Being a Public Fat Person

You're listening to Burnt Toast. I'm Virginia Sole-Smith. Today my conversation is with none other than the beloved, the brilliant, Lindy West.

Lindy is the author of four books, The New York Times bestselling memoir, Shrill, as well as the essay collections, The Witches Are Coming and Shit, Actually, and her brand new memoir Adult Braces, out now.

Lindy is a former contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. Her work has appeared in This American Life, The Guardian, Cosmopolitan, GQ, Vulture, Jezebel and many others. She is the co-host of the comedy podcast, Text Me Back!!! and the author of the newsletter Butt News. Lindy was a writer and executive producer on Shrill, the Hulu comedy adapted from her memoir, and she co-wrote and produced the independent feature film, Thin Skin. She lives on the Olympic Peninsula in rural Washington state.

Lindy joined me to chat about her brand new memoir, Adult Braces. We get into her relationship to fatness, having people comment rather relentlessly on her marriage, why more best friends should start podcasts and so much more—including a quesadilla she invents in real time while we recorded. You are going to love this one.

This conversation with Lindy is so juicy that we're breaking it up into two episodes! In Part 1 we’re talking about her brand new memoir, Adult Braces, as well as her eating disorder therapy, being a public fat person and having people comment on her body and her marriage.

In Part 2, we're getting into non-monogamy, the benefits of being in a throuple, podcasting and so much more!

If you're already a paid subscriber, you've got both parts of the episode right here, right now in your inbox!

Everyone else: Join Burnt Toast today to hear the whole thing! Membership starts at just $5 per month and also gets you commenting privileges.

One last thing! You will want to read Adult Braces after hearing this conversation. If you order it from my local independent bookstore, Split Rock Books, you can take 10% off if you have also ordered a copy of my book Fat Talk from them. Go to Split Rock Books and use the code "fat talk" at checkout.

Here's Lindy West.

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Virginia 

We are here to talk about your new memoir, Adult Braces. My producer Kim and I both read it. We loved it. Like, crying laughing, full body experience reading this book. 

Lindy

Thank you so much!

Virginia

Do you want to give us a brief summary of what the book is about?

Lindy  

The book is about a road trip that I took in 2021 from Seattle to Key West and back, which I decided to do when I was having a crisis in my life. I needed to get away from my house, and I needed to get away from my family and my responsibilities.

I had found out a couple years earlier that my husband had a secret girlfriend, which was sort of illegal in our relationship, sort of not. That was quite a topic of conversation for several years, and we eventually figured it out. But then I was exhausted from a year of COVID and three years of non-stop couples therapy. I was like, I gotta get out of here. So I left and I drove to Florida in a van that I rented. I slept in the van. I just wanted to be out in the world and be brave and alive.

The road trip stories are interspersed with chapters about my life before. A big message, at least for me, is that it's really easy to read my crisis as this monogamy/polyamory conversation, but when I think back on it, everything about my life was messed up before that. I had so many other problems, in my mental health, in the way that I managed my career, my life and my brain chemicals. I wanted to build a full picture of that, because I think the easy story is like, 'Oh, no good husband.' But it was a lot more complicated than that, and a lot of it stemmed from work that I had to do on myself, which is ultimately the only work that I can do. I can't do work on my husband.

Virginia 

Nope. A lot of us learned that the hard way.

Lindy  

Right! That was actually one of my problems. I was constantly waiting for my husband to transform into the person that I had imagined would be my husband, and that's not how people work.

Virginia 

It's annoying, but true. 

Lindy  

It's very annoying. The book is about all of those figurative journeys happening at once, and also my literal journey. 

Virginia 

It's spectacular. The van alone. I'm obsessed with the van. There's a mural on the outside of the van. It's incredible.

Lindy  

The van has a big, scary rabbit on one side and then a big, anxious sheep on the other side. The van was named BAAA, like the noise a sheep makes. I think I'm going to make some social media content out of this. I'm trying to be an influencer in order to promote this book. I want the van. I want that van. I want it in my possession.

Virginia

I was sad when you gave it back. 

Lindy

I know! Me too, and now the company has gone out of business. I tried to rent the van for my book tour and they don't exist anymore. Someone has that van. I think I'm going to do a social media campaign called "Help me find my van," so that I can buy it.

Virginia 

Burnt Toast listeners, if any of you have a van with a rabbit on one side and a sheep on the other, hit us up. Even if it's a different van with that art, I think Lindy would be interested.

Lindy

Yes. I will pay upwards of $1,000.

Virginia 

To get that van back. It was a sad moment. It was like the end of those movies with a person on a journey with an animal, and they say goodbye. It was like the volleyball in that Tom Hanks movie.

Lindy  

Oh, my God, yeah. I had to watch BAAA float away on the ocean. BAAA had really been there for me. BAAA is an old lady now. Maybe she doesn't exist anymore, because she already had 250,000 miles on her and then I drove her another 50,000.

Virginia

She was in her golden years. 

Lindy

She was in her golden years. But I think those Ford Transit vans are built to last, so I think someone has her. It turns out all the van companies are going out of business because I had a really hard time finding a van. I called three different companies that had all recently gone out of business, because #vanlife is not that popular anymore now that people have #donthavetowearamasklife.

Virginia 

They had a little Renaissance moment there.

Lindy  

I called this other company that was going out of business, and I was like, "Well, what are you doing with your fleet?" I know the all the terms now. I was like, "What's happening to your fleet? Can I buy one of your vans?" And he was like, "Yeah, they're $90,000." Sorry, excuse me?

Virginia 

It doesn't even have a rabbit on it, sir.

Lindy  

This van is blank. I think that if there's any hope for me getting a van, it's got to be old lady BAAA. If you're listening and you know where BAAA ended up, please call me.

Virginia 

I mean, I'm now picturing that BAAA probably has a new owner who also really loves her. There's going to be a complicated journey to restore BAAA to her rightful owner, which is you, but ...

Lindy  

Ok, now that you said that I don't want to take BAAA away from her new family.

Virginia 

Well, maybe it could be a joint custody situation, you know? Let's be open-minded to different family structures.

Lindy  

That's true. You're so right. God, that was very regressive of me.

Virginia 

But yes, I hope that you can be reunited.

Lindy

Thank you.

Virginia

Along with the story of BAAA, you talk about many vulnerable things in the book. One of them that I know our listeners will be really moved by is your exploration of having an eating disorder and starting treatment for that. It was just so relatable. Like when you wrote about reading through the list of nutritionists from your doctor, and only one doesn't mention weight loss. When you're looking for eating disorder treatment!

Lindy  

It's a snapshot of what most people are going to the nutritionist for: weight loss. That's what everyone's looking for, in every direction. So, I get it, but it was very frustrating. Luckily, the one lady that wasn't weight loss focused is the best person I've ever met, so it all worked out.

Virginia 

What was it like working with someone who was like, "Actually, you don't need to lose weight. You need to eat more food?"

Lindy  

It's been amazing. I mean, it's frustrating, because you still have the diet culture voice inside your head, even if you've done as much healing as you thought was humanly possible. I realized once I started working with her that some tiny part of my brain had been like, Once you see the nutritionist, maybe you will lose weight. Not that that was my goal. But there's always this little, dee de dee dee, then your life will be perfect. It's really hard to deprogram that.

Grace, my now therapist, just kept being like, "Your job is to eat whatever you want all the time." And I'd be like, "Yeah, but what if I want vegetables?" She was like, "That's fine, but you're not allowed to not eat candy." And I was like, "But don't you want to give me some kind of guideline for how to be perfect?" And she was like, "No, that's disordered."

Virginia 

That’s the opposite of what we're doing now.

Lindy  

I find myself still searching for someone to tell me how to live so that I don't have to figure it out. Unfortunately, the answer is listening to your body and learning how to know yourself. So I'm doing that instead. 

Virginia

She said joyfully.

Lindy

Again, I'm not trying to lose weight. I'm not on a weight loss journey. I think after so many years of living untreated in diet culture, I don't have any kind of a natural relationship with food. And it is a lot of work to figure out how to listen to my body. So even from a non-diet culture perspective, I was hoping that some part of this therapy was going to be her handing me a worksheet. Even if the worksheet said "One piece of cake for breakfast, one piece of cake for lunch, one piece of cake for dinner." I just was like, Making the choices is triggering to me.

Virginia 

The decision fatigue! It's a lot of work, every meal. I have to, again, make the decision to eat and what to eat and how. All day long we do this??

Lindy  

I have to do the grocery shopping?

Also, when you've been shamed your whole life for those choices, making the choices is stressful. Now I feel like, either direction, I'm doing something bad. I'm either doing diet culture by choosing to have a salad, even if I want one. I still am like, Am I betraying myself? Or the opposite, if I choose to eat something sort of indulgent or whatever, then I'm doing fat person. Which is fine.

Virginia 

You have to negotiate it in both directions.

Lindy  

Yes! Except then I'm like, Well, but if I'm eating something decadent, is that just reactionary? Because I know I'm not supposed to do diet culture. So then do I even want this ice cream? I'm still, to this day, fairly lost. I'm way better than I was five years ago, and I've definitely figured some stuff out, which is just having routines. It's like, I have oatmeal. Done.

Virginia 

One less decision.

Lindy  

In the morning, I have oatmeal, and then I have certain staple things I keep around. I'm so angry that my head has been messed with to this degree. You know what I mean? 

Virginia 

Yes. And you were trying to navigate recovery as a public fat person, which brings a whole other layer. I have had a tiny fraction of what you experience, and it's bananas. The amount the world feels like they can engage with our bodies and have opinions and theories and comments and all of that. You doing it, especially when you first started doing it, was such a gift to the rest of us. You were really on the front lines. 

Lindy  

It's really hard, and that's the thing that I write about in the book. Obviously, the mean people are the worst. But there's a way that my fans feel an ownership over me that is a little bit ... not claustrophobic - I appreciate it, it's very loving - but also, I feel surveilled. I'm definitely being watched. People notice if my body changes, and that is confining in a certain way. It's hard to navigate, because you don't get to just have a private relationship with your body, which, to be fair, I voluntarily gave up because I said "I'm going to present my body for public conversation," basically.

Virginia 

I don't know that we ever have informed consent around that though. I don't think you could have known when you decided to publish that first essay in The Stranger what this would be like. You know what I mean? I don't think you could wrap your head around where it would have gone.

Lindy  

I can't blame the fans, especially since so much of this stuff was grassroots on the Internet. I used to be a fat girl lurking on Tumblr, taking from other fat people who came before me. I don't want to build a wall around myself and say, "No, you can't look at me, and you can't feel anything about my body, and you can't have any opinions or connection to it," because I did the same thing. But navigating of it is hard, and complicated.

Virginia 

It is complicated. I can understand, especially when navigating your own recovery and wanting to make choices for yourself, but feeling like people will feel let down. It's complicated. We all do it with other public figures all the time. 

Lindy  

Oh, I don't like it when famous fat people lose weight. I don't trust it at all, but I don't say anything about it. You know what I mean?

Virginia 

At least, not super publicly. Maybe in my own head.

Lindy  

Just to the group chat. "Oh, ozempic, got another one?" I'll send that text. I do have this fear that if eating disorder treatment and recovery did cause me to lose weight, because I changed my relationship with food in such a way that my body changes—which I don't know if that would happen or not, there's no way to know, probably not—but if it did happen, it's so scary to think that I could be perceived as having betrayed people, or that I'm one of those people that I look at and send to the group chat and say, "Oh boy." Which is why I shouldn't do that.

Virginia 

Sure, fine. Now that you're putting it that way, I suppose.

Lindy  

It depends on the person. Look, just don't take me on your weight loss journey. I don't need to hear about your journey.

Virginia 

That's really the key to me. People do what they do with their bodies, and that's fine, but I really appreciate it when a celebrity says nothing. If you start justifying and explaining it, odds are that you're causing harm to somebody.

Lindy

It's not that hard to not say anything.

Virginia 

Yeah, just have your body. That's fine. You do you.

Related to people dissecting your body online, another experience we unfortunately share is having our personal lives written about and commented on online, particularly in regards to marriage. In my case, my divorce. It made the Daily Mail, which is a real point of pride for me.

You write really candidly about your marriage with Aham in this book and there are many difficult parts. Did it feel like you were taking some control back over the narrative to write about it? How do you feel about how people might react once they read what you've written?

Lindy  

I wanted to take control of the narrative. People react so intensely to non-monogamy. It's very scary to a lot of people, and I get it. You're sort of promised an equation for happiness, which is one person loving you obsessively for the rest of your life until you die. Just the idea that some people might choose a slight variation on that —it's threatening.

And it's a slight variation. I am married to two people. It's just one extra person! There's just one extra. It's not really that different. If you think about it, being single is only one person away from being two people. Just one less.

Virginia 

Right. Every single person is basically married. And every married person is basically in a throuple.

Lindy  

Is it that weird? People find it very weird. There was so much backlash, particularly directed at Aham, but also at me. My body was a big factor in it. The way that people perceive our relationship is never disconnected from the way people look at my body. 

So when people started to clock that we had a third person in our marriage—my partner, Roya. I shouldn't just talk about her like she's a mysterious, shadowy figure—so much of the response was, "Oh, we see what's going on here. You're fat and ugly and gross, so he doesn't like you. He needed a thin woman so that he can actually be happy."

Virginia 

He had to trade up in some way. 

Lindy  

He had to upgrade, as any man would, because, "Unfortunately, you're disgusting, and that's why we're here to defend you against this evil man."

Virginia 

Yes, defend you —because this is from people who were your fans. That was what blew my mind [when you first came out]. I was like, But wait, you're a pro-Lindy person drawing these conclusions about her life. That doesn't make sense.

Lindy

Why are you being so mean to me?

Virginia 

You're so mad on her behalf. But she didn't ask you to do that.

Lindy  

Right? And you know who's not saying anything mean to me? Aham. You guys are being way meaner. 

So, I don't know. It just felt like I wanted to get some definitive version down on paper, even though people are still going to do the same thing: take it and run with it, fill in the blanks. Everyone became a body language expert. People are obsessed with being the genius who read between the lines and could figure out what wasn't being said. We're in the age of conspiracy. I get it. But you can't actually just look at a picture of some people on the Internet and figure out what isn't being said. 

I couldn't even capture it in the book, because part of it is me and Aham sitting at the dining room table doing couples therapy over Zoom every week for three years. How do I put that in the book? It's so much work. 

People keep asking me, "Why are you so hard on yourself in this book?" Some people think I'm too easy on Aham. People keep telling me what my feelings are, and that I'm this naive person who's been duped. Or that I don't really understand, I can't really see, what's been done to me. 

I wanted to get my feelings down in hard copy. I can't excavate Aham’s feelings in my book. When I tried to, I cut it because it sounded like I'm begging the audience to co-sign that it was ok for me to stay, that I'm allowed to stay in my marriage. It feels like rationalization, and I don't want to do that. 

Virginia

You don't actually need our permission. 

Lindy

I don't actually need anyone's permission. But what I can do, and what I have the authority and right to do, is put down in excruciating detail my process and the things that I came to realize about myself, and the ways that I had been a part of the toxicity in our marriage. The ways that I had been in denial, and the ways that I had not been taking care of myself, emotionally, psychologically and in a million different ways. 

That's what I have to work with. I'm also, in my personal life, a passive, shy person. I have this childhood wound of being talked over and not given the authority to speak on my own experiences, and not feeling capable of asserting myself. That's a lot of what this book is. I'm hard on myself because I found it fascinating. I found it so illuminating to realize all of these ways that my brain had been warped, and I thought it was rational. How interesting to come to a realization that these things that you thought were a given actually, maybe you were wrong. People read it as me being really cruel to myself, but to me, it felt really healing to excavate all those things and figure them out. I hope it's not a grind to read.

Virginia 

No, it's definitely not. I found it more healing than you being hard on yourself.

I mean, there are moments—and I think this is, you know, this is me being a fan for a moment—like we love you Lindy. We've been rooting for you for a long time. There are moments where I would think, Oh no, Lindy. I want to protect you. I don't like this. But then you would have this breathtaking insight about yourself, and I'd be like, Oh, shit. Ok, well, that makes sense.

That was my experience of reading the book. These moments of feeling defensive or protective, and then being like, Oh, mind blown. 

Lindy  

Thank you. I was just going to say, I do keep having this little feeling of, if you read the book and you're like, I can't relate to this because she's so hard on herself, well ... it sounds like you've never been fat.

Virginia 

Or in therapy of any kind.

Lindy  

Congratulations on never having low self-esteem?

Virginia 

Must be neat to always be so sure. Are you maybe a narcissist?

A lot of what I saw in that narrative of "Lindy's the victim. He's trading up for the thin woman." is that this is so many fat women's core fear, right? So this was people projecting their own stuff of,  'This is what's going to happen to me. My husband's going to leave me for a younger, thinner woman.'

Lindy  

And that's rational, of course. That's what they do! I get it, because that was my fear. That's why I didn't want to do it. I was like, I know you're just waiting to upgrade. But in retrospect, it doesn't make sense. If what you were waiting to do was upgrade, why would you not just leave me?

People talk to me as though, I'm still, to this day, being victimized. But to me, it was so healing to be brave and step through this veil into this other relationship structure and discover that Aham does not love me less. He didn't leave. I don't have less of him. He was telling the truth about, at least, how he feels about me.

I was always so paranoid about that, and I always had so much doubt about it. People read it, and I get it, of course. Most people feel like they are barely holding their husband back from running off and being evil.

Virginia 

But if that's the case, there is divorce. I just want to say to everyone in that box, there is this other path. You don't have to stay with that guy.

Lindy  

If you're worried about that, please get a divorce. You will love it. 

Virginia 

It's so great. It's real rad. 

Lindy  

Look, I don't trust men either. I get it. I have the same wounds and the same anxieties. That's why I resisted so hard for so long. But I also didn't want to not be with Aham, because we have a really, really special relationship and I couldn't imagine ... I mean, I did eventually imagine, actually, there's a chapter cut from the book called "If I'd Left" about all the stuff I would have done. 

Virginia

Ooh, I am intrigued. 

Lindy

I'll tell you about it, but mostly it was a list of the different animals that I would acquire. 

A big part of this whole journey—I've said "journey" so many times—Aham tried to do it right. He brought it up day one. He said, "This is non-negotiable if we're going to be together." I said, "Ok, sure." He tried to talk to me about it over the years. I avoided the conversation. I would throw a fit and cry and hyperventilate. I could not handle it. 

When I found out that he was seeing someone else, he said, "I think we want different things, and if that's the case, we need to not be together."

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Part 2 is for paid subscribers only.

To hear the rest of our conversation with Lindy West, go to patreon.com/virginiasolesmith and join us. Membership starts at just $5 per month. You don't want to miss this the second part of this conversation.

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The Burnt Toast Podcast is hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay. You can follow Virginia on Instagram at @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.bsky.social. You can follow Corinne on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay.bsky.social and on Patreon at Big Undies.

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Our video editor is Elizabeth Ayiku, who also runs the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders. Learn more and donate at melittlemefoundation.org.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!