April 17, 2026
Cherry Baby, by Rainbow Rowell
I’m a little bit obsessed with the way that every Rainbow Rowell novel is about time travel, not just the one that literally is. With the way she can play with chronology, weaving different eras together, as though our history is ongoing simultaneously with the contemporary moment. And how in the novels where she doesn’t do this, her characters’ emotional baggage stands in for the same, the past ever present, no matter how badly we’d like to put our burdens down. There are so many feelings, so much yearning, and desire, and all of this is at the heart of her latest novel, Cherry Baby.
Cherry Baby is about the particular moment at which Cherry is beginning to realize she’s going to have to disentangle her life from that of her husband Tom, who is also her ex-husband-to-be. But this is complicated by the fact that Tom’s ultra successful biographical web-comic has just been turned into a film, and the caricature he’d created of Cherry—all boobs, curves, and double chins—is going to be rendered even larger than larger than life, for everyone to see. And then Cherry runs into Russ, an old friend, and something is kindled between them, raising the possibility that Cherry might have a future beyond simply being left behind by Tom, but that future is troubled by Cherry’s notion of Russ’s shame about her fatness and his reaction to her depiction in Tom’s film. This same trouble is compounded by Cherry’s one sister’s weight-loss, an anomaly in their family of fat girls and their fat mom, and everyone’s suspicion that she’s been using weight-loss drugs, but the sister won’t admit it.
Fatness is complicated, and I don’t know a single woman—fat or otherwise—who doesn’t have a relationship to it. And what makes it extra complicated is that whether we’re looking at ourselves or somebody else, what we see is a kind of funhouse mirror, a warped version of our own fucked up perceptions. And fatness is complicated too, because it’s complicated, and Cherry feels a sense of betrayal at her sister’s weight-loss, because her sister’s example had always been a sign to her that she could be fat and loved and happy, but her sister has her own reasons for doing what she’s doing, and the novel holds that complexity, the ambivalence, the uncertainty. (I love the destabilization in Rowell’s prose as sentences in brackets undermine what’s just preceded it.) (And then the contents of a second set of brackets serves to further wobble all that. Life, love, relationships, bodies—it’s all so awful and gorgeous and wonderful and messy.)
Cherry Baby is about family, marriage, home, and wanting, and also choosing. And what Cherry chooses in the end isn’t what I’d expected at the start, and (except for the book’s very last scene, which is PERFECTION) perhaps not entirely satisfying, but I find that interesting, actually, that Rowell is not set on giving readers what they want, that she resists those tidy endings. Her books are tough to classify, insist on being true to themselves, but no matter which way it all shakes out, I always find them absolutely delicious.
