Alicia “Plum” Kettle

Alicia “Plum” Kettle, known throughout the novel as Plum, is the central character/protagonist. The novel charts Plum’s growth from an insular, self-conscious, woman working in an unfulfilling job to a confident, outgoing woman pursuing her dreams. At the start of the novel, Plum believes that in order to achieve this kind of transformation in her life, she must lose a large amount of weight via surgery and drastically altering her appearance, however, in the end, Plum changes dramatically as a character while her body shape remains the same.

While Plum is still convinced of the necessity of dramatic weight loss she thinks of her future self as “Alicia” – her real name. Alicia is the thin version of Plum and Plum imagines that in the future, after the weight loss surgery when she becomes Alicia, all of her problems will be gone and she will...