Hi, I'm Alyssa Nadwarnie, and this is NPR's book of the day.

Cherry, the main character in best-selling author Rainbow Rowell's latest novel, Cherry Baby, is having a hard time.

Her very public marriage is disintegrating into a very public divorce.

And while her life falls apart, her husband's star is on the rise. He's

getting a ton of notoriety from his comic strip, which just happens to feature a wide-hipped,

double-chinned character named Baby, who fans continually conflate with Cherry. Rainbow Rowell

talked with here and now host Deborah Becker about the book.

Author Rainbow Rowell has pushed a lot of boundaries in the writing world, though she might be

best known for young adult books like the best-selling Eleanor and Park. She also writes adult fiction,

short stories, and comics. Her latest book, Cherry Baby, is an adult novel,

but it takes up issues of identity, marriage, body image, and the weight loss drugs known as

GLP Ones. The novel's out this week, and Rainbow Rowell joins us to talk about it. Welcome to

here and now. Oh, thank you so much for having me.

So right at the beginning, we learn that your main character, Cherry, is fat. I mean, that's how she

defines herself. She calls herself beautiful and fat. And although Cherry says she is beautiful,

she takes pride in her appearance, she's always ruminating about her weight. Why is that

something that you wanted readers to understand right from the start? Well, I think that she is just

always thinking about how people around her are reacting to her body and knowing that her body

is not the ideal. She also works in

marketing and PR. So it's almost like she's thinking about how she has to spin herself as she

moves through life, how she can present herself in the best way, but also always feeling people's

judgment of her and knowing that people are evaluating her and that she's not measuring out

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