A visit from The Boob Fairy

A guest essay by Annabelle Tometich.

iStock | Dalinas

Annabelle Tometich is the author of The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony, which debuted earlier this year. We’ve gotten to know each other because we share a literary agent, and she’s been so lovely and helpful in sharing her insights into the first-time book process. Here, she writes about how some of the ways she’s concealed her real body mirrors how she concealed her real identity as she posed as a male restaurant critic for more than a decade.

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Body Type brings you insights, essays, and guidance about body culture and body image from me, a woman who has been through big body changes and worked inside the wild world of the fitness industry. I’m pleased to occasionally bring you guest posts from other writers who have something to say about their own bodies. Please subscribe to support my work and theirs.

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I wrote my first restaurant review as “Jean Le Boeuf” in 2006. 

Despite working in restaurants for more than a decade at that point — I held every job from host to dishwasher, prep cook, line cook, server, manager — and despite launching my own (tiny and failed) catering company, I felt I had no business being a restaurant critic. My saving grace: a silly pseudonym that made me sound like a French guy. I didn’t have to write reviews as “Annabelle Tometich,” I got to write them as “Jean Le Boeuf.” Tres bien! 

“Jean Le Boeuf” was the pen name that critics at my hometown newspaper, The Fort Myers News-Press, had been hiding behind since 1979. I don’t think any of them embraced it as wholeheartedly as I did. 

Even though we made it clear at the end of each review that “Jean Le Boeuf,” or JLB as we called him in the newsroom, was a pseudonym, many readers assumed JLB was a real, living French man. They addressed their envelopes to “Monsieur Le Boeuf” and started their emails, “Dear sir.” Their presumptions gave me, a mixed-race Filipina woman, the confidence to rail against rubbery mushrooms and straight-from-the-freezer coconut shrimp. It allowed me to be not myself, but a puffed-up version of myself, one who could delineate, with beaucoup de confidence, the positives and negatives of any creme brulee. 

JLB was me, padded – padded against risk, against pushback, against who I really was. This was something I was used to doing.

I’d been padding other areas of my life for years. As a brown kid living in a Florida county named for Robert E. Lee, I felt that a different kind of body would be my pass to acceptance, or at least more friends. 

As a teenager in the early to mid 1990s, boobs were it. The Kardashians hadn’t yet graced us with their buxom bottoms, and though Sir Mix-A-Lot openly shared his big-butt desires, they too (Thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-six!) required breasts. In fifth grade, I watched my best friends metamorphosize as if they had been visited by the Boob Fairy overnight. As their chests grew, so too did their social status. Jenny Walton went from training bras to satiny Maidenforms and punched a one-way ticket to the cool table at lunch. Libby Miller went from queen of the kickball field to queen of, well, everything, when she skipped the A, B, and C cups and went right to D the summer before sixth grade. 

Those girls were my colleagues and compatriots. They were two of the only people in my majority-white classes who didn’t question my other-ness. They didn’t eye my white dad and Filipina mom the way some teachers did. They never asked if my mother spoke English, or what the heck Tagalog was. They didn’t assume I ate dogs. They just showed up and hung out. We played TV tag together, rode bikes together, shared dog-eared Goosebumps books – until one day, when their bodies changed, we didn’t.

I figured, halfway through middle school, it was best to fake it, to pad myself into popularity. In seventh grade, I pawed my way through the J. Byrons intimates section, feeling for the cushiest options my babysitting money could buy while also fitting my 30 AAA chest. I landed on a lacy number with about an inch of foam cushioning the cups. It took me from “Ew, who is he?” to “I guess you can sit with us.”

I finally felt “in” — in with the boys who snapped back straps, in on the jokes about who stuffed their cups with toilet paper (not me!), in with the girls who’d pass in the hallway and tap my shoulder to let me know, 13-year-old to 13-year-old, that my bra strap was showing and to adjust my shirt. I wore that bra everywhere and always: to gym class under my sweaty sports bra, to pizza parties for the straight-A honor roll kids, to sleepovers at friends’ houses where I dared not remove it, and dared not reveal my real self. 

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I’m certain I wore some kind of gel-filled bra to my first restaurant review as JLB. I was more than a decade out of middle school, but the Boob Fairy still hadn’t visited me. I hid the flatness of my 25-year-old chest behind WonderBras, Bombshell bras, and regular bras with larger cups that I stuffed with sticky silicone inserts shaped like chicken cutlets. 

At this point, my faked boobs were more for me than anyone else. My best friends knew about my small boobs, as did the guy I’d been dating for eight years who’d recently proposed. And yet, the padded bras remained. I scoured every Victoria’s Secret semi-annual sale for more. When I found one that fit just right, I bought it in every color — or as many colors as I could afford as a med-school reject turned line cook turned journalist/restaurant critic (so, maybe two). 

Me and my puffed-up bras, me and my padding, we were inextricable. The padding had earned me acceptance way back when. I wasn’t about to let that go. 

A version of the Boob Fairy finally visited when I was 29. That summer, I had my first kid and, through pregnancy, delivery and new motherhood, filled my first A, B, and C cup bras with what were undeniably my real breasts. These boobs, however, were not the boobs I imagined at Paul Laurence Dunbar Middle School. These boobs throbbed and leaked. They felt alien, as did the rest of my postnatal body. And then, as my first child got older, these boobs went away — much to my relief — placing me back not quite at square 1, but at square 1.5, a slightly bigger but also flabbier and less perky square. 

When I had a second kid in 2013, this cycle repeated. This version of the Boob Fairy came, left some alien presents, and then magicked them back when the baby no longer needed them. What little breasts she left were small but functional in ways I was starting to understand and, perhaps, even appreciate. These leftover boobs didn’t get in the way. They needed very little support. Since there wasn’t much to them, they didn’t sag, couldn’t sag. There was, quite flatly, nowhere for them to go. 

Still, I padded them. And kept writing my reviews as the puffed-up JLB. 

The real Boob Fairy, the one I now realize I truly needed, visited me on my 40th birthday. She came in the form of a gift card to a local boutique that specialized in custom bra fittings. It was fall 2020, and I’d taken to wearing sports bras or no bras most days — a silver lining of the work-from-home mandates my newspaper put in place during the pandemic. If I had to be presentable, I pulled one of my tattered WonderBras from the depths of my underwear drawer and contorted my body till the hooks sank into the last row of eyes, which were holding on by threads and motes of dust. 

To be sized for a proper bra felt luxurious. A kind woman with warm hands wrapped a measuring tape around the top of my rib cage and then around the small mounds of my breasts. She set me at 36A, and she brought me every bra the store had in my size. Muscle memory told me to start with the thickly padded options. I realized I hated them. They pinched and pulled and squeezed, sensations to which my boobs were no longer accustomed, sensations my boobs now loathed. I switched to the less padded bras and then the lightly lined ones, the bras that gave lift but no oomph; some vava, 86 the voom. 

I looked in the mirror and, like magic, felt like myself. 

A few months later, in spring 2021, I let go of another layer of padding. After 15 years writing as a Frenchman, I shed the JLB pseudonym and started critiquing restaurants as Annabelle Tometich. I worried readers would hate me for killing the iconic pen name, which, like me, was also more than 40 years old at the time. But another bit of magic happened: Readers didn’t just accept the change, they applauded it. They thanked me for finally being myself. 

I spent so much of my life hoping for a different body, for the Boob Fairy to grant me what I thought I needed. But what I needed ultimately was acceptance of myself, and all parts of me – no padding required.

Follow Annabelle on Instagram here. Find her book, The Mango Tree, here.