Julie Murphy

Julie Murphy is an author best known for her #1 New York Times Bestselling young adult novel Dumplin’ (2015), which tells the body positive story of Willowdean, a young fat woman in Texas who decides to enter a beauty pageant. The book was later adapted into a Netflix film in 2018.

Murphy has penned a number of other books and short stories. In her 2017 novel Ramona Blue, a confident young lesbian starts to develop feelings for her male best friend and is forced to consider that she may in fact be bi. This is an experience many folks in the bi community have had, but it’s rarely explored in popular media, which makes Ramona especially exciting.

Murphy was able to draw on her own experiences as a bi woman and discussed what it feels like when the world assumes your sexuality based on your relationship:

I’ve always been bisexual or pansexual or queer or whatever label you want to put on it. I’ve always dated both guys and girls, and when I married my husband, I experienced this really weird thing that I didn’t expect to experience in that I kind of felt like I wasn’t straight enough for all the straight community and I wasn’t gay enough anymore for the queer community. It was this really happy time in my life and honeymoon period in my marriage when I should’ve been really thrilled, but I was having to come to terms with this shift in identity because I would never, for as long as we’re married, experience that feeling of walking into a restaurant and holding hands with a girl, and for people to just identify me as queer.^[1]