Kismet Meets Serendipity: A Personal Reflection on Using Patricia Leavy’s Novel Low-Fat Love to Bring Meaning to College Students

Authors

U. Melissa Anyiwo, University of ScrantonFollow

Abstract

In this article Melissa Anyiwo writes about meeting Patricia Leavy and reading her debut novel, Low-Fat Love. She reflects on the impact this book has had on her personally, and how as a work of social fiction it resonated deeply with her own life experiences. She details using social fiction novels in undergraduate classroom settings, why she has used Low-Fat Love so many times in her courses, the lessons embedded into the novel, and the kinds of self and social reflection the novel stimulates. She references other well-known examples of popular culture in her analysis of meaning-making in Low-Fat Love.

Keywords

Patricia Leavy, social fiction, fiction as research, Low-Fat Love, novels, pedagogy, undergraduate teaching, history, self-reflection, autoethnography

Author Bio(s)

U. Melissa Anyiwo is an Associate Professor of History and Director of Black Studies at the University of Scranton with 20+ years of teaching experience. The focus of her career has been advancing the representation and inclusion of minoritized communities and individuals to aid expanding knowledge and understanding of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI). Her teaching includes the U.S. History and Culture sequence, where she regularly uses texts by Patricia Leavy and a range of Black Studies courses based in historiography often using the vampire as an inclusive pedagogy. She has published on inclusive practices including “That’s Not What I Signed Up For”: Teaching Millennials about Difference through First-Year Learning Communities” in Outside/In in Teaching Race & Anti-Racism in Contemporary America (2013) and “Using Vampires to Explore Diversity and Alienation in a College Classroom” in The Vampire Goes to College (2013). Finally, she starred in the WVIA Short “It’s More Than Hair” (2023), the Podcast Systemic episode “Policing Black Bodies” (2023), and the documentary “Lestat, Louis, and the Vampire Phenomenon” for the Interview with the Vampire 20th Anniversary Edition DVD (Warner Brothers, 2014). Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Melissa Anyiwo at melissa.anyiwo@scranton.edu

Publication Date

3-3-2025

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.46743/2160-3715/2025.7942

Recommended APA Citation

Anyiwo, U. M. (2025). Kismet meets serendipity: A personal reflection on using Patricia Leavy’s novel Low-Fat Love to bring meaning to college students. The Qualitative Report, 30(2), 3132-3145. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2025.7942