer, fat, disabled lives, especially for young people, and Stinson offers a story whose hope is palpable, and whose embrace of hitherto rejected bodies is loud and unconditional.
July 31, 2022
This quirky little coming-of-age novel about a fat 17-year-old named Char is sort of lyrical in its sparse, direct prose. Char's best friend Felice leaves town after they have some confusing intimate moments, and amid a summer spent dodging her mother's dieting efforts and her days working at a nursing home, Char reads Felice's letters and daydreams about her friend. Felice loves geology and mails her friend rock samples. Char eventually travels to New Mexico to visit Felice and their feelings get even more intense and confused. The end of the story is bittersweet yet triumphant.
I found out about this sweet sapphic story when Lesley Kinzel mentioned it in her essay collection "Two Whole Cakes." I hope she got to read it to the end because it's the perfect summer story.
I found out about this sweet sapphic story when Lesley Kinzel mentioned it in her essay collection "Two Whole Cakes." I hope she got to read it to the end because it's the perfect summer story.
December 18, 2025
really sweet (but not flowery) and introspective. better than a lot of writing that it's influenced for sure. i felt so seen by char taking inventory with how large her belly was by cupping her fingers underneath it. quieted my brain in a grounded way. genuinely enjoyed it
January 10, 2008
Susan Stinson, Fat Girl Dances with Rocks (Spinsters Ink, 1994)
I spent the last eleven days of 2012 and the first eleven days of 2013 first in the hospital, then in a rehab center, fighting a nasty-though-not-life-threatening case of cellulitis. When you are not a fan of cable, and watching Netflix on a laptop screen gives you fits (when we had a 21” TV, I watched movies on my 23” computer monitor instead!), you get time to read a lot of books that have been on your TBR stack forever. And so I finally found myself getting round to Fat Girl Dances with Rocks, which I think had been sitting on my shelf for something like a decade at that point. I'm not sure it's anything new, anything pushing the envelope, but that's not always necessary; it's a very nicely done coming of age tale about a teenaged girl who goes looking for something—she's not entirely sure what—and ends up finding herself.
Plot: Char is a teenager in the godawful seventies. (I was a pre-teen in the godawful seventies. Trust me, they were godawful, and Susan Stinson gets it in a way that I've seen others who write books set in this era miss entirely.) Her life isn't traumatic, by any means, but it's pretty darn boring, and she has vague feelings of not fitting in with anything or anyone around her save her best friend—who ends up moving away for the summer with her family right after planting the first big, deep, passionate kiss on Char's lips that she's ever experienced. Well, that complicates things—but it also sets Char on the path to figuring out who she is. Not necessarily “I'm a lesbian”, although obviously her sexual identity plays a big part in it, as it does with most teens. But just as important is Char's summer job at a nursing home, which exposes her to many different people with whom she finds herself experiencing varying levels of bonding, which is an odd enough thing for an introvert, but it teaches Char about balance—something she desperately needs to learn.
Man, there is so much to like here. I would say that all of the book's sins are of omission rather than commission; Stinson is great at coming up with these fantastic minor characters, giving us just enough to get us interested, and then kind of letting go in order to focus on the novel's major relationships. (Interestingly, you're going to be hearing this same complaint in another review below, for another fine YA novel, My Favorite Band Does Not Exist.) You've gotta give Stinson points for her character creation, but the benchmark of minor characters (and resolving, often messily, their storylines) is Stephen King, specifically in 'Salem's Lot, and that level of storytelling is missing here. I rush to add that this is a minor complaint, as those main relationships on which Stinson is focusing are satisfying indeed, and I am assuming she was working within the publisher's strictures as regards the length of this novel, which is quite short (less than one hundred eighty pages in the trade paperback edition I read); as far as I'm concerned, it could have easily gone twice its length without ever getting boring, with Stinson just exploring the wonderful, wonderful characters in the nursing home. But what we got is quite good. I adored Char as much as I quailed at the setting, remembering it all too well from my own younger days. This is good stuff indeed—obviously recommended for the GLBT crowd, especially younger readers in same, but as far as I'm concerned, you don't need to identify sexually with Char to get a great deal out of the appreciation for beauty that she develops in this novel. *** ½
I spent the last eleven days of 2012 and the first eleven days of 2013 first in the hospital, then in a rehab center, fighting a nasty-though-not-life-threatening case of cellulitis. When you are not a fan of cable, and watching Netflix on a laptop screen gives you fits (when we had a 21” TV, I watched movies on my 23” computer monitor instead!), you get time to read a lot of books that have been on your TBR stack forever. And so I finally found myself getting round to Fat Girl Dances with Rocks, which I think had been sitting on my shelf for something like a decade at that point. I'm not sure it's anything new, anything pushing the envelope, but that's not always necessary; it's a very nicely done coming of age tale about a teenaged girl who goes looking for something—she's not entirely sure what—and ends up finding herself.
Plot: Char is a teenager in the godawful seventies. (I was a pre-teen in the godawful seventies. Trust me, they were godawful, and Susan Stinson gets it in a way that I've seen others who write books set in this era miss entirely.) Her life isn't traumatic, by any means, but it's pretty darn boring, and she has vague feelings of not fitting in with anything or anyone around her save her best friend—who ends up moving away for the summer with her family right after planting the first big, deep, passionate kiss on Char's lips that she's ever experienced. Well, that complicates things—but it also sets Char on the path to figuring out who she is. Not necessarily “I'm a lesbian”, although obviously her sexual identity plays a big part in it, as it does with most teens. But just as important is Char's summer job at a nursing home, which exposes her to many different people with whom she finds herself experiencing varying levels of bonding, which is an odd enough thing for an introvert, but it teaches Char about balance—something she desperately needs to learn.
Man, there is so much to like here. I would say that all of the book's sins are of omission rather than commission; Stinson is great at coming up with these fantastic minor characters, giving us just enough to get us interested, and then kind of letting go in order to focus on the novel's major relationships. (Interestingly, you're going to be hearing this same complaint in another review below, for another fine YA novel, My Favorite Band Does Not Exist.) You've gotta give Stinson points for her character creation, but the benchmark of minor characters (and resolving, often messily, their storylines) is Stephen King, specifically in 'Salem's Lot, and that level of storytelling is missing here. I rush to add that this is a minor complaint, as those main relationships on which Stinson is focusing are satisfying indeed, and I am assuming she was working within the publisher's strictures as regards the length of this novel, which is quite short (less than one hundred eighty pages in the trade paperback edition I read); as far as I'm concerned, it could have easily gone twice its length without ever getting boring, with Stinson just exploring the wonderful, wonderful characters in the nursing home. But what we got is quite good. I adored Char as much as I quailed at the setting, remembering it all too well from my own younger days. This is good stuff indeed—obviously recommended for the GLBT crowd, especially younger readers in same, but as far as I'm concerned, you don't need to identify sexually with Char to get a great deal out of the appreciation for beauty that she develops in this novel. *** ½
January 25, 2021
This book felt almost meditative, enticing and slow. More poetry than prose, a beautiful slice of life piece. It's short but filled with imagery and descriptive day dreaming so I took my time with it. Super enjoyable.
June 8, 2018
I chose this book as part of a 30 Days of Pride Book Review project. The following is that review:
It is summer, sometime vaguely in the seventies, and Char is growing into the person she will become. How would it feel to live a braver life? To not always be on a diet? To kiss her best friend? To dance naked and unafraid with the beauty of nature held fast by the power of her own body?
Stinson’s frank abrupt prose etch out a very matter-of-fact story of a young woman not just coming-out but also coming into who she is. It is a story of awakenings, realizations, and becomings.
There were certainly good things going for this book.
It captured that boring desperation of being trapped in a small town as a teenager, and not quite fitting in the way everyone else seems to do... Char’s struggles with her body and how her own expectations of it are mirror-reflections of her mother’s expectations both for Char’s body and for her own…. The emotional freedom of accepting herself for what and who she is, instead of futilely pushing back against it. The themes of self-discovery, self-acceptance, and spiritual growth are fully realized by the last page. It says what it set out to say.
But… I struggled a bit with pacing. This is a short book, but I found it a slow read. There were some really poignant descriptions sprinkled in, but I mostly found the prose to be so abrupt and to the point that it felt more like a journal entry about Char’s day than a moving internal monologue. I guess I just wasn't really feeling the narrative voice.
Do I recommend it? For me, from a narrative standpoint, I found it only so-so. But... the themes of struggling with body positivity, with desiring the female body and feeling envious of it at the same time are strong and underrepresented themes. And for those people really craving this representation, I know this book will scratch a very specific itch. This book will speak to outsiders who have struggled to make their square bodies fit in society’s round holes all their lives. So if that is you, you might want to give it a chance.
I'll close out with the project scales.
It gets a few solid points on my Queer Counterculture Visibility Scale, which I made up to quantify how I felt a story shined a light of representation on less visible aspects of the community. This is a lesbian coming of age story told by a girl who is tired of apologizing for being fat. There is a, not fully realized, side story about two women who are disabled, elderly, interracial and possibly lesbians or bisexual… because their story isn't fully realized, I can only say possibly. The fat, the old, the infirm… they also have rich stories full of meaning and love that need to be told. I'm giving it:
3 out of 5 stars
The Genre Expectation scale, simply measures it against other books in the genre. I give it a middling score. It is a good but not great representation of the YA self-discovery genre.
3 out of 5 stars
It is summer, sometime vaguely in the seventies, and Char is growing into the person she will become. How would it feel to live a braver life? To not always be on a diet? To kiss her best friend? To dance naked and unafraid with the beauty of nature held fast by the power of her own body?
Stinson’s frank abrupt prose etch out a very matter-of-fact story of a young woman not just coming-out but also coming into who she is. It is a story of awakenings, realizations, and becomings.
There were certainly good things going for this book.
It captured that boring desperation of being trapped in a small town as a teenager, and not quite fitting in the way everyone else seems to do... Char’s struggles with her body and how her own expectations of it are mirror-reflections of her mother’s expectations both for Char’s body and for her own…. The emotional freedom of accepting herself for what and who she is, instead of futilely pushing back against it. The themes of self-discovery, self-acceptance, and spiritual growth are fully realized by the last page. It says what it set out to say.
But… I struggled a bit with pacing. This is a short book, but I found it a slow read. There were some really poignant descriptions sprinkled in, but I mostly found the prose to be so abrupt and to the point that it felt more like a journal entry about Char’s day than a moving internal monologue. I guess I just wasn't really feeling the narrative voice.
Do I recommend it? For me, from a narrative standpoint, I found it only so-so. But... the themes of struggling with body positivity, with desiring the female body and feeling envious of it at the same time are strong and underrepresented themes. And for those people really craving this representation, I know this book will scratch a very specific itch. This book will speak to outsiders who have struggled to make their square bodies fit in society’s round holes all their lives. So if that is you, you might want to give it a chance.
I'll close out with the project scales.
It gets a few solid points on my Queer Counterculture Visibility Scale, which I made up to quantify how I felt a story shined a light of representation on less visible aspects of the community. This is a lesbian coming of age story told by a girl who is tired of apologizing for being fat. There is a, not fully realized, side story about two women who are disabled, elderly, interracial and possibly lesbians or bisexual… because their story isn't fully realized, I can only say possibly. The fat, the old, the infirm… they also have rich stories full of meaning and love that need to be told. I'm giving it:
3 out of 5 stars
The Genre Expectation scale, simply measures it against other books in the genre. I give it a middling score. It is a good but not great representation of the YA self-discovery genre.
3 out of 5 stars
September 8, 2023
I wish I read Susan Stinson's Fat Girl Dances with Rocks when I was younger. I want to cry at what teen me missed. Adult me wants to cherish this book forever.
February 5, 2012
this 1970's era lesbian coming of age story was a true find! i found it at the brown elephant thrift store (of course!) and was excited to read this fat positive, lesbian positive story and wished i would have known about it when i was a teenager struggling with my own coming out. it would have been beneficial for me back then but still fun to read now!
September 17, 2009
story of a queer teenager who is just starting to recognize and realize her emotions. She's also overweight and struggling with how she fits in the world in this way. lyrical writing, somewhat slow, but enjoyable.
August 3, 2018
Many years later, I am bumping my rating up by a star, because I'm glad to have read this book. It feels like it has left a little print of itself in a corner of my mind, and my life is better for it.
June 30, 2008
A nice coming of age story. Good, quick read.
July 26, 2013
It's been a few years since I read this. I do remember smiling and smiling after I finished. I wished I'd had it when I was an awkward teen-aged girl who liked girls and hated my body.
July 4, 2014
Adore Susan Stinson, adored this book!
April 24, 2017
Fat Girl Dances with Rocks is suitable for all ages, though it strikes me as a coming-of-age young adult novel. The characters are unique yet realistic, and avoid all the pitfalls — “insta-love,” love triangle, nerdy chic, popular kids vs. your obvious choice to side with — that usually make me avoid stories about teenagers.
Full review at Grab the Lapels!
Full review at Grab the Lapels!
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews