Finishing up the year right–with the third fat-positive romance review in a row–is A Holly Jolly Ever After (2023) by Julie Murphy and Sierra Simone, the team that brought us A Merry Little Meet Cute.
This time, we have Kallum, the “funny” member of the boy band INK, who has moved home to run a pizza chain, when he achieves infamy again for a leaked sex tape. He is something of a bad boy with a dad-bod, but he’s going to try starring as a sexy Santa for a Christmas film. It’s all good, until his childhood crush, Winnie Baker, turns out to be his co-star.
Winnie has been a good girl her entire life, starring in a family sitcom, marrying her childhood sweetheart at 18, embodying purity culture, until her husband cheated on her and she insisted on a divorce. Now her parents aren’t speaking to her, she is living in her best friend’s coach house, and since the good girl parts aren’t coming her way anymore, she might as well try working on a sexy Santa movie. But the problem is that she’s never experienced pleasure from sex. Can Kallum help?
Some of the same characters from A Merry Little Meet Cute return, and the sex scenes are just as steamy. While she’s not explicitly fat, Winnie has “stopped living on the edge of starvation in order to maintain” the image she was told to, so now she’s curvier and rounder. Often, though, Winnie describes seeing a glimpse of Kallum’s round, furry belly and broad chest, so he’s clearly fat and that’s part of what attracts Winnie to him.
Also, Winnie has narcolepsy, so she’s dealing with a disability, and that is just another part of who she is. Do things work out instantly? Of course not, they misunderstand each other and screw up, but it was a cute happily ever after.
Reading While Fat 
One thought on “A Holly Jolly Ever After”