The Image of Us: An Exploration of Body Image Through the Lens of "Selfie" by Kay Cove

The only thing spicy about me is my bookshelf.

I think every woman I know has a complicated relationship with their sexuality as it relates to their body image. It doesn’t matter what shape our body is or how much space it takes up: somehow, we’re all unhappy with it. I’m petite and there are days when I don’t like how my skin sits on my bones, how I seem to have curves in every part of my body but the places I want to have them, how scars litter virtually every square inch of my body. Then, I have friends who don’t like how their stomachs look in certain dresses, or how their thighs jiggle and chafe with their steps. Somehow, someway, we all simultaneously take too much space and too little.

This might come as a shock to some of you or maybe it isn’t, but I didn’t think I could be considered anywhere in the realm of sexy or hot until November of last year. It took one fateful girls’ trip to realize that “sexy” had very little to do with how my body looked, but whether I trusted myself and the people around me.

“Selfie” by Kay Cove

This blog is once again made possible by the lovely imprint Page & Vine. Thank you so much for trusting me with your ARC’s enough to not only enjoy them, but to write about my experience reading the story between the pages. Seriously, I love you all.

“Selfie” by Kay Cove is a billionaire romance story featuring grumpy-but-actually-a-teddy-bear Nathan and our sunshine-with-a-chance-of-rain Spencer. After Spencer breaks up with her ex and moves to Las Vegas for a fresh start, she finds herself in the undesirable position of Nate’s personal assistant. This isn’t a hyperbole: previous assistants have quit within hours of the seemingly tyrannical billionaire. Our girl Spencer though is determined to keep her job so she can raise her sister Charlie after their mother died.

If you find yourself needing a story about how to choose love after heartbreak, this is it. Both Spencer and Nate have lost in the game of love in tragic, traumatizing ways, and after bad experiences, it can be too easy to shove it away forever. Still, doing so comes at a high price. What is life without a little risk? If you keep running from it, all you do is limit your ability to experience life at its fullest under the guise of protection. That’s not wisdom.

It’s cowardice.

I’m so out of touch with my own sexuality that even in my dreams I’m awkward.

It’s in the way fingers twitch after a risky text. The instinct of throwing your phone into the ocean and hiding under the covers of why did I do that? When the book opens, we start three months after the story’s already started: with Spencer sending Nate a nude.

It’s a trust thing.

The last time she did it, her body ended up plastered all around the walls of her college. The word “COW” markered over a moment of vulnerability and beaten down by laughs. When she tries to run from Nate and from love, it’s that memory that leashes her and convinces her to do it. Everytime she’d loved, she’d been used and discarded.

I struggle to name a girl who hasn’t felt that way at least once in their life. I’d tell you girls have a complicated relationship with sexuality, and it’s true—a lot do—but it’s more than that. It’s the way bodies are dehumanized into spectacle: we exist to be pretty, enticing, tempting. Then, when things don’t work out, we’re taught we should’ve known.

I remember going through a major heartbreak in my 20’s, crying to my family about the shattered pieces in my chest, and being told, “Well, what do you expect? Look at you. How could anyone want you for more?”

Because being 20 and a woman is my failing. Being 20, dressing in clothes that make me feel good, doing my hair in a way I liked, and being a woman eliminate all else. How dare I have the audacity for love when all people expect from me is lust?

I told myself I didn’t mind, but I stopped thinking of myself as more than that. My body and me became two separate things. I began to resent it. I didn’t ask for it. To top it all off, I didn’t even think I was very conventionally attractive that way. I wanted bigger boobs, a thinner waist, smaller thighs, and an ass that didn’t jiggle as much when I walked. If I was going to be perceived that way, used that way, then couldn’t my body at least have done be the favor of being what I found pretty for myself?

Did you see it? The wording just now? “For myself.” Because everyone else to me is gorgeous. Drop dead supermodel stunning. The monstrosity’s just me. Insecurities are narcissistic that way.

I quietly fixed all my insecurities one by one, but it didn’t make the trauma go away.

Spencer used to take pills for weight loss until it put her in the hospital. We learn this pretty early on. Around her sister, she called them vitamins: but kids are smart and her sister knew what they were for. When she had to stop taking them, she stopped eating instead, resolved to count calories for the rest of her life in the name of being smaller.

I wish I could tell you Nate’s love healed this, but it didn’t. Not alone, at least.

Nate helped. He made her feel sexy and wanted. For her body and her brain. He loved her curves and loved the way she decorated his office into Barbie’s Dream Office out of pettiness. He loved how she felt in his hands and her tenacity at the same time. He helped her believe she could be loved with, for, and beyond her body. But the thing that stuck out to me the most was her friends.

Lennox, Dawn, Avery, and Chelsea. They coax her into eating when they’re together, and they don’t let her name her starving as a diet. They bring her out to the club where she initially met Nate, and when Nate’s being difficult or Spencer runs into an issue she isn’t ready to disclose to him, she goes to them.

They talk about sex. They talk about bodies. They talk about the taboo. It’s an adult friendship with transparency and shamelessness. So, by the time Spencer sends Nate that picture, it isn’t filled with doubt and doubt alone. It’s with the confidence that no matter what happens, she’ll be okay because she has them.

But maybe that’s me projecting a little bit.

Because when my heart broke so catastrophically, and the words of men past lingered in the folds of my still-forming brain, I know who stitched me back together: it was my girls.

My girls who took me on a girls’ trip to see some cows and start a podcast. One night, we took an instax polaroid and took spicy pictures, and when I made jokes that nobody would see mine, they said that I would and that was enough. Because I have this body right now and one day, I might want to remember it. We took photos of each other and cheered each other on, wolfwhistling for reach other and screeching at how hot each of us looked.

When someone named something they didn’t like, the rest of us looked at them like they grew a second head. What do you mean you don’t like your hips? You have a perfect hourglass figure that makes me want to fight your boyfriend. What do you mean you don’t feel hot? I’m sweating behind this camera because damn.

When you feed your love to people that love you, you feed it into yourself.

I’m happy to announce I do have more pictures of my body now. Photos nobody’s ever seen, and they weren’t taken because I was asked. They were taken because I wanted them, and that’s enough.

(The girls have seen one or two though, and we continue to cheer each other on even when we’re not in the same state.)

Too bad for you, I’m not going to roll over and die just because you asked me to.

You’ve heard me say it before, and I’ll say it again: learning is not a linear process. There are still days I hate my body, and days that I love it. I suck my stomach in for photos and roll my shoulders back. I feel inextricably awkward with each shutter click because I’m a photographer and what I think looks good on me unfortunately feels weird sometimes. I don’t mind a bit of staging.

But the photos I look back at the most are the ones where I’m not looking. Where I’m a bit slouched over because I’m working and you can see my drive through the lens. The ones where my bag looks like it holds my whole apartment because I’ve got a day longer than a football field ahead of me. The photos of me that I like the most are not the ones where I’m trying to be pretty, but the ones where I am. Not just because of my body, but because of the consciousness that occupies it.

By the end of the book, the thoughts Spencer has surrounding her body decrease. She takes the selfie, sends it to Nate, who drives like a man who can absolutely pay off his speeding tickets just to get to her. He doesn’t even realize how he made her nervous by leaving her on read; he just needs to be with her. To talk to her. Then, to do other things.

After that night, Spencer considers her body less and her heart more. She thinks of him, of her sister, of his daughter. She thinks of work and what comes next. The past doesn’t haunt her as much as it used to because when you live so committedly to your present, there isn’t time.

There are better ways to use your energy at that point.

Be high maintenance, Spencer. Don’t settle for what you can get. Demand what you’re worth.

Spencer lets go of exes and past flings gone wrong. She stops thinking of a way to fit the mold of what she should’ve been and starts finding people who fit her instead. Same goes for dresses: she gets the size she is and lets the fabric adjust to her body instead of the other way around.

Sounds like common sense, but when the world tells you to do the opposite, you’d be surprised how muddled your thoughts get. Especially when you’re young and impressionable. It isn’t a bad thing to be marked by the world. It isn’t shameful to learn the wrong lesson and carry weights that aren’t yours. Half of life is making mistakes, and the other half is just trying to figure out how to correct them.

For me, it means I think of my friends. I think of what I would say to them when they get hurt. Then, I do the hard part and extend myself the same grace and defense I would give them. Even when that means asking them for help and validation.

After girls’ trip, something in me changed. No longer was I resolved to be low maintenance. I tried that, and I ended up alone. I am decidedly a high maintenance person. I decidedly have needs and boundaries and standards. Even if it made me alone sometimes, it was fine. At least I was alone with self-respect and the family I forged myself.

There’s a common phrase: sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. My parents drilled this into me as a kid. The problem was that I was never a kid that took things just because an adult said so, and that old adage didn’t feel true. I dislocate bones all the time, and those hurt nearly as bad as getting your heart broken by the people you loved.

And that’s okay.

It’s okay to get hurt. It’s okay to feel insecure. It’s okay to hate your body some days. I’m here to tell you that I do, and if this book is any indication, so do a lot of people. But you can’t linger in it. The darkness of your shadows isn’t sustainable, and it does nothing but keep you cold.

We may not be able to love our bodies all the time, and the world may never stop trying to shape us. Luckily for us, we can choose not to listen to it and create kinder expectations for ourselves. Guidelines we’d give ourselves as gently as we give our closest friends. In this world, we really do have to be our own best friend in today’s day and age. That kind of tenderness doesn’t come from shrinking ourselves in the name of society; it stems from the moment we decide to see ourselves clearly—and kindly.