Yes, The DUFF Is Banned!

Kody Keplinger wrote The DUFF when she was seventeen, and the book has the raw, unpolished honesty that comes from writing about high school while you’re still in it. Bianca Piper is smart, sharp-tongued, and deeply insecure after football star Wesley Rush tells her she’s the DUFF of her friend group, the Designated Ugly Fat Friend. What follows is not a conventional romance: Bianca and Wesley begin a physical relationship that Bianca uses to avoid dealing with her parents’ disintegrating marriage and her father’s alcoholism. The novel treats teenage sex as complicated and emotionally fraught rather than either romanticized or moralized.

The DUFF was challenged 16 times in the 2024-2025 PEN America data, with bans across multiple Florida school districts including Broward, Hillsborough, and Palm Beach County. The sexual content, particularly the depiction of a teenage girl initiating a physical relationship for reasons that aren’t about love, draws the most objections. Keplinger has been vocal about the irony: the book was written to explore how real teenagers actually navigate sex and self-worth, and banning it removes exactly the kind of honest representation that teens say they need. A 2015 film adaptation sanitized the story considerably, which probably says something about which version adults are more comfortable with.