Katie Sturino opens her first novel with a scene that many of her readers will likely find uncomfortably familiar: Trying on a bathing suit in a well-lit dressing room and not liking what you see in the mirror.
“It’s a universal thing,” Sturino tells TODAY.com. “Who has not been able to find something in a store, and then left feeling like you triggered an eating disorder?”
The book’s protagonist, Sunny, grapples with the feeling of being big in a world that wants her to be smaller. Sturino herself can relate.
Her debut novel fits into the mission she’s carved as a truth-teller speaking up around expectations of women’s bodies as a multi-hyphenate entrepreneur, blogger and voice in the body positivity space.
The book character Sunny shares obvious similarities with Sturino too. Sunny runs a PR company; Sturino ran a PR company for years. Sunny is getting over a divorce from an influencer; Sturino divorced Josh Ostrovsky, known as The Fat Jewish online, in 2017. Sunny loves her rescue dogs; Sturino’s dogs had their own viral accounts. Sunny starts a business (swimsuits); Sturino started a business (personal care brand Megababe).
“There are certainly a lot of things that are taken from my life,” Sturino says, noting that the book’s individuals are fictional — for the most part. She did base one of Sunny’s suitors directly on her now-husband, John Forkin. “I learned what good, healthy love looks like from him and I wanted to show that to people,” she says.
The character overlap is entirely on purpose: This is the book Sturino says she wanted after her divorce in 2017. “This book offers an alternative narrative to the typical breakup story, which is like, girl gets dumped, then, like gets a glow up and finds she’s worthy of love,” she says.
The book defies typical narratives. Instead of a “revenge body,” for example, Sunny gains weight, just like Sturino did after her divorce. Sturino avoided the revenge-body trope on purpose. “It reinforces the idea that there is only one way to find to be worthy of love, and that is to be at your smallest, most fit body,” she says.
Sunny gets the guy and her happily ever after without trying to change who she is or how she looks. Still, Sunny’s relationship with her body impacts every part of the plot. It’s the inspiration for Sunny’s swimsuit brand. It comes up when she’s dating. It’s in the haunting remarks of her ex. And yet she expresses frustration about it — she’s tired of having to talk about her body.
The press tour for “Sunny Side Up” has often pointed to Sturino’s own body and journey. Amid the interviews, Sturino opened up about using a type of weight-loss medication called a GLP-1 agonist to lower her A1C (a measure of blood sugar levels) after trying other interventions.
“It’s frustrating that so often women are not allowed to just talk about their work without including the body narrative,” she says. “And by body, I really mean weight. I just don’t think that we talk about men that way in the media, and it’s pretty consistent that we talk about women like that.”
Sturino says she starting taking a GLP-1 agonist for her health and now is approached by people asking if they have to get on it, too. “I’m like, ‘No, you don’t have to get on this.’ That’s the downside of having the conversation everywhere — there is a pressure,” she says.
Ultimately, she’s happy to be transparent. “I hope that sharing my story helps someone too. And based on the comments I’ve gotten recently, I think it has,” she says.
Sunny, by the end of the book, comes to a conclusion that her body wasn’t the problem. If there’s anything Sturino wants her followers to know from her work, it’s just that.
“That’s the main messaging on my channel. You can lose weight, gain weight, have a baby, aging, all these different ways our body changes over our life. You have to do the work in your brain to accept your body, because your body will change throughout your life. If you don’t do that work, then every single change is a jump scare,” she says.
She calls her book an “anchor” in a new landscape where skinny seems to be en vogue again, no thanks recent social media trends and speculation about which celebrities are taking Ozempic and why.
“It’s a really hard time. But it doesn’t mean that we just throw the last 10 years down the drain and just say, well, we’re back here. I think if you want to keep the fight up, you can, and you should.”
There are days it seems the body positivity movement — which promoted accepting bodies of all sizes — is, well, over. “It doesn’t have to be,” she says. “We choose what’s important.”
Because, Sturino says, this isn’t a “one size issue” — “all women, for the most part, have poor body image, because we’ve been trained to,” she says.
Sunny’s story is inspired by Sturino’s life and inevitably, body image plays into both. But in Sturino’s ideal world, maybe there wouldn’t be a need for these conversations.
“If we could just get women focusing on their power and not their size, I think that we could really talk about what’s important and ways to harness our power — versus how do we all get as collectively small as possible?”
“It’s a scam,” she says. “And we’re all falling for it.”
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