47 pages • 1 hour read
Sonya Renee TaylorThe Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Foreword-PrologueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Foreword Summary
Content Warning: This section contains mentions of suicide and also discusses body image, racism, ableism, and transphobia.
In the Foreword, author Ijeoma Oluo recounts her first memory of people expressing concern over her size. She recalls that at age 11, she overheard her mother and aunt fretting over a photo of her, commenting on her body and worrying that she was getting big. This experience deeply impacted Oluo. As she grew up, she went on to internalize the belief that, as a Black girl, she needed to shrink herself in every way.
Oluo says that in her thirties, she started to allow herself to take up more space. She started a successful career as a writer. While she came to value her brain and her talents, she still found it difficult to love her body. One day, she saw Sonya Renee Taylor speaking on stage and saw Taylor fully inhabiting her body as a confident and strong woman. Oluo bought Taylor’s book, which changed Oluo.
Oluo praises Taylor’s vision, which imagines a type of healing that goes beyond traditional self-help, a genre Oluo acknowledges can be steeped in capitalism, ableism, and white supremacy. Oluo declares Taylor’s work to be a classic and one that she hopes will enable readers to discover lives of self-love.
Prologue Summary
Sonya Renee Taylor describes how, in the summer of 2010, she attended the Southern Fried Poetry Slam in Knoxville, Tennessee, with her poetry slam team. There, her teammate Natasha, a woman living with cerebral palsy, confided in Taylor that she feared she might be pregnant, likely by a man who was just an occasional fling. Taylor, who had previously worked as a sexual-health service provider, asked why Natasha had chosen not to use a condom with this man. Natasha felt that since her disability already made sex difficult, she didn’t feel like she had a right to speak up about using condoms. Taylor responded by telling Natasha that her body was not an apology—it was not something that she had to offer someone as a way to apologize for her disability.
After this encounter, Taylor’s words kept returning to her in different ways. Every time she thought hurtful thoughts about her own body, the words would come back to her.
Taylor discusses the concept of natural intelligence, an idea espoused by author and spiritual teacher Marianne Williamson. Williamson contends that every being is created with what they need to embody the highest version of themselves and that they naturally know how to do this. Taylor acknowledges that while this concept is resonant and healing, even someone like Williamson is not immune to bias and body shame, as evident in the premise of Williamson’s book A Course in Weight Loss, a book in which the author correlates losing weight with healing.
Taylor proposes her own name for natural intelligence: radical self-love. She contends that radical self-love is something that humans already are. She explains that the rest of the book explores how to listen to radical self-love more closely, even when body shame threatens to drown it out. Taylor argues that this kind of healing is about remembering something that one has forgotten—it’s about coming back to a state of being that all humans already know.
Foreword-Prologue Analysis
Taylor introduces the theme of Radical Self-Love as a Natural State. In the Prologue, she delves into the concept of natural intelligence. Her discussion pivots around the idea that every human inherently embodies radical self-love, but societal norms and personal experiences often muffle this innate wisdom. Throughout the narrative, Taylor emphasizes that the journey to radical self-love is not about acquiring something new but about stripping away layers of shame and social conditioning to reveal that which is already present within every individual.
Personal anecdotes serve as vehicles for the book’s messages, creating a narrative that aims to be intimate and relatable. In the Foreword, Ijeoma Oluo recounts her personal experiences with body shaming, illustrating the impact of societal expectations on individual self-perception. Oluo shares how she “felt ice fill [her] veins as [she] crept out of [her] room to take a look at [her mother and aunt]. There they were, staring at [her] school picture proudly displayed on the wall” (i). Her aunt’s and mother’s comments were so impactful that they had an immediate bodily effect on her. Similarly, Taylor’s recounting of her interaction with her teammate Natasha puts a spotlight on the personal struggles and revelations that led to the conception of the book’s central theme. These stories not only provide context but also add emotional depth to the discourse, making the book’s concepts more tangible and resonant.
In these early sections, Taylor’s approach is presented as transcending the typical boundaries of the self-help genre. According to Oluo, Taylor goes beyond the genre’s entanglement with capitalist, ableist, and white supremacist ideologies; her work proposes a model of healing and self-love that is inclusive, intersectional, and transformative. Indeed, in the Prologue, Taylor shows that a prominent figure in the self-help genre, Marianne Williamson, is complicit in perpetuating body shame. As such, Taylor espouses a version of natural intelligence that centers on the body, rejoicing in the body diversity of humanity.
These opening pages set up the theme of Celebrating Differences to Foster Inclusivity, which is further developed in later chapters. Through the stories of Oluo and Natasha, Taylor suggests that marginalized bodies, often shamed by society, should instead be recognized and celebrated. This celebration of difference challenges the conventional narrative of conformity and invites a radical acceptance of diversity in all its forms. Taylor’s argument lays the groundwork for a broader discourse on body shame, body diversity, and intersectionality.
