I'll Look So Hot in Culver City: In Conversation with Carla Sosenko

Join us at Village Well Books & Coffee for a conversation with Carla Sosenko, author of I'll Look So Hot in a Coffin!

Carla will discuss her history with disease, self-image, mental health, and ambition. Come for an intimate, funny, and revealing reading and an audience Q&A.

About the author:

Carla Sosenko is a Brooklyn-based journalist and author whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Time Out New York, Entertainment Weekly, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, and other publications. She also co-wrote TikTok star Melissa Dilkes Pateras’s first book, A Dirty Guide to a Clean Home. She is currently the executive editor at large at Us Weekly.

About the book:

Carla Sosenko was born with Klippel-Trenaunay syndrome, a rare vascular disorder that resulted in legs of different sizes, a mass of flesh on her back, a hunched posture, and other idiosyncrasies big and small. She spent years trying to hide under layers of clothing, and then experimented with the opposite: wearing tiny dresses and short shorts, daring people to stare so she could make them regret it. No matter what she did, she was worried that she didn’t measure up.

In this candid and funny memoir, Sosenko shares what existing in an unconventional body has meant for her self-image, mental health, relationships, and ambitions. She writes of having liposuction when she was eight years old, and an adulthood spent obsessively gaming Weight Watchers points. She wrestles with the rise of Ozempic after working hard to reject diet culture. She tries to parse whether it is in spite of or because of her physical differences that she is a social butterfly who chose a high-profile career in media. Most of all, Sosenko explores the ways in which she’s felt alone and without community: not disabled but different; the recipient of pretty privilege but also fatphobia; too much, but still never enough. We follow along as she learns to claim her body—and mind and spirit and life—for exactly what they are: her own.

A clarion call for anyone who has ever felt like an outsider or believed they should take up less space, I'll Look So Hot in a Coffin offers hope, recognition, and a new way to see ourselves—by celebrating what sets us apart.

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