shake it to the right if ya know that you feel fine

"spice up your life" by the spice girls & full of myself by siobhán gallagher

I’m a big fan of following artists on Instagram! I remember a few years ago, I was talking to someone and they were expressing the usual complaints about social media, what a drag it could be, how much it fucked with their self-esteem, etc., and I was a little (naively, innocently) like . . . how? I mean, I once followed a friend of a friend who was always doing the most elaborate Pinterest-worthy stuff with her kids, and that made me feel like a bad parent, but I just muted her and then the problem went away! My feed was a perfectly curated mix of visual artists and Paramore fan accounts and a few close friends and all was right in the world.

I am on Instagram a lot more now than I used to be, and I do see the issues with it, unfortunately. But I still try to follow accounts that Spark Joy, and one of those accounts for years and years has been that of artist Siobhán Gallagher.

I LOVE Sio’s art style. It’s so fun and whimsical, quirky and feminine, full of cheeky humor and nostalgic references and all these little details that are fun to pore over. So when I found out she had a new book coming out — Full of Myself: A Graphic Memoir about Body Image — I decided to reach out and see if I could get an advance copy. I did!! And I loved it!!!

I kinda wish I could just post pictures of every single page so you could marvel at it with me, but I’m obviously not going to do because that’s copyright infringement lol. Also a lot of work. But please do let me tell you just a bit about the book, some standout parts to me, and some things it made me think about from my own life!

Full of Myself is Sio writing about her relationship with her body, her gender, and her sense of self-worth and how that relationship was affected by the mixed messages she received from the media and other people growing up. It does contain references to self-harm, depression, eating disorders, and fatphobic language, so be mindful of that going in and gentle with yourself if you know those are hard topics for you! I’ll also be touching on those same topics in this review, just because it’s difficult not to.

Sio steps through her life chronologically to show how her thinking around her body and her gender changed over the years. Like I said, I’m not going to post a bunch of excerpts here, but I will post just these two panels because they honestly made me have to sit back and just think for a minute:

Oooof. This one really hit me. I do remember this shift, the way you suddenly feel self-conscious, the way you feel that there are all these expectations or judgments or desires being projected onto your body that used to be just a neutral vessel for doing things. I remember all the big t-shirt hunched shoulder years, all the focus on dress code violations, all the worries about what messages you might be sending to faceless people you don’t even know and shouldn’t even care about. Once, in middle school, a group of guys made fun of me for not shaving my legs, and made me touch another girl’s much smoother ankle so I could see how my legs were “supposed” to feel. Once, in high school, I had a friend who wore a Guess brand t-shirt to class, the word Guess printed across the chest, and our male history teacher said, “Hmmm . . . 32B?” Like, what the fuck.

One thing I love about Sio’s work, though, is this could all feel really HEAVY but it doesn’t. There are those moments, for sure, and they’re always handled thoughtfully and with a lot of vulnerability. But there’s also all her trademark whimsy and humor, and I literally laughed out loud several times while reading. For example, only a couple pages after that panel that made me stop and think about my life, there’s a section where she describes how she imagined growing up, and how she’d host dinner parties and drive a car with a sunroof. And there’s this one little image of her reclining in a purple hammock and going, “This can go in the purple room! I’ll take it!” and I like, died over that. It’s so thirty and flirty and thriving for real.

Sio’s work with pop culture is also some of my favorite! In fact, let me see if I can find one of the images that — if it wasn’t the first thing I ever followed her for, it was definitely very early on!

I mean! Elaine in the parking garage with the fish! ICONIC! (You can buy this sticker in Sio’s shop, btw.)

I will also be purchasing this illustrated poster for Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion VERY soon, once my pocketbook has recovered from the Great Romance Book Release Day of February 13 2024:

Anyway, so it’s no wonder that another aspect of Sio’s graphic memoir I really enjoyed was some of her commentary on portrayals of women in media in particular. She has a whole page dedicated to “Fat Monica” on Friends, for example, which is truly one of the most painful parts of a show that already has lots of other jokes that didn’t age that well.

She also referenced The Spice Girls a few times, which is why I HAD to make this the song for the week!! If I didn’t think the height of feminine sexiness was Posh Spice in The Spice Girls movie asking if her mini-dress was too short, I stg. It’s so hilarious that we really did just, like, put one woman in track pants and a sports bra and be like “That’s Sporty Spice!!!” I just snort laughed so hard it made my throat hurt.

There’s this other page that shows teenage Sio reading an article about how red is the sexiest color and how you should wear it if you subconsciously want to attract romantic attention, and then the next panel shows her walking down the hallway at school in a red cardigan, happily thinking about how she’s really going to get noticed now! Man, could I relate to all these little moments of teenage vulnerability, the way you were desperate for whatever Secret could somehow unlock friends or coolness or love or whatever else. True story: I wore so much black in my teen years that the ONE day I wore a red mock turtleneck (it was the early ‘00s, whaddya gonna do), everyone made SUCH A BIG DEAL ABOUT IT that I was like never again, absolutely not. I felt like I was walking around with my heart on my short little capped sleeve. If you caught me out in any outfit where I “looked nice” I would immediately tell you it was laundry day or I’d lost a bet or WHATEVER it took so that you didn’t believe I was actually trying!

Sio has all these really creative ways of conceptualizing her life, or the topics she wants to talk about. Like a cross-section of a house made of rooms of all the different ways she spent her time as a teen, a game show with numbered doors for how she can change her body! change her life!, there’s even this one optical illusion page that was really powerful, I can’t describe it but you’ll know it when you get to it.

This was one of those books that had me immediately thinking of all the different people I would recommend it to, or who I thought would enjoy it. I thought of Kerry Winfrey, who has written very thoughtfully about some of her own journey with health and body image, and would love especially Sio’s references to the time she spent watching old, critically acclaimed movies. I thought of Bridget Morrissey, who LOVES a good nostalgic trip through someone else’s memories (we have been trading pictures from our old yearbooks from weeks now). I thought of Jenny Howe, who is writing some of my favorite romances with fat representation. I thought of my dear friend Charis Stiles, who is a therapist who specializes in Health at Every Size and body acceptance journeys. (At one point, Sio even talked about still trying to find the right fit for a therapist with this focus, and I was like, hmmm, I wonder if Charis is licensed wherever she is? and then I was like stop, don’t be weird.) I thought of Virginia Sole-Smith of Burnt Toast, one of the best newsletters on this topic; and Aubrey Gordon of Maintenance Phase, one of my favorite podcasts (which gets name-checked in this book!). That feels like a whole paragraph of name-dropping and I’m sorry, but I think sharing some of the people I thought of and why I thought of them helps show the range of this book!

I could say so much more about this book and all the various things it made me think about, but for now let’s leave it at a call to action! Which is that you can preorder the book, if this review has sold you on it at all! The book publishes on April 2, so not long now. You can also follow Sio on Instagram. You can also sign up for Sio’s Patreon — I have been a member of her Mail Club for a while now, and I love it! Every few months I get an envelope filled with art and nostalgic ephemera. One of my best friends in elementary school used to go to Minnesota every summer to stay with her dad and I’d send her letters on Lisa Frank stationery, and that’s kinda what receiving something from Mail Club feels like.

I am also trying to get better at sharing my own Calls to Action, since that is ostensibly what I have a newsletter for lolol. I’ll be at Love Y’All Fest in Atlanta this upcoming weekend, and I am VERY excited!!! I’m ironically skipping the Fan Fest for my favorite baseball team so that I can be on a sports romance panel with THE SUSAN ELIZABETH PHILLIPS!!!!!!!!! Guys, you have no idea. The Chicago Stars series is everything to me. If you’ll be at the festival, please do say hi!

You can also preorder my upcoming baseball romance, The Art of Catching Feelings (that link takes you to my local indie Tombolo Books, where you can write any personalization request in the comments of your order!). I’ll be announcing a lot more about various stuff to do with that book over the next couple of months, and right now I’m running my very first giveaway of an Advance Readers Copy (Advanced Reading Copy? Advance Reader’s Copy? Fuck it, it’s an ARC, okay, I forget what that technically stands for) over on Instagram. You could win signed ARCs of both my book and KT Hoffman’s The Prospects, which you know I’m obsessed with!

Currently reading . . . I just finished Stars in Your Eyes by Kacen Callender and wow. What a sucker punch of a book. I love romances that aren’t afraid to get messy and complicated, to push the boundaries of what we consider a romance. There’s a lot of trauma in this book, so definitely take care to look up content warnings before going in if needed, but there’s a lot of healing and love, too. It was really powerful. One of my favorite parts of romance is getting to see love stories play out in unconventional ways, or with people who have been through a lot and are still working through it and who don’t often get to be the typical protagonist or love interest in a romantic story. On a shallower note, I also just love a celebrity romance!

watching . . . We have been rewatching the first season of True Detective and I know Matthew McConaughey’s character became almost a parody of itself by the time we got to the Lincoln car commercials of it all, but I really do love the dynamic between him and Woody Harrelson in this show. “You think a man can love two women at once?” Woody asks, in the middle of Going Through It, trying to juggle his wife and his sidepiece and compartmentalize enough to tell himself he’s not doing wrong by either of them. “I don’t think man can love,” says his nihilistic partner, just about the LAST FUCKING PERSON you actually want to hear from in that situation lolol. I love it.

listening to . . . Today my husband made me listen to all ten minutes of “Child in Time” by Deep Purple and I didn’t hate it. Lots of wild stuff going on in that song. I told him I recognized one part of it but couldn’t remember where from and then I just Googled it and saw that it was in the movie Twister. What an incredible movie. I am legit excited for the Twisters reboot that was advertised during the Super Bowl.

preordering . . . I am SO excited that it’s finally time for Till There Was You by Lindsay Hameroff! I read this book early and feel like I’ve been waiting forever for it to actually hit stores. And yet no matter how many times I’ve stared at this adorable cover, this is the first time I’m noticing the blueberry dotting the “i?” How charming is that?!?! Anyway, I highly recommend the book, and in fact this was what I said in my official blurb: “Falling for a talented musician who writes dreamy songs about you is pure wish fulfillment, and that's exactly what Lindsay Hameroff delivers in Till There Was You! I loved following Lexi on her journey to figure out what she really wanted even as she lived out a seeming fantasy. Fans of Holly James and Amanda Elliot won't want to miss this one!”