> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://club-yme.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # VI/MMXXVI - URL: https://club-yme.ghost.io/vi-mmxxvi-bellies-book-review/ - Published: 2026-07-20T01:05:30.000Z - Updated: 2026-07-20T20:32:56.000Z - Description: Over several years of loving, when waists readily gather inches, hair roots abandon their follicles and breasts reach longingly for the navel, each change brews anxiety. - Author: Leah Puri Be sweet to me reader, I haven’t written in years. You know that for the past 4 years, I’ve spent much of my time taking out stubborn kidney stones and cancerous organs, untwisting testicles and reassuring men that their penis size is *perfectly normal*. Medicine has exposed my many weaknesses—regulating my stank face after 28 straight hours of work, getting literally any admin task done in time and feeding myself anything healthy on call. I bare these weaknesses because they are human; they don’t expose me like writing does. I am a well of constant feeling and each time I read my well goes deeper. I have scooped out a bit of myself and given it to you today, and there is nothing scarier than that. --- ### **Tenderloin** I come to *Bellies* by Nicola Dinan desperate for a queer love story. It is the middle of June and, in San Francisco, I am desperate for warmth. Within the fog, I know that my queerness is invisible, sometimes even to myself. I squelch the thoughts that books listened to somehow leave you less full and I forge in, hungry. Tom, newly out, having painfully broken free from the gripes of his missionary-only-esque relationship with Sarah, meets Ming at a party. Ming is handsome and cheeky, and I’m immediately next to them at the bar, heat rising in my cheeks as they flirt. My hands tighten on the steering wheel as they kiss for the first time and I grin when they go home together. I arrive at work and they linger faintly in my mind as I move through the day. I encounter an octogenarian couple and wonder if they too fell in love all at once. In the evening, Tom and Ming’s friends - Rob, Sarah, and Lisa - drown out the traffic home. Their conversations remind me of finding my people. When Rob massages Tom’s feet, my heart swells with memory; it is 2019, a friend holds me close as we watch TV, and I first understand platonic yearning. Tom and Ming weave their relationship across the UK and Malaysia, and in the process navigate the dredges of mental health crises and smooth the jagged edges of interracial entanglements. Paradoxically, I am cozy in the familiar turbulence of early adulthood, and I long for the next installment with each drive. When Ming shares the truth of her gender with Tom, I transition to listening even outside of my drives. Like anyone who has fallen in love too early and, seemingly permanently, I too wonder what metamorphosis will finally warrant rejection. Over several years of loving, when waists readily gather inches, hair roots abandon their follicles and breasts reach longingly for the navel, each change brews anxiety. Tom and Ming now confront the mother of it. At what point is it crude for Tom to seek the body that first held him, though the old body is now undeniably devoid of shared context? Can Ming truly and fully step into herself while making space for Tom’s fear of what seems to be a regression of his own identity? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/42/62/42621783-74d6-4656-b2c3-928d7c378ea1/content/images/2026/07/IMG_7337.JPG) **Raven in song - Point Reyes* As my protagonists’ differences come to a head, their individual friendships morph and ultimately mature. I am doing the dishes when Tom and Sarah have the conversation that informs the title. When Sarah shares the nothingness of her body being under a man, daring her mind to astrally launch her into a different reality, Tom finally sees the weight she also had to bear. He sees Sarah’s belly and he doesn’t look away. I think about the person I once started to love who told me she needed more than I could give and my chest tightens. My reaction then was a melodramatic descent into victimhood. She showed me her belly and its soft fragility felt contagious. I heaped a thick layer over mine. When I return to the present, my fingers are wrinkled. Tom and Sarah have left me four minutes and thirty seconds behind. I wipe the suds from my hands and hit rewind. When the author adds a layer of grief, I am walking home from my first weightlifting class. The sadness ripples through my body and I start to ache a full twelve hours too early. I am rubbed raw and exposed— like all of the people in my ears. I taste salt and it takes me a moment to realize a tear has pooled at the corner of my mouth and is attempting to part my lips. I decide then that this is a good book— because for the first time I think painfully, not victoriously, of friends and lovers, whose bellies I ripped to shreds long ago. My talons retract like an embryonically misguided testicle. As penance, I decide to show my own belly. --- **enjoy :)*