Puddin': A guide to friendship, and self-love

“I just want to know who I am going to be so I can start being that person.”

Genre: YA

Trope: Friends-to-lovers

Writing: 4.5/5

Plot: 5/5

Characters drawing: 5/5

Overall rating: 4.8/5

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My heart is feeling too big for my chest right now, for this gorgeous book.

Of course, I adored it, but adoration is not quite the word that suffices the jukebox of warmth and admiration and respect I have churning in me.

I feel like this book had a long time coming.

If you have read Dumplin’, you know Millie to a certain extent. That bubbly, chirpy, Leslie of Park and Recreation (by her own admission) personality, who is unable to cuss or say mean things to you. But also, she will if you deserve it.

I remember wondering how she got to be that way, so bouncing with positivity – she even cross-stitches inspirational quotes and hangs them on her wall - that almost borders on the periphery of annoying. Because she is fat and hence, the universal fodder of entertainment to the generic high school teenagers.

I am not saying she should be bogged down by the harsh bruises of life, and embittered by the rotten lemons that life throws her way, or anything like that. But - I would understand if she were.

But that is why I also adored Millie, I think. That she wasn’t like that, that she wasn’t cowered down by the vile taunts and jeering and coarse name-calling. She learnt to ignore them, to block them out. Though I really wished at times that she didn’t.

Puddin’ is, in one part, about her, how she manages to live her life without the shackles of her mother’s dreams and fat camps, how she manages to carve something out for herself, even demand it, because she knows she’s got it. That is mighty enviable.

The other POV of the book carries Callie’s narrative, the textbook Pretty Mean Girl, the one lounging at the top of the hierarchical food chain of high schools, who is equal parts revered and abhorred. On paper, and maybe off it, Callie has this perfect life – with popular, jock boyfriend Bryce, on her way to becoming captain of the dance team, Shamrocks and leading them to victory in the Nationals. It’s all pretty much sorted into place.

Millie and Callie’s friendship, along with the other three, starts when Callie is put to work off her debt at the gym that she, with her team, vandalized Millie’s place of work aka her Uncle’s gym in a fit of rage and vengeance. Reason: the gym had withdrawn their sponsorship for the team for their own lack of affordability.

Except Millie makes the rookie mistake of not confessing to her right away that she is the one who identified Callie and called the cops on her.

Honestly, Callie has no legs to stand here, but nevertheless, you just know the moment Millie realizes this and is even coated with guilt for hiding this not-a-big-deal and pretty justified thing from Callie that it would broker conflict between them in the future.

The story here grows beautifully, on both their parts. That friendship between all of them, between Millie and Callie, it reaffirms your good feelings about the world. Millie’s effervescent, sunny personality, the way she tried to band all the Pageant Days girls together in an essay to maintain the friendship before it withers away, and her adorable crush on Malik – it was hard not to fall for her.

Despite having a diet-obsessed mother who has a penchant for micromanaging her body and her passion and her life, she decides to brave the Journalism Boot camp in the coming summer break, instead of the fat camp that her mother sends her to every year like clockwork. Their relationship was knitted so succinctly, you won’t remain stoic and dry-eyed for too long.

“Love comes and goes but lipstick is forever.”

And also, Malik. Can I just thank Julie Murphy already for painting an Indian character who is not a science geek and a joker sidekick that only lives to cater to the white folks all his life with his embarrassing kinks and hijinks? I adored him, his shy mien and mild manners and peaceful aura and smart brain, who is really into films and aspires to be in that field someday – not science or apps. Or maybe politics – but not science or apps. He just fit with Millie. Their slow, steady romance with an insane amount of sweetness and fluff was one of the best parts of the book.

About the Mean Girl. Initially, I will admit, I wasn’t particularly keen on Carrie’s POV, because she was not likeable and I couldn’t connect to her at all. I don’t know what turned the tide for me, and I still don’t connect to her, and yet, I do understand her.

This was an elaborate and veritable peek into the inner workings of a Mean Girl’s brain and heart. The most gorgeous part about it is Julie Murphy didn’t try to hide the nasty, crooked parts about Callie that made people like Willowdean and Hannah hate her in the first place. She didn’t try to drape a veneer of ‘deep-down she is actually a kind person’ on the bad parts and paints them as a momentary lapse of judgment and deviation from her inner goodness or something. Murphy painted the Mean Girl as the Mean Girl. With all the blemishes.

It’s like Callie is this version of us if we, all the time, let breathe all the crude, bad, ignominious thoughts that slide into our brain just for a second before we chase them away.

So as I said, you will understand her. You will feel for her. Because we all have the urge to say mean things from time to time. But Callie chooses to think those things and say them, whereas we just swallow them down. Or at least, some of us do. But she also regrets saying them, always just a breath short of curbing down those instincts and just be nice.

You will feel for her because we all have a coping mechanism that we adopt to keep the crushing egregiousness of the world at bay. And so has she, early on in life to parry off racist comments on her half-Mexican skin. And you will feel for her because she‘s someone who is trying to find her place in an otherwise white family and make it look to the world that she belongs there. Someone who’s still figuring out who she wants to be when she doesn’t have the one dream that has always powered her forward anymore. Someone who’s had a crappy boyfriend and crappy friends leaving her to fend for herself when her lift fell into shambles, without even acknowledging her sacrifice.

Murphy showed that no one person is inherently bad. Everyone has both the good and bad parts, and it’s up to us which part to act on. Callie’s slow-growing friendship with Millie and Willowdean and Ellen and Amanda and Hannah gradually starts to chip away at the morally gray parts and bring out the better version of her that everyone can be if tried.

She and Mitch were probably not the couple goals, but I love how they built their relationship without rushing into it, and how they left the ending as a definitive present, but not a definitive future, leaving only hopefulness for it.

Julie Murphy’s use of language is sharp, incisive and the novel poignant, her brilliance so obvious in her success at sketching two completely disparate characters, sketching them both with so much understanding and transparency and love. At tackling fatphobia and body image. I am honestly grateful to her for addressing that ‘fat’ is actually just a word, just an adjective that sticks to you like your other physical attributes, and it doesn’t define you. That the word only sounds like an insult and humiliation and taunt because people have made it so, that it doesn’t have to be.

“Sometimes it’s about what you don’t say.”

For not letting Millie succumb to this warped idea of body image where people -including parents – think you cannot be happy or healthy if you are fat enough and do not fit the society’s measurements, that fat people shouldn’t have their eyes too high up, because the world doesn’t let them get that far, so they should learn to curtail their ambitions and dreams.

The end was so empowering, I still feel the goosebumps near-electrifying my skin.

So in all, a definite 4.8 for me.

“Find the things you love and do them every day, even if it means failing.”