Leave Your Husband Lindy West

CW: This post discusses eating disorder, Fatphobia, Diet culture

I know, know, I’m the least influential voice in the thousands (millions?) that have voiced their opinion about Lindy West’s new book, Adult Braces. The discourse has been fierce on this one. This essay isn’t really a review of the book or even much about Lindy’s life. It’s about mine, as a Fat person, and maybe a little about Lindy.

If you haven’t been dragged into this conversation, here’s the short summary. Lindy West, famed feminist and fat activist behind Shrill is now in a throuple with her husband and her husband’s girlfriend (but also now Lindy’s girlfriend.) The issue isn’t the polyamory, because who are any of us to judge what consenting adults do in the privacy of their relationship. Plenty of adults practice ethical non-monogamy in a really healthy way. The discourse is because Lindy firmly wanted monogamy in her marriage and her husband made a firm stipulation, an open marriage or nothing. Lindy begrudgingly agreed to a hypothetical with a certain amount of ground rules. Her husband broke the rules, it was infidelity. That’s not actually what this is about. I leave this to the polyamory experts.

Full disclosure, I haven’t read Shrill, but I was acutely aware of Lindy and the book. I saw her speak at the Boston book festival in 2016 and I remember her listening to her take down of Dan Savage, from the Savage love Podcast on This American Life in 2016. When this aired, as a Fat person, I thought Savage’s rhetoric around Fat people was what we were supposed to embrace. Afterall, this was the sort of shame that would make us eat less and move more. That was the thesis in Super Size Me; Fat people must feel shame for every bit of food we dare to eat. This is how I lived my life.

And yes, mom, if you are reading this, I know you think I should lose weight. I know you think I should go on GLP-1s and I should move more and eat less and you think it’s all for my health. I know, fuck, every single Fat Person knows. We all know. We see it every single day, a million times a day. I know. If you think I haven’t weighed the pros and cons of GLIP-1s, the expense, the unknown health risks, the digestive issues, the issues around compounding pharmacies, and the fact that I will gain the weight back if I don’t keep up this ultra expensive medication. I know.

The episode of This American Life featuring West aired when I was 26. By that time, I had been on two very substantial diets. One when I was 16 years old, and losing weight became my crowning achievement. My mom bought me a dress we really couldn’t afford for band banquet as a reward. My mom, who is probably reading this, will tell me how it was for my health, a doctor recommended, but now in hindsight, knowing everything I know, I wonder if I would have been better off if I never lost that weight at all.

Even as an adult, at CPA, a woman with a career, an author that’s been featured in the New York Times and who just signed books on the floor on BookCon, losing weight would somehow usurp all of this. My ability to just not eat out would be my crowning achievement. I hate it here.

Sure, eventually I would have been initiated into diet culture. I would have learned how much is sucked to go to bed hungry, to be craving the “Special meal” for the week. One where I had already pre-counted out the calories, and it was just a bland chicken and vegetables take out. In my early 20s, after I gained all the weight back. After college I went on another diet. This one organized in excel. I would eat under 1,000 calories a day. Each weekend, I prepped meals that I would divide into plastic containers, and I would mark down the calories on labels and shove them in my freezer. I walked six miles a day, three on the treadmill and three more after with the dog. I was serious about it this time. I could lose the weight and have the self-control. It didn’t last. There would be more later, I would try Keto, I would think about diets that I would never start. It all failed, and each time I gained all the weight back and more.

That’s how this works, If Fat people are trying to lose the weight, we’re lazy and bad people.

When Lindy came on the scene, talking about how much she loved seeing fat bodies in paintings and in Lame Bryant ads, I wondered if I would ever get there. I could hardly look at myself in a mirror without spiraling, I hate almost all my pictures (Past and present tense, I really tried to have pictures from BookCon because it was such a cool experience, but I can’t pretend that I’m not struggling with my body after posing for more pictures in an hour than I’m usually in in a single year) It’s why most of you don’t actually know what I look like.

I think, the only time in my adult life where I didn’t totally hate my body was when I was doing roller derby. Suddenly, my body was strong, and I loved I could move with the other women. I loved roller derby so much, and then, just about four months in, when I was really settling into the sport, I broke my ankle. It was so bad, I needed surgery. I as a 29-year-old adult, with a professional career and a dog and stairs I needed to walk up to get into my building, I was too old to start an ultra dangerous, contact sport, played on roller skates. Then the pandemic hit and then we all, as a collective, gained weight again (except, somehow Lindy West, who retreated to the mountains and lost weight. What I went through with Roller Debry, Lindy would go through during the pandemic.)

The reality is, I have never made the peace on my own body that Lindy had seemingly achieved in 2016. I couldn’t look at Lane Bryant and see myself and back in 2016, I was still so sure I would lose the weight. One day, one day I would talk myself into not eating anymore. I would lose the weight. There is this taboo thought, cliché that I know a lot of Fat people have, why can’t I be anorexic. Why can’t I be strong enough to have a debilitating eating disorder that literally kills people. It is a horrible thought and yet…yet…it’s hard not to be fat and not think about it.

But not Lindy, Lindy wasn’t ashamed of her body. She had transcended diet culture. I think, part of the reason I didn’t read Shrill, even though it was everywhere and I was highly aware of it, was because I wasn’t ready for Lindy’s fairy tale life as a Fat woman. Her perfect husband, who proposed to her in a perfect way. Lindy had produced an entire show about being a Fat women, a show I admittedly struggled to watch. I couldn’t be Lindy, because I still hated my body. I have failed at both losing weight and accepting my body as it was. I am a fucking failure.

Except, what we learn in Adult Braces, is that Lindy still feels all of my emotions acutely. She knows what it’s like to be a Fat woman slowly walking up a hill, huffing and puffing and fucking embarrassed. She knows what it’s like to wonder how much better her life could have been if she weren’t fat. Not because her weight is impacting her physical health, but because our society doesn’t like Fat people. It also means she understands how devastating it is to date. In Adult Braces, Lindy’s marriage no longer feels like a fairy tale. Her husband, Aham, is a walking red flag. It’s not just the whole non-ethical- nonmonogamy thing from above. He is needy and annoying; he seemed unable to support Lindy in her depression. He seems to often need man-child levels of emotional coddling and support.

So many people are upset about Lindy West’s book. The tell all we didn’t need. The body acceptance Lindy West probably never achieved. I’m not though. Because, that failure I felt listen to Lindy’s excerpts from Shrill, it was also never real. I couldn’t accept my body any more than Lindy could. Not because we’re failures, it’s because it’s fucking hard. A few weeks ago, I went to buy another pair of overalls (if you have met me in person, there is a good chance I was wearing a pair of Duluth Trading Co overalls) and even though the size I needed was listed on the website, it took the staff 15 minutes to scramble around the back to find them. The straight sizes were displayed around the store; my size was hiding.

We’re back, in full diet culture now. Ozempic/ Wegovy are now everywhere, I keep getting an ad on the reels about how you can be a size 2 or 4 or whatever and still be on a GLP-1. Plus sizes are disappearing from stores, or like my Duluth experience, hiding in the back. But the truth is, I’m not sure we ever really were in the body positivity movement. Not like we thought we were, Lindy West never actually was. It was like we were all pretending it was real.

While I was busy being single and trying roller derby and writing romance novels and devising a plan to visit as many bookstores as possible on bookstore, Lindy West was sacrificing her own life because she didn’t think she could find a husband who actually cared for her. In the tale of two Fat woman, I always thought Lindy had it figured out. She had ascended to another level, above the judgement and bullshit. But, the reality is, we have both carved out paths that accommodated for a societal disdain of Fat people.

If Lindy’s book was a romance novel. She and Roya, her Girlfriend, would ditch Aham, and live a happy life together. This isn’t romance novel though, it’s real life. Lindy seems happy based on her own words, but she seemed the happiest alone when she wasn’t at service to her husband. The book was literally her going off on her own and finding herself and her own autonomy. That’s what I’ve been doing my entire adulthood and I’m mostly happy. I think I learned a lot from Lindy, but more importantly, I learned that I was doing just okay myself.

Here’s to navigating this world as a Fat person who will likely never accept their body, but who is learning to be happy and make their own path.

M.J. Etkind is the author of Dishwasher Safe, The Witch of Wall Street, and The Lone Wolf Paradox.