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There’s a certain meticulousness that I notice with all guys when they put their shoes on. First of all, they sit down. I mean, they need to sit down to do it. Right there, it signals, “I’m going to be here for a while. Let’s get settled in.” I can put on a pair of hiking boots that have not even been laced yet while talking on my cell phone, without even leaning on a wall.

I don’t have any real problems with it, except when you’ve done a whole snappy/sexy exit conversation with a guy leaving your place and then he tacks on an extra eight minutes as he puts on his shoes.

My Appearance: The Fun and the Really Not Fun

When You’re Not Skinny, This Is What People Want You to Wear

GETTING PROFESSIONALLY beautified was all that I dreamed about doing when I was an asexual-looking little kid. That’s because my parents dressed both my brother and me according to roughly exactly the same aesthetic: Bert from Ernie and Bert. Easing them out of dressing me in primary colors and cardigans (seriously, I was a child who wore cardigans) and getting them to let me grow my hair out past my earlobes was a first huge step that took years.

Cosby sweater on, lovin’ life.

So, yeah, now that I’m an adult, getting made beautiful by a team of professionals for a red carpet event or a magazine photo shoot is heaven to me. The part that is not fun is someone picking out clothes for me.

I love shopping and fashion, as anyone who has read more than a paragraph of this book will know. But for magazine photo shoots and things, they hire stylists for me, because they have a certain idea for how they want me to look, and it isn’t necessarily how I would style myself, which is 1980s-era Lisa Bonet.

Since I am not model skinny, but also not super fat and fabulously owning my hugeness, I fall in that nebulous “normal American woman” size that legions of fashion stylists detest. For the record, I’m a size eight (this week, anyway). Many stylists hate that size, because I think, to them, it shows that I lack the discipline to be an ascetic or the confident sassy abandon to be a total fatty hedonist. They’re like: pick a lane! Just be so enormous that you need to be buried in a piano, and dress accordingly.

For the record, they’re not all bad. I’ve worked with some really badass stylists who make me look so smokin’ hot your face would melt. Monica Rose, who styled me for this book cover, totally gets my body and celebrates it. (Yes, I say things like “celebrates my body” like your old hippie aunt.) But many stylists don’t know what to do with me.

Over the past seven years, here’s what stylists have tried to make me wear:

Navy: Ah, navy, the thin-lipped, spinster sister of black. Black, though chic and universally slimming, is considered a boring red carpet color and is rarely featured on best-dressed lists. That’s why I get shown a lot of navy. Navy has made a comeback in the past few years, which is terrific, because before that, navy was most famous as the signature color for postal workers.

Cap sleeves: Cap sleeves look good on no one, and yet I am given them all the time. I believe it is in an effort to hide the flesh where my arm meets my torso, which I guess is disgusting. Cap sleeves should be worn exclusively by toddler flower girls at a wedding.

Billowing bohemian blouses billed as “Poet tops”: Skinny girls like Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen look ethereal and gorgeous in hippie clothes with lots of volume. I love the bohemian look, but when I try it, I look like a chubby gypsy. Also, chubby people can never truly pull off ethereal the same way skinny people can never be jolly. The only fat ethereal person I can think of was Anna Nicole Smith, and in her case, ethereal might have meant “drugged.”

Layers of chunky beaded necklaces: Nothing makes me look like a social worker from the 1970s like several layers of colorful, conspicuous, statement necklaces.

Muumuus: In college, I was cast in a student-written musical that was a retelling of a Greek myth. It was a very cool play with a small cast, each of whom played several