Superheroes may be fiction, but their impact on our world is incredibly real.

The heroes we love to read and watch as children can have a lasting impact, affecting how we see the world and our place in it. And no one understands the true affect of stories like the people who tell them for a living. In the new essay collection Last Night, A Superhero Saved My Life, edited by Liesa Mignogna, over 20 authors share their superhero origin stories, including beloved and bestselling authors Neil Gaiman, Brad Meltzer, Jodi Picoult and Leigh Bardugo.

In the exclusive excerpt below, bestselling YA author Bardugo — whose Wonder Woman novel hits shelves next summer — discusses body image and her complicated relationship with the Amazonian heroine.

Image: Macmillan

WE ARE NOT AMAZONS by Leigh Bardugo

It began with a bustier. You can call it a breastplate if you like, but it began as a bustier—Vargas girl lingerie decked out in stars and stripes, a piece of clothing that gives new meaning to suspension of disbelief.

As a kid, eating bowls of cereal and watching Super Friends, I didn’t question how Wonder Woman ran in heels or how she kept that red bustier from sneaking south. I put on my Wondy Underoos, made bulletproof bracelets from construction paper, and took to the backyard to twirl with abandon, utterly transformed. When two girls showed up at a swim party in Wonder Woman bathing suits—as they invariably did—we didn’t fret over the practicalities of fighting crime in your skivvies. We just argued over who got to be Wonder Woman and which poor sucker got stuck being Wonder Girl.

I lived on superhero stories in Saturday morning cartoons. I learned to spell with the

Super Friends dictionary. I adored Firestar in her skintight, flame-emblazoned onesie. In the evenings, I worshipped Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman, down to the rich click of her boots on whatever pavement she happened to be pounding. My favorite episode? The origin story of course, when Diana donned a blond wig and competed in secret to journey to the world of men. I graduated to comics, to Black Canary in fishnets and bolero, to Storm in her Mohawk and midriff-baring leathers. They were power and beauty, and when I was watching or flipping the pages, I walked among them as an equal.

Then, when I was ten, my camp counselor took me aside. Her name was Jill and, though she couldn’t have been twenty, at the time she seemed wise, experienced, infinitely cool. She had red hair to her waist and drove a convertible. I didn’t worry about being in trouble when Jill sat me down at a picnic table at the end of the day. I was a high-achieving kid, eager to please. I just assumed I was being singled out for something special.

“Listen,” she said, voice gentle, raspberry gum cracking. “We think you need to have a talk with your mom about getting some new bras.”

I didn’t really take in her meaning at first. I just remember a full body cringe at hearing my mother and bras mentioned in the same sentence. Only later would I think on the awfulness of that “we,” humiliation hitting in waves that never seemed to lose their force.

We think.

The idea of Jill and her friends trying to figure out a tactful way to raise the issue, deciding who would face the task of discussing it with me, all those older, cooler, effortless girls embarrassed on my behalf.

“Something with an underwire,” she continued. Then she gestured vaguely at my chest. “This is kind of out of control.”

I wish my body had actually been out of control. Then I might have thrown up on her shoes or peed on the picnic table or spat my teeth out at her. Instead I just nodded, croaked, “Sure,” and spent the rest of the day hunched over, desperate to be home, cursing the thin cotton of my rainbow T-shirt, wondering who was looking at me and what they saw. I rode the bus home with my knees drawn up to my chest, feeling every jounce in the road, every damning jiggle.

Out of control.

Apparently, my breasts required something more than a training bra to keep them in check. They were out of training. They had run amok and taken to the field.

I was never a nymph. I skipped the stage glorified by pervy old directors in artfully lit coming-of-age films. Puberty came on faster than a locomotive and I was helpless, tied to the tracks. Kids’ clothing stopped fitting me correctly. My breasts had weight that caused the spaces between my blouse buttons to gap. Our perfectly respectable phys ed shorts rode high on my thick thighs. I was tall for my age, nearly five foot nine by the sixth grade. When I was twelve, I looked sixteen. When I was sixteen, I looked like a grad student. I got asked on my first date when I was ten. This didn’t make me popular. It made me miserable in my own skin. It made me slouch. And it changed the way I looked at superheroes.

I bought my comics at a newsstand right near the corner of Van Nuys and Ventura. It was wedged between a pizza place and a beauty supply called the Bee Hive where you could buy bottles of hair dye and cheap silver earrings. Back then, people still had to venture from their homes to buy their porn, so I had to walk past the girlie mags on the way to get the latest X-Men. I kept my shoulders hunched, wore baggy sweatshirts even at the height of the Southern California summer, and I stole glances at the partially hidden covers of Playboy and Hustler as I passed, as curious as I was self-conscious. I was fascinated by the models’ big hair, heavy eye makeup, the halo of light that seemed to surround their airbrushed skin. They didn’t look much different than the women in my comics, backs bent, chests thrust forward, full lips parted. Once I walked to the newsstand in my new pink Candies—faux leather with tiny heels and bows over the toes. “Those are sexy,” said the guy at the register. I never went back.

Superheroes stopped making sense to me. Black Canary bound and lying on her side in her fishnets and heels wasn’t glamorous anymore, she was vulnerable and about to be in serious danger. And Wonder Woman? I could barely stand to wear a swimsuit to the beach without covering it up with a long T-shirt. How was I supposed to stop mad scientists and megalomaniacs in one? What person, male or female, would choose to go into a fight as physically exposed as Wonder Woman? Where were her tights? Where were her

straps? Looking at her didn’t make me feel strong, it made me feel skeptical. Only an Amazon could get away with that outfit. If some guy pulled up beside her in his car when she was walking to the mall, rolled his window down, asked her if she wanted to fuck, she wouldn’t have to start looking for a store to duck into the way I did. She’d pull that guy right through the driver’s side window and make him sorry. She’d crumple up his car like tissue paper. I was no Amazon. I was a girl whose body was out of control. I didn’t want to be looked at. I didn’t want to feel afraid.

I still loved heroes, but Wonder Woman and the supergirls of the comics panels lost their places to a bunch of upstarts in miniskirts. I gave my heart to Jem, She-Ra, Sailor Moon–type all-girl crews. Sure, they showed cleavage, wore heels, had ridiculously expressive hair, but at least they got to wear skirts instead of just panties in primary colors. They weren’t contorted in the same breast-thrusting, booty-popping poses. They went on adventures, made friends, stopped evil, wore glitter at every opportunity, and had chaste romances with cute boys named Rio and harmless rogues like the Sea Hawk. They were female fantasies created for girls. I wasn’t an Amazon, but maybe I could be a rock star who fought crime on the side.

Oddly enough, only Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight slipped past the barricades. Or maybe it wasn’t so strange. There, beside the caped crusader, was the sometimes maligned Carrie Kelley, flat chested and sporting an androgynous haircut—a girl fighting crime in an admittedly absurd outfit but unburdened by traditional visual indicators of femininity. She wasn’t SomethingGirl or WhateverWoman. She was just Robin. I traced the images in those panels. I gave Carrie blond hair like mine. I didn’t look like her. I hadn’t looked like her for years and never would again, but she was what I needed to see—a girl devoid of powers, buoyed by nothing but Batcables and bravery, built for strength instead of sensuality. And do you know what else I found in those pages? Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman, thoroughly declawed—aged, wrinkled, turning tricks, beaten and left hogtied in a Wonder Woman costume, another body out of control.

It would be years before Wonder Woman and I met again, this time over a keg at a college Halloween party. By then, I’d gone full preppy—safe sweaters, collared shirts. My bras were serious architecture, buttresses, straps, masterpieces of restraint. I had dieted the worst of my shaming jiggle into submission. That night I was dressed as some vague undead thing—long black dress, hair in a tangle, red Solo cup in hand. I saw Catwoman first, Selina Kyle in top form, dressed in the shiny patchwork latex made legendary by Michelle Pfeiffer. She was dancing on her own, like a sleek black satellite. Then I saw her friend, Wonder Woman, walking slowly toward me. She was a tall brunette, gorgeous, dreamy, glassy-eyed drunk, wearing the classic Wonder Woman costume, little more than patriotic lingerie.

Jesus, I thought, caught between scorn and envy, really?

It was a bit like seeing an ex. Why do you have to show up and ruin my good time? Why do you have to get me thinking about what it was like to love you? This was an ex I’d heard rumors about over the years. I’d heard the stories about how her creator, William Marston, was into bondage, how he’d lived with his wife and mistress and all of their children in some kind of love cult pre-hippie farmhouse. Her image turned up in unexpected places—on a women’s studies syllabus that reproduced her striding across the cover of the first issue of

Ms. Magazine, in a kitschy belt with a double-W buckle that I couldn’t resist buying in a Seattle boutique but never wore. My response when Wonder Woman cropped up was never, “Oh, I remember her.” It wasn’t nostalgic fondness either. Wonder Woman was a part of my childhood, but I’d managed to leave most of the female characters of my childhood behind. I didn’t give much thought to Scarlett or Lady Jaye from G.I. Joe.

If I wanted to recall the glory of my wayward youth, I could crank up

Jem and the Holograms and binge on madeleines. But Wonder Woman wasn’t past. She was always present.

That night at the party, I felt all the things I’d felt when my own body turned on me. Catwoman I could admire. Wonder Woman set off something different inside me, something I didn’t like. Looking at that fearless girl in satin, I had to ask why. The ex had returned and part of me hated her for betraying me, but part of me loved her still.

The girl in the costume was named Avery. We never became friends but I watched her from afar. She was impossible to miss. She wore short skirts and knee-high boots. She made the college paper for simulating sex acts atop a table in a film studies class. She was outrageous in the most literal way. Her body was a means of protest and I began to understand that Wonder Woman costume had been a challenge. The impossibilities of Wonder Woman’s costume were what had driven me away from her and other superheroines, but now they were what began to bring me back to her again.

Slowly but surely, Wonder Woman became my muse of audacity. She was the voice that whispered to buy the tight tank top, that choker that looked more like a dog collar than a necklace, those leather pants. She told me to cut my hair short and to dye it as red as her boots. She dared me to be unafraid to be seen. The next Halloween I went as the tattooed lady, bare arms and belly adorned with nothing but paint, a parade of lazy hand-drawn bees traveling up my cheek from the flowers on my neck as if seeking honey.

It’s easier for us to conceive of a heroine in Black Widow’s slinky but staid bodysuit or Batgirl’s new yellow combat boots. But I think we need Wonder Woman in that bra, those bracelets, those bright, unapologetic colors precisely because they threw me for such a loop.

On any other woman, Wonder Woman’s costume would be interpreted as an invitation to ogle, an opportunity to judge the wearer’s intent, her psyche, even her morals.

Who does she think she is? What does she think she’s doing?

Wonder Woman isn’t subject to those same questions. She is free from the relentless “if she didn’t want me to stare, she wouldn’t have worn that” presumptions. Wonder Woman is a superhero. She came to fight. She came to win. She’s going to do it in her uniform and her uniform happens to be shiny underwear. No one gets to misconstrue those star-spangled panties as an invitation to grab her Amazon ass.

I am not an Amazon. I don’t have superstrength. I’m not even particularly fond of crunches. As I grow older, I find new judgments placed on my body: too big, too round, too soft. There are different pressures to keep myself covered, but they are the same voices of adolescence, the imagined Greek chorus chanting,

What was she thinking? Who does she think she is?

The way I dress is constrained by fear of judgment, by the need to code strength and professionalism in very particular ways, to comport with someone else’s idea of respectability. But why should Wonder Woman, my fantasy of strength, be bound by mortal modesty? She is both soldier and pinup, both icon and eye candy.

I think often of Wonder Woman’s bracelets. She has had numerous costumes over the years, but through almost every iteration, through bustiers and breastplates, through bottoms thick and thong, those bands of metal have remained—changing color and size, sometimes more bauble than bracer, but still retaining their purpose. In the mythology Marston built around those bracelets, Wonder Woman could only be robbed of her superstrength if they were chained together. And if she was freed of them, she would run amok, unstoppable, an Amazon unbound. I grew up afraid of what my body might do if freed, what attention it might garner, what shame it might bring. But for me, those bracelets have nothing to do with control or restraint. Instead, I see them for what they are:

armor— the one functional bit of attire Wonder Woman retains on her vulnerable body.

Those bracelets speak to what is most fundamentally resonant about Wonder Woman, because the act of walking around in your underwear—or a miniskirt and heels or long sleeves and sensible shoes—and trying to get the job done is actually something a lot of women understand.

When women dress, we walk the same line Wonder Woman has always walked, negotiating the same territory of the professional and the provocative. We are at once trying to honor the desire to choose our attire based on our own wants while still understanding the way our clothing is coded for those who observe us. We know that no matter how we dress or what our intent, our clothing will incite judgment and that we will invariably be measured against male fantasy.

We make these choices without the benefit of armor, and those bulletproof bracelets are something we all covet: a defensive weapon that can literally be used to turn a villain’s attack back on him. They’re the power of the ricochet, a perfect metaphorical refutation of the male gaze: “Whatever you send my way, I will give right back to you.”

I’m a fantasy author now. I write female heroes. But the night of my book launch, as I try to decide what to wear, I feel the old fears set in. I will be photographed, tagged on Facebook, commented upon. I will be on display. I feel the shame of sitting at that picnic table with Jill, hear that chorus kick in, voices thick with pity and derision:

What was she thinking? Who does she think she is?

I could use restraint, silence my body, and make sure it sends no message at all rather than risk the wrong message. But I try to let Wonder Woman answer instead. I choose a short black dress, high platform wedges trimmed in gold like a lasso. My calves are emphatic. My hair is a yellow riot. With these choices, I don invisible bracelets. I am not an Amazon, but I might become one—fearsome, inviolable, bulletproof.

The first girl in my signing line is built the same way I was, the way I am, her belly overflowing the waist of her jeans, her T-shirt tight across her chest. “I love your dress,” she says, beaming.