Body: or, How Hope Confronts Her Shadow and Calls the Flutter Girl to Flight

You will never see your body the same again.

Hope hates her body. She always has. The fact that she’s a graphic artist who manipulates images of women’s bodies for a living only makes matters worse.

Hope’s teenage niece, Lana, has a physique Photoshop can’t touch. But in her dance world, finesse in motion requires mastery of body, which, for Lana, spirals into obsession.

Looking into the mirror, Hope and Lana have in mind a continually altering ideal of beauty defined always as thinner than they are in the moment.

Hope turns to her preternaturally trim friend, Lilith, for help. Comedy ensues as Hope mimics Lilith’s alpha female style, storming through life solving her problems and losing weight—that is until her new inauthentic persona leads to catastrophe. At her lowest, Hope meets Joy, a quirky mentor offering ancient truths of physical health and spiritual peace that will change Hope’s and Lana’s lives forever.

Sean Coons is an author, screenwriter, musician, and educator living in Redondo Beach, California with his wife and son. He has written for The Atlantic, covering topics ranging from history to culture to Hollywood, and has toured the US and abroad as an entertainer. His work in the field of body image is informed by personal experience as well as his study of psychology and social behavior at UC Irvine and counseling psychology at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.