Carla Sosenko’s Body Was Always the Story. Now She’s Telling It Herself.

Carla Sosenko spent much of her life trying to tame her body. She had liposuction at eight years old, cycled in and out of Weight Watchers, and hid her frame under layers and layers of clothes. But in her debut memoir, Sosenko tries a different approach — finally coming to terms with the Klippel-Trenaunay syndrome that left her with two different sized legs, a hunched posture, and many more idiosyncrasies.

Below, in an exclusive excerpt from I’ll Look So Hot in a Coffin (out now), Sosenko details her ever-evolving relationship with her body — and the many unwelcomed comments she’s fielded about it along the way.

If you are a human being, chances are people have commented on your looks at some point. If you’re a woman, this is 99.9 percent more likely to be true. If you are a woman who is not white or a woman who is not cis or a woman with a body that is different from the kinds of bodies people are used to and therefore comfortable with, that percentage soars to a whopping 100.* Keep in mind that “used to” and “comfortable with” can change from place to place and depending on who’s looking. If you are in the United States like I am, the lens is one that, when it comes to women, usually sees thin, able-bodied, not deformed cis white femmes the most clearly; everyone else is slightly out of focus, and people feel an intrinsic right to ask questions about the things that aren’t clear to them. That’s the price you pay for being blurry, even though so many of us are. On that note, here:

*I made up these numbers but would bet my life that they are accurate or on the low side.

An Incomplete List, in No Particular Order, of Things People Have Said to Me About My Body

“At least it didn’t hit your face.” —An allergist

I was thirty-seven, and I’d never seen this doctor before. I was visiting her because during a brief delusion, I considered letting a boyfriend move into my apartment with his cat, even though cats turn me into a puffy splotch. The doctor had never heard of Klippel-Trenaunay. Once I explained it, her assessment was a look-on-the-bright-side kind of affirmation that this rare syndrome had messed up my body but thank god not my face. I dumped the allergist but not the boyfriend (which was a mistake; more on that later).

“You have too much fat on your thigh.” —My kindergarten music teacher

Our class was getting ready for a recital, and Mrs. Trindadi had decided to add a dance routine. She asked who among us had a leotard at home, and my hand sailed up of its own accord; I took jazz, ballet, and tap at Arlene & Cathy’s School of Dance like most of the girls. But no, my right thigh was not thin enough for her production, said Mrs. Trindadi, and so my navy zip-up leotard stayed home for the recital, and I sang but did not dance.

“The big one hasn’t stopped eating since we sat down.” —An old lady at a friend’s bat mitzvah

In her defense (I guess?), she didn’t say it to me, only near me, but she was loud, and I was often on the lookout for offenders, spoiling for a fight. It was true. I hadn’t stopped eating since we sat down. The kids’ dais had bowls of Hershey’s Kisses everywhere, exactly the kind of contraband I gobbled up as much as I could when I was out from under my parents. Even at thirteen, I was pretty spunky, so I shot the woman—my elder, somebody’s grandmother—a look that said I had heard her and would make her pay. Caught, she smiled and said, “I could just watch you kids dance all day!” I smiled back and knew she wouldn’t talk about me again.

“Wow, the right one is so much bigger!” —A stranger in a shoe store

This may be my earliest memory of someone I didn’t know talking about my body in front of me as if I weren’t attached to it. I was little, shopping for shoes with my mom, and I’m sure neither of us was having fun. Shoe shopping was a particular kind of misery in the 1980s. The styles of the day were not amenable to feet like mine, which are flat, wide, and slightly different sizes, both big. My mom’s response to the curious onlooker who had remarked on the difference in my feet was ferocious—“You think I don’t know that?”—which in retrospect sounds more like a vexed plea for a break than a defense of me. Today I have no doubt that my mother’s response would be, “Yeah, well, your face could stop a clock,” which is one of her favorite insults for people she can’t stand.

“Who’s this? Oh! You look different from behind!” —My boyfriend Henry’s mom

When sweater coats came along as a trend in the late ’90s, it was as if they’d been sent from the heavens just for me. If I couldn’t walk around in a full suit of armor or giant opaque bubble, a piece of clothing that was practically a blanket was the next best thing. I bought as many as I could and did not take them off until the mid-aughts, when they were pilled, faded, and long out of style. I was wearing one the first time I met Henry’s mom, at her sister’s house for Christmas. When she walked into the house, I was seated on the couch and I guess she saw what I wanted her to: my thin face, my long neck, the illusion that the sweater coat, not DNA, was responsible for my bulk. When she found me standing in the kitchen a little while later, the sweater coat’s power faltered because I was at a new angle with no sentry. I felt her hands on my hips first, then saw her head peering around me as if I were a tree and she a child playing hide-and-go-seek. “Who’s this?” she asked, then a beat: “Oh! You look different from behind!” At her new vantage point, she hadn’t known who I was. The words tumbled out of her mouth uncensored as she tried to figure how the girl with the thin face from the couch could also be the person standing in front of her now.

I decided that I did not like my boyfriend’s mother.

Excerpted from I’ll Look So Hot in a Coffin by Carla Sosenko Copyright © 2025 by Carla Sosenko. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.