To paraphrase Socrates, a life where you remain stuck as a steak-loving republican prude is not worth living. Transformation is essential to us all, otherwise, what’s the point? I’m totally saying this with a straight face: body positivity is huge right now. So is veganism. My book will be the first to combine these two sizzling trends movements, since true body positivity cannot exist without veganism, and vice versa. People are hungry for delicious food, liberation, and spiritual satisfaction, and this book provides all three. Well, technically, it doesn’t provide delicious food…but maybe we could sew a vegan jerky strip into the spine?
Who cares?
How dare you! Just kidding. It’s a fair question, but who am I, Nielsen? I’ll ask Google Analytics in a few months. I suspect the answer will be women ages 25-65, because that’s probably who’s buying books that my book thinks it lives in the same neighborhood as, pardon my almost ending that sentence with a preposition.
Who am I?
No, seriously, do you know? I lost my I.D. This much I remember: I have BA in Writing, MA in Psychology, and am a certified vegan lifestyle coach and educator (VLCE) who’s been published in VegNews, Edible Indy, USA Today, and beyond. More importantly, I’m a vegan-for-the-animals warrior who loves great food and great sex and spent most of my adult life depriving myself of at least one if not both of those things. Then I wised up, and I want to make readers laugh while inspiring them to get wizened up, too. That’s not a misspelling; that’s inclusivity.
What’s the book like?
Laura Clery’s Idiot meets Sonya Renee-Taylor’s The Body is Not an Apology meets Dr. Melanie Joy’s Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows. Plus, there’s celebrity sex, just for good measure.
What kind of platform do I have?
Between my website, writing gigs, speaking engagements, documentaries, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, I have literally over a bajillion followers, or my name isn’t John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt!
What’s my marketing plan?
Sorry. I have to take this call.
What the excerpts are saying:
“Look, I’m going to screw this up. Remember that Seinfeld episode, The Library, when Jerry remembers a girl from high school, Sherry, wearing an orange dress and chewing Blackjack licorice gum? And then they meet and she says it was a purple dress and Dentyne gum? That’s what it’s like to write a book.”
“Something strange happened after my new husband told me about his childhood trauma. Something completely unrelated to his trauma, yet unassailably connected to it. I stopped eating meat.”
“Hot girls are everywhere, folks. If you don’t believe me, just so somewhere. There will be a hot girl there. I promise. You could be lost at sea for a month and the first person to float by on a rescue raft will be a hot, half-naked girl who’s dying to f*k your husband. That’s just how life works.”
“Momma said I was more of a ‘cheesetarian’ than vegetarian. Going vegetarian caused me to increase my cheese consumption, because now instead of a chicken sandwich with a slice of cheese on top, my meals consisted of grilled cheese sandwiches—with a slice of cheese on top. That is, until I read John Robbins’ Diet for a New America. You can’t swing an organic cotton sack filled with homegrown tomatoes without hitting a vegetarian whose life was changed because of that book.”
“Since my dairy addiction was not only a socialized one but also a chemical one, I knew I had to go hardcore in order to break it. So I made a deal with myself. I could have as much dairy as I wanted, with one caveat. I had to watch at least one minute of an undercover video of a dairy cow first.”
“Being sexy is infinitely more compelling than being beautiful. Beauty is fleeting. Sexy is forever. At 47, I bought lingerie for the first time in years and actually looked forward to prancing around in it. I joined countless dating apps and had loads of fun for a while, flirting and setting up dates and going on dates and having le sex. I was a vegan doing well in the land of hunting and fishing.”
“Inclusion and liberation of bodies is something I support with every fiber of my being—but unless we’re including and liberating non-human bodies as well, we’re just acting like the self-serving oppressive a-holes we claim to despise. Because here’s the thing. We can explore the details of how the oppression of female & trans & Black & Brown bodies got started all day long, but what good does it do if we don’t talk about the root of all oppression?”
“If we ever meet and I act weird, it’s probably because I have something in my eye.”
