Thanks for joining me!
Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

Thanks for joining me!
Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

I am so lucky to get reader email. I say lucky, because it’s sort of incredible that anyone would even take the time to contact me when there is homework to do and children to feed and presidential candidates to make fun of.
That being said, reader email can be all over the place. It ranges from OMG-I-LOVE-YOU-THANK-YOU to DIE-BITCH-DIE. The best conversations usually happen somewhere in between. And yet you might be surprised to know that the reader email that breaks my heart the most has nothing to do with my book.
Since DUMPLIN’ released on September 15th, I have received so many versions of this email so many times that I’ve decided to publicly respond. The email usually goes a little something like this:
Julie,
I really loved your book so much, but I just don’t feel like it’s believable. The hot guy doesn’t go for the fat girl in real life. And two guys like Willowdean? I wish it could be true, but I just don’t buy it. The rest of the book was great. Thank you!
– Lovely Reader
In the words of Willowdean herself: SIGH.
I understand. I get it. I do.
This post (though it may seem like it) is not about my book. I am human. I wrote a book. It has imperfections as do I. The fat girl getting the/a guy is not an imperfection. It is not unbelievable. In this way, I can tell you that the book I wrote is not broken. The world around us is. We have been taught that we are not worthy. We are not deserving. It’s a lie.
No matter how badly we want to love ourselves and our bodies, society has trained us to have this knee jerk reaction/pit of your stomach feeling that says HA! NO WAY WOULD THAT HAPPEN IN REAL LIFE!
So every time I get this email, I want to give the person on the other end a suffocatingly tight hug and whisper in their ear, “The fat girl gets the guy. Or the girl. Or the person. Or the thing they want. YOU get the guy/girl/person/thing.”
This isn’t about hot boys. This is about wanting, demanding, and having things we (FAT PEOPLE!) are not “allowed” to have. But I will say this: when you see a fat person and a thin or traditionally attractive person together, it isn’t some accidental universal slip. It isn’t always a fetish or a case of aiming low. (Though sometimes it is and that’s another post for another day.) In most cases, it is two people who have come together as a unit because they are wholly attracted to one another. Inside and out.
Society is broken. But you don’t have to be and choosing not to be is the first step to fixing the world we live in.
YOU get the guy. You get the girl. You get the person. You get the thing–WHATEVER it might be. Believe it, because this isn’t wish fulfillment. It’s fucking true.
Really. You should read this.
@dmc-dmc you should REALLY read this
This is pure evil. @feelingwomanish i don’t even know what to say.
Anyone who sees this PLEASE READ and fill out the petition!!!!!
- While the Children in Flint Were Given Poisoned Water to Drink, General Motors Was Given a Special Hookup to the Clean Water. A few months after Governor Snyder removed Flint from the clean fresh water we had been drinking for decades, the brass from General Motors went to him and complained that the Flint River water was causing their car parts to corrode when being washed on the assembly line. The Governor was appalled to hear that GM property was being damaged, so he jumped through a number of hoops and quietly spent $440,000 to hook GM back up to the Lake Huron water, while keeping the rest of Flint on the Flint River water. Which means that while the children in Flint were drinking lead-filled water, there was one — and only one — address in Flint that got clean water: the GM factory.
- For Just $100 a Day, This Crisis Could’ve Been Prevented. Federal law requires that water systems which are sent through lead pipes must contain an additive that seals the lead into the pipe and prevents it from leaching into the water. Someone at the beginning suggested to the Governor that they add this anti-corrosive element to the water coming out of the Flint River. “How much would that cost?” came the question. “$100 a day for three months,” was the answer. I guess that was too much, so, in order to save $9,000, the state government said f*** it — and as a result the State may now end up having to pay upwards of $1.5 billion to fix the mess.
- There’s More Than the Lead in Flint’s Water. In addition to exposing every child in the city of Flint to lead poisoning on a daily basis, there appears to be a number of other diseases we may be hearing about in the months ahead. The number of cases in Flint of Legionnaires Disease has increased tenfold since the switch to the river water. Eighty-seven people have come down with it, and at least ten have died. In the five years before the river water, not a single person in Flint had died of Legionnaires Disease. Doctors are now discovering that another half-dozen toxins are being found in the blood of Flint’s citizens, causing concern that there are other health catastrophes which may soon come to light.
- People’s Homes in Flint Are Now Worth Nothing Because They Cant Be Sold. Would you buy a house in Flint right now? Who would? So every homeowner in Flint is stuck with a house that’s now worth nothing. That’s a total home value of $2.4 billion down the economic drain. People in Flint, one of the poorest cities in the U.S., don’t have much to their name, and for many their only asset is their home. So, in addition to being poisoned, they have now a net worth of zero. (And as for employment, who is going to move jobs or start a company in Flint under these conditions? No one.) Has Flint’s future just been flushed down that river?
- While They Were Being Poisoned, They Were Also Being Bombed. Here’s a story which has received little or no coverage outside of Flint. During these two years of water contamination, residents in Flint have had to contend with a decision made by the Pentagon to use Flint for target practice. Literally. Actual unannounced military exercises – complete with live ammo and explosives – were conducted last year inside the city of Flint. The army decided to practice urban warfare on Flint, making use of the thousands of abandoned homes which they could drop bombs on. Streets with dilapidated homes had rocket-propelled grenades fired upon them. For weeks, an undisclosed number of army troops pretended Flint was Baghdad or Damascus and basically had at it. It sounded as if the city was under attack from an invading army or from terrorists. People were shocked this could be going on in their neighborhoods. Wait – did I say “people?” I meant, Flint people. As with the Governor, it was OK to abuse a community that held no political power or money to fight back. BOOM!
- The Wife of the Governor’s Chief of Staff Is a Spokeswoman for Nestle, Michigan’s Largest Owner of Private Water Reserves. As Deep Throat told Woodward and Bernstein: “Follow the money.” Snyder’s chief of staff throughout the two years of Flint’s poisoning, Dennis Muchmore, was intimately involved in all the decisions regarding Flint. His wife is Deb Muchmore, who just happens to be the spokesperson in Michigan for the Nestle Company – the largest owner of private water sources in the State of Michigan. Nestle has been repeatedly sued in northern Michigan for the 200 gallons of fresh water per minute it sucks from out of the ground and bottles for sale as their Ice Mountain brand of bottled spring water. The Muchmores have a personal interest in seeing to it that Nestles grabs as much of Michigan’s clean water was possible – especially when cities like Flint in the future are going to need that Ice Mountain.
- In Michigan, from Flint water, to Crime and Murder, to GM Ignition Switches, It’s a Culture of Death. It’s not just the water that was recklessly used to put people’s lives in jeopardy. There are many things that happen in Flint that would give one the impression that there is a low value placed on human life. Flint has one of the worst murder and crime rates in the country. Just for context, if New York City had the same murder rate as Flint, Michigan, the number of people murdered last year in New York would have been almost 4,000 people – instead of the actual 340 who were killed in NYC in 2015. But it’s not just street crime that makes one wonder about what is going on in Michigan. Last year, it was revealed that, once again, one of Detroit’s automakers had put profit ahead of people’s lives. General Motors learned that it had installed faulty ignition switches in many of its cars. Instead of simply fixing the problem, mid-management staff covered it up from the public. The auto industry has a history of weighing the costs of whether it’s cheaper to spend the money to fix the defect in millions of cars or to simply pay off a bunch of lawsuits filed by the victims surviving family members. Does a cynical, arrogant culture like this make it easy for a former corporate CEO, now Governor, turn a blind eye to the lead that is discovered in a municipality’s drinking water?
- Don’t Call It “Detroit Water” — It’s the Largest Source of Fresh Drinking Water in the World. The media keeps saying Flint was using “Detroit’s water.” It is only filtered and treated at the Detroit Water Plant. The water itself comes from Lake Huron, the third largest body of fresh water in the world. It is a glacial lake formed over 10,000 years ago during the last Ice Age and it is still fed by pure underground springs. Flint is geographically the last place on Earth where one should be drinking poisoned water.
- ALL the Children Have Been Exposed, As Have All the Adults, Including Me. That’s just a fact. If you have been in Flint anytime from April 2014 to today, and you’ve drank the water, eaten food cooked with it, washed your clothes in it, taken a shower, brushed your teeth or eaten vegetables from someone’s garden, you’ve been exposed to and ingested its toxins. When the media says “9,000 children under 6 have been exposed,” that means ALL the children have been exposed because the total number of people under the age of 6 in Flint is… 9,000! The media should just say, “all.” When they say “47 children have tested positive”, that’s just those who’ve drank the water in the last week or so. Lead enters the body and does it’s damage to the brain immediately. It doesn’t stay in the blood stream for longer than a few days and you can’t detect it after a month. So when you hear “47 children”, that’s just those with an exposure in the last 48 hours. It’s really everyone.
- This Was Done, Like So Many Things These Days, So the Rich Could Get a Big Tax Break. When Governor Snyder took office in 2011, one of the first things he did was to get a multi-billion dollar tax break passed by the Republican legislature for the wealthy and for corporations. But with less tax revenues, that meant he had to start cutting costs. So, many things – schools, pensions, welfare, safe drinking water – were slashed. Then he invoked an executive privilege to take over cities (all of them majority black) by firing the mayors and city councils whom the local people had elected, and installing his cronies to act as “dictators” over these cities. Their mission? Cut services to save money so he could give the rich even more breaks. That’s where the idea of switching Flint to river water came from. To save $15 million! It was easy. Suspend democracy. Cut taxes for the rich. Make the poor drink toxic river water. And everybody’s happy.
Guys if ur gonna scroll past this at least read number 5. I haven’t seen stuff to confirm this but i just looked it up and it’s true, and they didn’t even warn the community that they were going to be doing military testing. This is unprecedented torture by the government.
10 Things They Won’t Tell You About the Flint Water Tragedy. But I Will. | MICHAEL MOORE

postcard c1910
I shall pass through this world but once, any good thing therefore I can do, or any kindness I can show to any human being, let me do it now, let me not defer it or neglect it for I shall not pass this way again.
[Sold]
This quote has been on my wall for nearly a decade but not as pretty as this
According to researchers, coordinated critics have mounted a “misinformation campaign designed to purposefully fabricate doubt regarding the harmful impacts of outdoor cats and stymie policies that would remove outdoor cats from the landscape.”
The conflict stems from a groundbreaking study published in 2013 by scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. That study evaluated the combined impact of the tens of millions of outdoor cats in the United States. The authors found that roaming outdoor cats kill approximately 2.4 billion birds every year and are the leading source of direct, human-caused mortality to birds in the country. Similar results have since been confirmed in Canada and Australia.
To those of you still in denial about how bad outdoor cats are to wildlife not just in your own countries but globally here’s the cold hard scientific facts stating that you are apart of a movement of uneducated critics spreading misinformation.
Here’s the link to the open-source scientific artificial as well:
Biologists Respond to ‘Science Denialism’ Regarding Outdoor Cat Control
hey
guess what
you’re so close to surviving 2018
you can make it
i’m so proud that you’re still here
keep going buddy
i love you
the world hasn’t killed us yet and it’s gonna regret that
this is honestly the most uplifting and hopeful thing i have read regarding my continued existence.
may 2019 bring you your “i’m doing better than i ever was” moment