The Vivisection of Lindy West

Content warning: this post features graphic discussions of disordered eating, cannibalism (symbolic and otherwise), body dysmorphia, misogyny, and general messy mental health struggles.

Failure is a fascinating thing. On one hand, it has a sort of relentless finality, in culture – a certain inevitability that we absolutely refuse to acknowledge. No matter how good an artist is, eventually, they’re gonna produce something that either you don’t like, or nobody really likes.

The more famous they are, the more reticent we are to admit that they might, possibly, have missed the mark. At a certain point, artists often become “too big to fail” – well, if they’re men, anyway. Women and non cis-men, or men who fail to conform to masculinity, are ripe targets for failure, always hovering a breath away from falling off the balance beam and slamming ourselves square in the crotch.

Taylor Swift got an unfortunate taste of this with her Life of a Showgirl album; Lindy West isn’t as much of an international household name, but she’s certainly getting the same treatment right now.

But maybe you don’t know who the hell this is, or what I’m talking about. (If you’re the kind of person who reads my articles, you probably do know…but hey, more context and validation of facts is generally prudent.)

What everyone’s talking about

If you’ve heard of this memoir from feminist it-girl of the 2010s Lindy West, a seminal and influential confessional writer, you’ve probably heard about The Controversy.

Now, I’m a little trash-picking corvid at normal times. I enjoy gossip and Discourse and I love thinking critically about things, turning over nuggets and crystals and bits of broken glass from the culture, appreciating and evaluating them and hoarding them in my thoughts. I have a strong stomach for rot and filth; I get my hands dirty. I usually don’t do so in the public view of the internet, because I have seen too many people barely survive trolling incidents, but in private, I rejoice in the confessional spaces of group chats and gleefully, ardently consider mess.

Generally, I prefer fictional mess, where no real human beings have gotten hurt – tabletop roleplay games and various genres of fiction are ideal for exploring drama and its fallout. Hell, I’ve written an entire trilogy (I promise I’ll go back to posting chapters soon!) that’s basically just drama: the early 2010s musical.

This is as much to say that when I saw Lindy West’s name crop up on ICYMI, I jumped on it like the magpie I am, viscerally excited about the prospect of scandal and discourse. Then it came up on another podcast I absolutely love, There Are No Girls On the Internet, with a rather scathing take on the whole thing – particularly the absolutely unhinged and deeply unprofessional email that Aham, Lindy’s husband, sent journalist and essayist Scaatchi Cole.

I will have some words about the whole thing with Aham, but that’s for part 2, because I need to get deeper into the book to really share my thoughts. Suffice to say that I’m writing this article with Neko Case’s “The Pharaohs” playing on repeat. “I want the pharaohs/but there’s only men…”

Then yet another podcast I adore, The Worst Bestsellers, weighed in with guest Margaret Willison, Bossy Dame and polyamory alumnus, as she revealed in an episode of Love Letters.

I don’t always dive several episodes deep into researching a topic, but well, this one caught my interest. And then a friend in one of the book clubs I’m in wanted to read Adult Braces.

Reader, of course I enthusiastically supported this proposition. But although I was curious about the “real story” with the whole polyamory situation, I didn’t truly know what I was in for. I didn’t know I was going to walk around a corner and slam face-first into a funhouse mirror version of myself.

The Fame Monster

I’ve always felt a certain guilt about my own lack of success as a writer – surely, had I just tried a little harder and posted more, and etcetera, I could have become a Name; Marlon Brando At The Waterfront, “I coulda been a contender,” etcetera. Who knows, I still might; I’m not dead yet, and even death isn’t necessarily a bar to success (although it’s not a marketing strategy I plan to utilize, for the record).

But until reading Adult Braces – and admittedly, I’m halfway through, but my burning thoughts demanded an article already – I hadn’t realised quite how cannibalistic success really is.

Dr Devon Price wrote a rather good piece examining this side of the memoir. Now, the poly stuff in the memoir is going to be something I touch on, but first I want to talk about this thing that very few people are discussing: Lindy West’s quiet fall from relevance due to what looks like burnout.

I’ll have an article about burnout coming out soon, but I don’t want to write four essays crammed uncomfortably into a SmartCar, so forgive my brevity for the time being. Let us, for the moment, discuss a nasty little overlap between the way Lindy’s work is treated and the way Lindy’s body is treated.

In the memoir, particularly the sections set in Hollywood, West describes being alienated and dehumanized by people who are basically feeding off her work for the show. Now, it’s unfortunately true that a narrative show is just going to have changes made to it. It’s not a documentary, and hell, documentaries lie all the time. But that doesn’t invalidate or decrease the fundamental disrespect of herself and her life experiences that she ran into down in the Hollywood hellscape.

Fat Girl in the Mirror

Lindy either hasn’t quite connected it or hasn’t said it yet (or I missed it, in the 45% of the book I’ve read), but surely, at least some of the dire self-loathing of her body must have been influenced by living in LA. The way she talks about herself in Adult Braces, it would be easy to assume she’s plain, even undeniably ugly, some cartoonish cautionary tale housed in woman’s flesh.

So imagine the shock that washed over me as I read about this famous fat woman, writing about loathing her own body, and I looked her up – and was shocked to see that she was undeniably beautiful and hot, conventionally pretty.

Now, I’ve occasionally alluded to and mentioned that I struggle with body dysmorphia. I’m fat – a “small fat” in the lingo of fat activists; an absurd term that sounds like a slightly unappealing latte order – but visibly fat nonetheless. Somehow, I have three partners, and multiple other people have been attracted to me visibly over the years, or flirted with me. As a fat femme, this is one of those things we end up compartmentalizing or just putting in a box. Sure, I’ve been flirted with, but I’m still ugly and undesirable.

To be fat is to be subjected to traumatizing social and personal attacks, over and over; is it any wonder that most of us struggle with disordered eating in some way? Of course, the assumption will always be that binge eating is to blame, but this isn’t always true. Conventional anorexia and bulimia diagnoses use thinness as fundamental diagnostic criteria.

It’s entirely possible to be obsessively counting calories, peering at your tracking app after every morsel that crosses your lips, debating the cost of every bite and just how your metabolism will handle it, feeling intense guilt and shame as you dare to eat something you enjoy. It’s possible to struggle with intrusive thoughts about calorie counting years after you abandon the apps, advertisements for various trackers on otherwise innocuous phone games popping up and offering you impossible, AI-generated perfection or the classic before-and-after photo tricks. It’s possible to sit and stew and wonder if maybe, just maybe, this will be the time that your metabolism and body surrender to restricted calories and shed the prisoning rolls of flesh that lie between you and “acceptable” attractiveness.

Ask me how I know.

But Lindy knows too, and the weight of apparent self confidence, of being A Successful Fat Person who publicly loved herself, was drowning her. Now, some of the issues we struggle with are always going to be calls coming from inside the house, our internal voices projected onto other people like bad dubs over 2000s anime. But for Lindy, plenty of those shitty thoughts were being sent directly to her inboxes and comment sections by real people.

We love celebrities because we are desperate to steal a little of their light and prestige and power, to bask in their reflected glow and imagine ourselves in their places of pride. But when does that love become crushing, suffocating, toxic? When you can’t escape your own shadow, as happened to West.

In the early 2010s, that currently romanticized time, there was a serious penchant for TEDTalks, for clickbait solutions, for One Weird Trick that would dispel bigotry or grant self-confidence or heal whatever psychological or social ailments we suffered. Surely, with just the right words, we could reach a racist bigot and fix them! It’s that Aaron Sorkin, cowboy speech type heroism bullshit that poisons an awful lot of Western culture. All it takes is one brave, divine saviour to martyr themselves or fight the Ultimate Evil, and we will all be saved.

Am I saying that Lindy West is Jesus? Sure – but in the sense that every fucking person weaned on the goddamn fucking Hero’s Journey is Jesus. Or rather, that we are being trained and taught to see ourselves as the next potential Jesus, the person whose brave sacrifice and hard work will be enough to tip the Cosmic Balance towards good.

Now, I don’t know Lindy West personally. I’ve never met her, I’ve only read a few of her articles over the years. I don’t have a deep, profound type of parasocial attachment to her, unlike an awful lot of my fellow fat folks. (This is not to insult or denigrate them – if I was immune to idealising public figures, I wouldn’t have spent months in mourning after finding out that Neil Gaiman is a piece of shit.) But I will say that there’s something about Lindy West that hurt her, and has protected me, as I’ve slowly developed it over the years.

Lindy West is a kind, nice person, who cares about other people’s opinions. The visceral hunger for approval and love burns in her writing. And that is only human, and deeply understandable, but Lindy does not have what I have: I’m a mean, bitchy person, and until now, I never realised how much that has saved me.

Surviving the Internet

Anyone who’s spent a lot of time on the internet has gotten hurt on it. It’s as inevitable as gravity. Either by accident or by encountering someone thoughtless or seeking attention for snark, you will get hurt. I’ve certainly gotten hurt many times.

I had a bad experience on GoodReads with snarky reviewers taking potshots at my first book, sometimes misogynistically and queerphobically. (It was 2013, and snarky book blog reviews were all the rage. These were the heyday of vile attack pages like RequiresHate, after all, and the movie review culture of trying to cram in as many jokes per minute as possible.) I had a small but cutting run-in with Gamergaters after I dared to criticize a reviewer I used to like – someone from that dunking school, ironically enough. I’ve had uncountable fights with conservatives and fellow progressives and leftists on Facebook, taking exception to and being scolded for poor word choices and small oversights.

People on the internet are fucking mean, but also wonderfully kind, and publicly interacting on websites is a daily spin of the roulette wheel. But humans, like so many other creatures (including pigeons), are willing to gamble. And so we all do, because most of the time, or enough of the time, people are kind and good and warm enough that it’s rewarding.

But adulation is addictive, and as West describes, there’s poison in the honey. But there’s also something oddly compelling about the harm, as West admits, describing her profound act of self harm in cataloguing every bit of trolling she received, thousands of screenshots’ worth.

To survive the internet means having to accept the randomness of human interaction and the horrible unkindness as not necessarily deserved, but inflicted on yourself. As my wife often points out, people can be cruel and unkind because of shit that’s going on for them. This is certainly true of an awful lot of trolls, or even of normally reasonable people who lash out on a particular bad day. It’s worth remembering the basic humanity of everyone we interact with, even the worst people.

However.

What Lindy West seems to struggle with (so far, in as far as I can tell from reading a memoir and not knowing her as a real person in private or offline), is that some people’s opinions ain’t shit. It’s not that “opinions are like assholes; everyone has one and they all stink” – it’s that, in fact, some people act in ways that fucking suck, and are disrespectful, and it’s extremely important to learn how to not give a shit.

Perhaps my readers will have been surprised to hear about my appetite for mess, and drama, and Discourse; those who know me personally probably aren’t at all. And the reason for this is that, fucking frankly, not every opinion needs to be shared on the public internet.  I don’t share my messiest, juiciest, nastiest thoughts with everyone, because quite frankly, I don’t want to contribute to the toxicity in public discourse. It’s one thing to talk shit in private, but I am constantly aware – as I guess, most people fucking aren’t?! – that there’s a chance the subject of my speech could see something posted publicly.

So I don’t. In places where my thoughts can be accessed by search engines, I hold my tongue; I curate my thoughts; I am deliberate, as much as any one imperfect human can be. We are all at a party, and we can all be overheard, and people need to actually think about the fucking concept of privacy and discretion in how they communicate on the wide public internet.

It’s probably good to speak positively, in general, and to compliment people’s work. When I do reach out to or comment on creators’ projects that I admire, I try to write like I’d talk to them if I met them at a convention. That is, sure I’m warm and friendly, but I maintain a self-awareness of the fact that a) I know this person’s work, not the person themselves, and b) they don’t fucking know me, which means that c) I’m not entitled to speak to them in certain intimate ways. It’s okay to form an emotional attachment to someone’s work, and their persona. Hell, the current landscape of the creative internet actually requires that creative people encourage a degree of this attachment to fucking survive. You’re supposed to want to see every update from a “creator”, every video clip, every breath we take.

To be famous at all is to live in the holding pen outside a slaughterhouse

And this is a recipe for self destruction, especially for marginalized people. For a fat person, or a person in a fat body – god, so many of us feel like we’re a thin person just imprisoned somehow! – there is something particularly cruel and horrible about the inevitable scrutiny on us. Lindy writes agonizingly about how people scolded her for losing weight as they projected their insecurities onto her.

It must have hurt. I can only imagine how it hurt. And it is as much a fault of the “good fan” for having shitty boundaries and poor distinctions of self-definition around Lindy, as it is the fault of a troll for dehumanizing her and targeting her. In a horrible way, every fan is a troll waiting to happen.

There’s a speech in the first Sam Raimi Spiderman movie, where Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin emotively snarls advice at Tobey Maguire’s wide-eyed Peter Parker, about how what people love more than a hero is “to see a hero fall, see him fail.” The thing about a dead hero is that they can’t disappoint you. This is also true of dead women; they are perfect ciphers, sexy blank canvases upon which any fantasy can be perfectly projected, painted, embroidered.

Now make the beautiful woman fat. Because we don’t like talking about that, do we, that fat women can be incontrovertibly beautiful? But there is some horrible angle to this, to the way that fat bodies are subject to an extra level of scrutiny. Prodded, poked, laid out flat; as people performatively describe their disgust for us and demonstrate their own virtue at the expense of our fallen bodies. It is like being eaten to death by rats, devoured one bite at a time, though you’ll feel every nibble. Do it to Julia.

Societally, we do not discuss the beauty of fat forms; luxurious, plush flesh, a huge variety of different kinds of softness and welcome. A body you can sink into and rest on. It’s not all about sex: there is comfort here. My toddler son loves to sleep on my tummy, and the way he cuddles into what has been my most hated body feature gives me pause. He is comfortable, happy, on the fattest part of me, and my fat helps me nurture him, while cushioning my bones and organs against twenty-odd pounds of rambunctious little kid flopping against them. My lovers don’t mind my belly, but it’s my son’s joy that is eroding my self-loathing, bit by bit.

Sure, the nineties raved about big tits and the 2010s were the era of the thick ass and thighs – but fat on publicly celebrated bodies is sculpted, curated, strictly controlled; not permitted wildness or softness or malleability. To sag and give in to gravity’s arc is to fail at the task of womanhood, and increasingly, manhood; to admit defeat in the face of entropy. We are supposed to be young and firm forever. We do not discuss or even consider that, maybe, there’s beauty to be found in age, or even that aging isn’t as bad as we claim it is.

The people who hate Lindy West and other fat people would probably sooner stab themselves in the face than admit that maybe, possibly, some of them find us a little bit attractive, or even just don’t find us that disgusting. But fat bodies are common and normal. Fat bodies are normal.

 Just writing that sentence is, somehow, fucking iconoclastic, even after decades of fat activist work; just saying “fat bodies are normal” feels like it needs some sort of caveat, or apology, or context, or some swooping caveat to condemn the most extreme cases of obesity and high weight. As though stigma and scolding will save people from the shadow of fat this time, in defiance of literally every other piece of evidence we’ve got about the relationship between weight and stigma and mental health.

What Should Lindy West Do?

I can’t speak for what Lindy West needs to do, apart from like, probably more therapy – something, I hasten to add, that I recommend for pretty much everyone who can manage it – but I do think that, if Lindy were to read this article somewhere, I’d say she might wanna listen to some punk music. Punk music is, broadly, about expressing the emotion of telling someone to go fuck themselves, and she could do worse than listening to Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette a couple times. The Regrettes are also high on my recommendation list. I’d also mention Bikini Kill or The Suffrajetts, but I haven’t listened to much of their work yet. Same goes for The Bad Decisions, who are also on my music homework playlist.  

(Don’t fucking gatekeep what counts as punk in the comments, or I will come to your house, knock on your door, look you in the eye, and tell you how much I don’t give a shit.)

No, really. There’s allegedly a  Zen koan that says, “If you see the Buddha on the side of the road, kill him.” The meaning of this is basically that like, someone claiming or appearing to be the Buddha is not the real Buddha, and it’s kind of meant to make you think about the concept of reverence compared to actual reverence, and like the whole sorta-atheistic nature of Buddhism qua not actually treating Buddha as a god but as like, a role model – and other stuff. I’m not actually a Buddhist; just someone who likes thinking an awful lot. In the same way, if you see an internet troll in your comment section, kill them (in your head; for legal and fucking logical humane reasons, I’m not advocating actual violence).

But relatedly, I think there’s a deep and profound importance to learning to shun people’s expectations, especially on the endlessly cannibalistic internet. Lindy West was never going to be good and perfect enough to satisfy everyone, to be a Perfect Fat Person, especially because different ideas and requirements for what it means to be a Good Fat Person exist, clashing and cracking against each other like her poor, abused teeth. But in the same way that her teeth needed the support of orthodontics, individual creators absolutely cannot get by without the support of colleagues.

Community is a bit messier and less ideal than we want it to be. To quote a good friend of mine, “being in community means being annoyed sometimes,” and that’s true. And being annoyed means dealing with your emotions, which sometimes means bitching and gossiping in private, then working your shit out so you can actually still be kind to the person who’s annoyed you. This, incidentally, is also how relationships work, whether platonic, romantic, familial, or some messy alterous nebulous thing you’re trying to figure out.

I’m still unlearning the anxiety and uncertainty and double-back clarifications that Tumblr and Facebook arguments taught me; the uncertainty in my own voice and fear of misinterpretation as I fail to cover ground for every possible meaning. It’s interwoven with real-life trauma I’ve been through in nasty, elf-locked tangles and knots. Some days I win against the self-doubt, some I lose. But when I see my girlfriend hesitate and struggle to share an opinion, the kind Tumblr would have flayed her for in her teen years, I support and encourage her, because in doing so, I’m also putting the boots to my own demons.

Sometimes it’s really fucking hard to tell whether the yelling is coming from inside the house or the street outside. The worst thing of all is when the monsters in the closet and the dickheads on the street are screaming the same things.

So fuck ‘em. Be angry at them. Maybe get real creative with your insults and dismissals. It feels great sometimes. And the best ways to disarm trolls are a) a casual acceptance of fault, if you did in fact fuck something up for real, and b) baring your teeth and showing them that you’re not a helpless little creature.  

And when people who claim to love you try to transgress your boundaries and hurt you, give them a chance to talk about it. And if they keep doing it, over and over, they also might need to go fuck themselves, and you might have to say it.

And I have more to say about that, but we’ll get to it in part 2.

***

A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB with xer family and their cats. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find xer all over the internet: *Website * Amazon * Substack * Patreon * Ko-fi * Instagram * Bluesky * Mastodon * Tumblr * Medium * OG Blog * Facebook