Ariella Elovic
Ariella Elovic Wants to Talk About Your Body Hair
The Jewish author of "Cheeky: A Head-to-Toe Memoir" tells Alma all about writing (and drawing) her way toward self-acceptance.
Ariella Elovic never thought her debut illustrated memoir would come out during a pandemic. (I mean, how could she have predicted 2020?!) But, in some respects, she is happy Cheeky: A Head-to-Toe Memoir is making its debut at this particular moment in time.
“I would give anything for a little hairy girl to come up to me and be like, ‘Look, we match.’ That’s all I want. I wish that I could meet people in person,” Elovic, a Jewish illustrator, tells me over the phone from her home in Brooklyn. “But I think it’s actually a really nice companion for now. We’re with our bodies all day long, in a way that we’ve never had to be before. If we’re not essential workers, and don’t have jobs that we need to go into work every day, we just are sitting. It’s very easy to slip back into patterns that we don’t like, when we’re just with our bodies all day, so I hope that this is a nice, comforting reassurance that you are enough — not just enough, your body is incredible and it’s going to help you through this.”
Elovic’s Cheeky is a powerful look at bodies — particularly, Jewish hairy female bodies — and how we feel about them. We chatted about hair, insecurities, and the camp friends that give you permission to be gross.
