And if you are both happy and pretty, then you might be lucky enough to be desired by a man and find the ultimate happiness through a heterosexual relationship that conforms to social norms. If you want to be happy, you need to be thin. These stories therefore feed into the larger social narrative that, if you want to be pretty, you need to be thin. If the author of the memoir was overweight, her story often ends with her finding “self-love” and “happiness” by achieving the thin, sexy body that society already wants her to have.
Or, to put it more bluntly, they tell a story that embraces traditional values and conformity. They make us feel good partly because they tell a story that we want to hear. We’ve all read them: those gushy, feel-good memoirs that tell a rags-to-riches story.
