recess' Jacqueline Detwiler joined in on a conference call with Meg Cabot, author of Size 14 is Not Fat Either, sequel to the best-selling Size 12 is Not Fat.
recess: Who are you trying to reach with your writing?
Cabot: I've fallen into this genre that is kind of called chick lit mystery. People who pick up my books the most tend to be people who read my young adult books [i.e. The Princess Diaries] originally and aren't finding books about the concerns that they have in their 20s about figuring out what they want to do in their lives.
How much of your experience working as a dorm director at New York University went into the character of Heather in your new novel, Size 14 is Not Fat Either?
I saved all the files of students that I thought were funny, and I used a lot of that. I'm not actually sure that's legal, but I try to make it so they don't recognize themselves. It had a huge huge impact, I don't want to say everything came from that, but it's all true, except the murders.
So how did you get the idea for the murder?
Right when I first moved to New York, in 1989, Dan Rakowictz murdered his roommate, boiled her head in a pot on the stove and fed her body to the homeless. It was terrifying to me because I was from the Midwest and things like that just don't happen there. Originally, I had the girl's body being made into the school meatloaf in the book, but I took it out because I thought it was too gruesome.
You've said that a big part of these novels is about the self-esteem of college students, yet your character Heather seems to want to fit into the [smaller] mold, why is that?
I think that's because of our society. There's so much pressure to be thin. Thin people even get better service at restaurants. I don't think it's good to have characters who are like "I'm fat and I'm proud" because that's just not realistic.y
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