She Used to Hate Her Belly. Then She Wrote a Book about It

Everybelly
Thao Lam
Groundwood Books (2025)

In Everybelly, author-illustrator Thao Lam’s latest picture book, a little girl named Maddie and her mom go to the pool.

Maddie is waist-high, which means her gaze is drawn inexorably to the bellies she sees at eye level: bellies with freckles, scars, stretch marks, rolls, faded tattoos, even insulin monitors. She celebrates each one with childlike delight. Maddie couldn’t care less about flatness or fatness, and she doesn’t understand why anybody with room wouldn’t fill up their belly with treats.

But to Maddie, the best belly ever belongs to her mom.

“I used to live here,” she says, pointing, on page 1. Her index finger disappears deep into its rolls.

Everybelly is a wonderful reminder that our children love our bodies as they are, and we should too. It’s also another reminder that Thao Lam is one of this country’s best picture book artists.

The Vietnamese Canadian collagist is the author of nine colourful, quirky and endlessly creative books, including THAO: A Picture Book, the wonderful My Cat Looks Like My Dad and the wordless One Giant Leap, shortlisted for a 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award.

Everybelly, released April 1 by Groundwood Books, features Lam at the height of her powers. It’s funny, as usual, and visually stunning: her paper collage illustrations are simple, clean and painstakingly crafted, from the care she takes in capturing a wide array of skin tones to the bright, beautiful patterns on each piece of swimwear.

Recently, Lam spoke with The Tyee about diversity, body positivity and where she gets all of her paper.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: Let's talk about your new book! I suppose it’s pretty clear what it’s about, since it’s a picture book for ages three to six, but what is Everybelly about to you?

Thao Lam: Everybelly was, I guess, an accumulation of my childhood experience with body image. With my mom, growing up, she was very... how do I say this nicely... judgmental. You know, you're eating too much, you’re eating too little, you haven’t exercised enough. It was just a lot of poking. Over time, my relationship with her became resentful. Then I moved out. Freedom! And ate whatever I wanted. But her voice was always in the back of my mind.

Eventually, when I had a daughter, I thought, all right, I’m going to do things differently. I’m going to make sure I don’t say anything that she can interpret as disliking my body.

Wearing clothes, I wouldn’t say, “Hey, do these jeans make my butt look big?” Nothing like that. I don’t even have a scale at home. We still talk about portions. I'll be like, “OK, you had a sweet at lunchtime, maybe we won’t have a sweet for dinner. You can eat anything, but it needs to be in proportion.”

There’s still a sense of making sure kids get their nutrition. But it’s not about body image. Just establishing good habits.

Yeah, exactly. Because if we all were left to ourselves, we would eat cake every day. I would eat cake every day. I have eaten cake for breakfast.

I, too, have eaten cake for breakfast. It’s amazing.

Exactly. But I thought I was protecting her and giving her a healthy outlook on food and her body. So then, when she was four or five, she came out of the shower and she grabbed her thigh [and said,] “My thighs are fat.” And I was floored. Where did you get that?

In my head, I’m like, “Was this from me?” [I was] kind of questioning everything. I was so upset.

So I started doing research, trying to figure out how I can have a good and healthy conversation with her. I was reading a lot of books from experts, and I was reading, also, all the children’s books out there on the topic of bodies.

Any recommendations?

Bodies Are Cool. And It Isn’t Rude to Be Nude.

I love body positivity books. Instilling self-worth became so important to me when I became a parent too, and my approach has really changed over time. Initially, I thought, well, we won't talk about our bodies in a negative way. That should do it. Then my daughter came home one day and said, “I wish my hair was straight.”

And I remember that feeling. I understand where that comes from. You want to look like your friends or, in my case, like your family, and you don’t, and it’s hard.

So it turns out that we need to do more than just not have a negative conversation about the body. We really have to create the conditions for self-love, while finding a way to insist that the shape of your body is not where all value comes from.

That’s definitely the goal. Early on, I started teaching her about genetics and, you know, why do you have straight hair. It’s because your mom has straight hair. But my ex has curly hair. So I said, “Maddie, you inherit the straight hair from me.” Or she would say to me, “All my friends in class are taller than me.” And I’ll be like, “Well, you see, Toni’s mom is very tall, and Toni’s dad is even taller than Toni’s mom. So where do you think Toni got her height from?”

Seeing yourself in your family is everything. A lot of self-love comes from connection with our roots, from seeing our bodies as gifts handed down by the people we love most. Everybelly spells that out beautifully, right from the opening line: “This is my mama. I used to live here.” Talk about recontextualizing the belly. Who cares about shape? It was your child’s first home.

In all the research I read, it’s like, your body is capable of amazing things. You can breathe, you can run, you can talk, you can do so much with it. We don’t need to be so hard on ourselves. So to me, it was like, OK, Maddie loves my belly. To her, it brings comfort. I carried her. Like this belly that I was being so hard on held my kid. It nursed my kid.

Perspective is a big part of Everybelly. Most of the images are from Maddie’s perspective, way down towards the ground, so people’s heads are cut off. It’s all bodies and bellies. I thought that was a really interesting way to encourage a shift in perspective, even among adult readers.

When I was picturing the whole book, I just wanted to show bellies. Because I wanted to have the conversation: this thing that everybody has a love-and-hate relationship with is just a thing.

As adults, we see so much. We're taught, and with experience, it all just clouds our vision.

When Maddie was still shorter than me, she used to just come in for a hug, and she would be right at belly height. Kids are at that height. That’s their point of view. So I want to bring us all back, adults, to that time when a belly is just mostly your mother’s belly, your parent’s belly. It’s just where you bury your face. It’s soft, and you take it and you squeeze it.

Maddie used to, or still does, take my belly and make pizza dough in it. Being an adult, I would be like, you’re just squeezing my fat, you’re just making me realize that I have rolls. But to her, it’s like when cats do bread.

Right. When they knead with their paws and get that weird, nostalgic look in their eyes.

Yeah, it’s like a comfort thing for them. I want to be comfortable with it too, and bring everybody back to that mindset.

Kids have such different priorities. Like, Maddie is off in her own little world in this book. The book is about bodies. But Maddie is all about jelly beans, mostly. Can you unpack that a little bit for me? What went into the decision to give her such a meandering internal monologue?

I remember telling my editor: I’m picturing somebody sassy. I wanted her to be able to say anything. Kids will say whatever comes in their heads. There’s no filter, and to me, that’s perfect, because it gives you an idea. Do you see how this is more important to a kid than this? And it actually took me, I wrote it, and I wrote it at least 50 other times, and then we even nitpicked all the way to the last week or a couple of days before it went to print. I’m glad it worked out, because I tell people all the time: I don't enjoy writing.

Really?

I can’t even say I like drawing.

But you think of yourself more as a visual artist.

I’m not trained as a writer. I think this is the longest written story I’ve done. It has the most text.

That’s so funny to me, because you’ve been the author and illustrator for every one of your nine books! It seems like a pretty conscious choice to be the all of every project, especially if you don’t enjoy writing.

The goal was always to illustrate children’s books, because that’s where my fascination and love come from. I love picture books. So when I was pitching book ideas, I was just like, I’m gonna make my own books so I can show them I can illustrate, right? And the first book I pitched was a wordless picture book, because I was just interested in illustrating.

The Canada arts council, Ontario, Toronto arts council... I got a lot of rejections. They would tell me, “No, you’re not an author.” And I was just like, what do you mean I’m not an author? “Well, your books don’t have any text.” But I came up with the idea! “No, the rule says it has to have text.” So that’s why, in Wallpaper, I threw the word “hello” in there.

There’s some text for ya. One unit of text.

Now, the next time I apply for a grant, I can say I’m an author. It snowballed from there. So now I’m an author. But it’s still very challenging.

You sure seem like an author to me. I especially enjoyed the section where Maddie’s just listing off all the different foods that she likes, and the words spill right over the page, and she just keeps going.

I really wanted her to be rambling like I rant. I rant a lot. And I find it healthy.

It reminded me of that page in The Very Hungry Caterpillar where the caterpillar eats a piece of chocolate cake, an ice cream cone, a pickle, a slice of Swiss cheese and so on and so on. I know that Eric Carle is an early inspiration for you. Is that what we might call a reference?

That didn’t even occur to me until you said it! I just told my editor: I don't want to cut any words. She’s like: We're running out of space. You gotta take out three of these food items. And I'm like: No, I don't want to cut anything, just let me have it. So how can we solve this?

I also wanted to show readers that there's a lot of good food out there. Why should we limit ourselves when there's lots of things to enjoy? And like, how many meals can you have in your lifetime? Just fill your bellies with good stuff.

It’s a very diverse list of foods, too. I wanted to ask if that was conscious — you know, just making sure that it's not only white-people foods.

I was very lucky. My dad, growing up, really loved food. He worked in the kitchen. And because we were new to Canada, he wanted to cook everything he was learning, right? He would be obsessed, like, “OK, today’s challenge: I’m gonna make the perfect buffalo wing,” or “I’m gonna perfect a taco.” We were introduced to lots of variety growing up. So I grew up loving food, and so Maddie, because I love doing it and that was my lifestyle, it became her lifestyle.

It mirrors the diversity of representation throughout Everybelly. Every time I look, I see more details. A surgery scar. A glucose monitor. A little bit of cellulite. It seems like you put a lot of thought into every single body that appears. How much prep and planning and research did you have to do in order to achieve what I'd call elite representation?

I’m hoping that I got most people. Because we’re talking about bodies, and it isn’t just our bellies that we are self-conscious about, and it isn’t just our bellies that make us different, right? I thought, OK, well, if I’m going to talk about bodies, I should also be aware of what the variety or diversity out there is. And make sure that I can fit as many people as possible in it, because that is what our world is. So I made a list. Like, do I have everybody accounted for? And how many different shades of skin colour can I get when I buy paper?

Speaking of paper, Everybelly has so many beautiful patterns. My daughter wants to know if you find paper with these patterns, or if you’re designing these patterns yourself.

Tell her I’m very lazy. I just buy the patterns.

She's gonna love that.

Usually before every project, I have an idea of the colour or the look that I’m trying to achieve. The place I buy papers, they change the papers all the time, right? It’s like clothing. It’s seasonal. Whatever patterns and colours just happen to be in that season, I’m kind of hindered by that. But this one was fun because it was swimsuits. So I got to have a lot of fun with all the different patterns. And I lucked out, because when I was buying the papers for this, flowers were very in.