Memoir
A dark-humor memoir about navigating the awkward parts of coming of age as a fat, working-class, Latinx teenager, coping with her dysfunctional home life in 1990s Las Vegas and early 2000s Miami, then stumbling through early adulthood—and attempting to make a life out of all of it.
Essay Collection
BIG GIRLS DON’T CRY is an essay collection braiding personal narrative, cultural criticism, and ongoing conversations about fat bodies, representation, and the explosion of the body positive movement over the last two decades. With first-hand experience repeatedly gaining and losing enormous amounts of weight, this collection explores – with humor – the unspoken social “rules” and truths of what it’s like to navigate the ordinary parts of life as a fat, millennial woman in a society that is hostile to plus-size bodies.
Novel
SUGAR is the story is set in present day and follows the friendship of Cristina and her best friend Roberto, as they come of age in a Latinx barrio in Miami. Their friendship falls apart when Cristina is awarded a prestigious scholarship and leaves for college. And when Roberto is left behind, envious, he sabotages her during a campus visit. But the two eventually reunite, several years later, just before a deadly tragedy changes their lives, and the lives of everyone in their neighborhood, forever.
Short Story Collection
SMASH: Two teenagers at an inner city high school bond over the absence of their fathers and love for badminton. A young woman regrets some of her choices after the drunk driving death of an old acquaintance. A high school history teacher makes an unlikely friend at an AA meeting she reluctantly attends. The short story collection, Smash, explores the difficult but often comic struggles people face with identity, friendship, obsession, desire, and loss as we come of age.
Natalie Lima 