Thank you! They are. I’ve gained about 40 lbs over the past few years which is probably a teensy bit too much but I’m in a new job that’s not toxic and in a new relationship and certainly feel like I’m on firm footing in my life so while I have occasional body issue panics, they’re few and far between. 

My mom had cancer several years ago (she is cancer free now) and lost a lot of weight because of it (not just the treatments, but it was throat cancer, so she couldn’t eat. Had to put Ensure through a feeding tube that went directly into her stomach.) People complimented her a lot. She’s a Boomer, so the way she was…

Yeah. I took a nutrition lecture in undergrad and I always remembered the curriculum covering eating/ weight disorders. They were very clear that, despite your best intentions, it is rarely, if ever, a good idea to pay an individual a compliment on an observed, recent body transformation. You may be telling someone…

My God, if there was ever an illustration that the talk about weight is not about health this story perfectly encapsulates that notion.

Many years ago, my friend freed herself of a long heroin addiction, and put on twenty pounds pretty quickly, because she was eating healthy food, and her father almost immediately started nagging her about her weight.

But it’s also a trap in the other direction: you speak positively about your body when you’re overweight, and you’re deluged with support, you’re spoken about as an icon for a particular demographic of your audience, you’re constantly expected to represent, inspire and defend those supporters... and if you ever do…

Yeah, there’s an unfortunate difference between “I want you to love yourself however you’re shaped” and “I need you to remain heavy and positive so I can feel better about myself.”

It cannot possibly be healthy to be so invested in a celebrity’s size (whatever it may be,) that a change of one sort or another feels like a betrayal. 

What is genuinely surprising to me around the issue of “body positivity” (or was surprising, before it happened a bunch of times,) is the number of people who come out of the woodwork to say mean things about celebrities (and particularly female celebrities,) after they’ve lost a significant amount of weight. I think…

I think you hit the nail on the head. It’s kind of a shitty trap that I can see a lot of them falling into. Like Oprah, as she mentioned. Or Kirstie Alley. You lose weight and get a sponsor and I would imagine at that point the pressure is immense and the fear of falling off the wagon is immense and it all snowballs…

I think your scenario is totally different as you’d be communicating with the person up front, presumably not writing an intentional “takedown”, and presumably not including stuff he’d written in it.

this really hit me as well. Dorland sounded like...a lot. But what happened to her (a group of people, whom she thought were her friends and peers, mocking her for years behind her back) feels like everyone’s worst nightmare.

Larson made $400 off that audiobook, and the story even mentions she had the audio publisher make the changes to that story too. Dorland was still suing for $15,000 over $400 and a story that had already been edited.

Oh, for sure. They both seem terrible.

After having read the story about three times I have concluded I am on Team Nobody for this one, haha. 

The un-plagiarized letter was still so obviously the same letter too! It was like a high schooler just changing one line at a time to not get in trouble. You'd think a professional writer would be better at obfuscating her sources.

Also uh I am definitely not the only person talking about the racial dynamics involved. If that is your impression then you need to follow the work of more writers of color.

Larson wrote that she was using Dorland’s words in 2015/2016, and that text changed in later drafts. The draft that Dorland was threatening to sue the Boston One City One Story program over years later had been edited to not include anything written by Dorland. She’s continuing to sue over a story that does not…

When I got to the bit where Larson changed her Dorland-inspired character’s sign off in her letter to “Kindly” (the real Dorland’s usual sign off), I actually gasp/laughed aloud.

It fell loudly because it was the story of a white woman deciding she would absolutely RUIN the career of a woman of color for failing to pay proper respect to her Great White Sacrifice. For crying out loud, it started with her being hurt because not enough people liked her Facebook post and it is ending with her…