Skin & Bones

Lena Baker is a Black woman approaching 40, about to marry Malcolm Wilson, and raising her seven-year-old daughter, Aaliyah, in Portland, Oregon. When a routine doctor's visit for a bladder infection turns into an unsolicited lecture about her weight, with a nurse typing "morbidly obese but seems happy" (7) into her chart, Lena confronts the way the world sees her body. Her blood sugar is normal, but the doctor still recommends weight loss, capturing a tension central to Lena's life: She does not hate herself, but the world constantly gives her reasons to question her worth.

Lena is the only Black homeowner left on her gentrified block, once central to Portland's Black community. Her mother, Honey, is married to Lena's father, the pastor of Faith and Hope Church, where Lena grew up alongside two lifelong best friends: Aspen, the deacon's daughter who runs Starshine & Clay, a community arts space for Black Portlanders, and Kendra, a personal stylist for plus-size women. Lena directs diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) for Multnomah County Libraries, and she and Aspen secure a grant for Portland: Black, a series of exhibits and events showcasing Black Portland's history.

The novel interweaves Lena's personal story with historical chapters tracing that history: White Southerners who migrated to Oregon seeking a White utopia, the 14,000 Ku Klux Klansmen who made the Pacific Northwest home, the 1948 Vanport Flood that displaced thousands of Black residents, and urban renewal projects in the 1960s and 1970s that demolished hundreds of Black-owned homes and businesses. Figures like Beatrice Morrow Cannady, a founding member of Portland's National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) who turned her living room into a lending library, prefigure Lena's own work.

Malcolm, Lena's fiancé, grew up in foster care in Los Angeles and became the youth pastor at her father's church. Lena describes their bond as a Wednesday kind of love: steady and present even on unremarkable days. On their wedding day, Malcolm arrives as Lena is getting dressed and confesses through the cracked door that during their breakup the previous year, he slept with another woman and lied about it when Lena asked. Lena opens the door in her gown and cancels the wedding, not because he slept with someone else, but because he lied for a year. Aaliyah asks in a shaking voice, "Does this mean you won't be my daddy anymore?" (75), and the household erupts.

Lena spends the following week in stunned isolation until a lightbulb slips from her hands and shatters on the kitchen floor, breaking her open. Flashbacks reveal her history with Bryan, Aaliyah's father, who moved to Seattle one week after Aaliyah was born. After their breakup, Lena gained 50 pounds through emotional eating. When Honey returns Aaliyah, she warns Lena not to fall apart. Lena resolves not to eat her feelings but begins taking appetite suppressants, telling Aaliyah they are "beauty pills" (93). Each morning, Aaliyah takes her vitamin gummy, calling it her "strong pill" (93), then watches her mother swallow the suppressant: "Yours is working, too, Momma. You are so pretty" (93).

At work on Portland: Black, Lena faces microaggressions: A colleague questions why the exhibit centers Black people, a marketing director cannot say the word "Black," and during a working lunch, coworkers discuss their fear of weight gain, admitting their greatest dread is having a body like Lena's. Bryan reenters her life when his mother has a stroke. After his mother dies, Bryan inherits the house, moves back to Portland, and declares he wants Lena back.

Tensions erupt among the friends when Lena discovers that Kendra has been styling Constance, the White woman Malcolm slept with. Kendra insists Constance is only a client, but Lena feels betrayed and cuts off contact. Meanwhile, Malcolm persists, sending a long text promising to keep reaching out and calling to catalog every time they showed up for each other. Lena writes a long letter wrestling with whether he deserves her love and eventually sends it.

Aaliyah's struggles with body image intensify. During back-to-school shopping, nothing in the regular section fits her. A White classmate named Nora compares her to a hippo and mocks her hair and dark skin. On Halloween, a boy tells her she is too fat to be an angel. Lena confronts the bullies and the teacher, but Aaliyah's self-portrait from class reveals a thin girl colored in tan pencil with straight hair, nothing like the big, brown girl she really is. When Lena tells Aaliyah she is beautiful, Aaliyah asks, "Mommy, do you really believe that?" (226).

The crisis arrives during a dinner celebrating Bryan's new photography job. Both their phones buzz with urgent calls: Aaliyah has overdosed on the appetite suppressants, believing the beauty pills would make her beautiful. Doctors pump her stomach and work to stop internal bleeding. After 36 hours, Aaliyah stabilizes. The psychologist determines the overdose was accidental; Aaliyah took the pills not to hurt herself but to become beautiful. A social worker warns that without Lena's father's reputation as a child advocate, child protective services might have removed Aaliyah. Lena signs a care plan committing to therapy for both herself and her daughter.

In therapy, Aaliyah is asked what she would change with a magic wand. She whispers, "Me" (298). In a later session, she breaks down: "You take beauty pills every night, so doesn't that mean you don't think you're beautiful? And if I look just like you, doesn't that mean you don't think I'm beautiful?" (313). Lena apologizes. The therapist guides them toward redefining beauty beyond appearance.

Honey and Lena clash before reaching a fragile peace. Honey defends her mothering, explaining she chose to affirm Lena rather than police her weight, waking her every morning with "Good morning, beautiful" (284). Later, Honey apologizes for the first time Lena can remember, admitting she did not know how to mother perfectly and asking whether Lena is doing her best for Aaliyah.

Lena ends things with Bryan, telling him his grief and nostalgia are not the same as love for her. Aspen urges Lena to stop walking away at the first sign of hurt and to show Aaliyah what forgiveness looks like. Kendra publishes a viral essay in the New York Times titled "How It Feels to Be Fat Me," and she and Lena reconcile. The Portland: Black exhibit opens to a packed house at Starshine & Clay, and as the gallery transforms into a juke joint, Malcolm finds Lena on the dance floor. She surrenders to what she has been resisting. She loves him, forgives him, and wants him.

Lena delivers a keynote at a library conference in Arizona, where a flight attendant forces her from the exit row because her seat belt extender disqualifies her, and staff members mock her body backstage. In her speech, she declares that to be a fat Black woman is to exist in "a constant state of hurting and healing" (390). Malcolm proposes in the Rare Book Room at Powell's, a legendary Portland bookstore, telling Lena their love is rare and still being written. She says yes.

Lena celebrates turning 41 on a plane to Hawaii, using the honeymoon ticket she had saved, traveling alone for rest and reflection. She thinks about the Black pioneers whose strength and shortcomings are part of her inheritance, and how they taught her to love a country, a city, and a body with a fierce, demanding love. The novel closes with Lena in motion, carrying all she has learned: that her story matters, that she belongs, and that she will make good use of this breath.