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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Lindy
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 because I don't want you to be in pain, losing your mind." And I said, "No, we are not allowed to break up."
What's he supposed to do? And again, he did many things wrong. There's lots of conflict and bad decisions and bad behavior, but I don't think that's one of the things. I would not let him divorce me. I insisted we had to stay together. I don't think he did a crime by then, trying to figure out, 'Ok, how do we do this non-monogamy that you hate, and yet insist on remaining in it?'
I guess he could have just forcibly left me. He could have packed up and left. But I mean, the person that he loves is standing there sobbing and crying and begging him to stay. Or the other option —and this is what he did for years and years —was defer to me and essentially not be polyamorous, even though he told me from day one that that was important to him. He suppressed that for a long time.
His choices were to continue to sort of playact monogamy with me, which is what I ...
Virginia
What you were demanding.
Lindy
What I was demanding. Or leave and make both of us sad. Or stay. I was insisting that I could figure this out, that we could figure something out that would work. So he did. And somehow, we did figure it out.
Virginia
When you describe your life together as a threesome. A throuple? Why are all the words so bad?
Lindy
They're all bad. Triad is okay.
Virginia
Triad? Ok. As a triad. Tripod?
Lindy
A tripod.
Virginia
What I was going to say is, your life together sounds lovely. It sounds really lovely and supportive. I was like, Well, I completely understand the benefits of having another woman in your household. Like, that's just practical. It seems like you ended up in a great place.
Lindy
That's part of why it's weird to have this book come out now and then be defending these choices, even though I understand why. This was seven years ago at this point. Aham and Roya and I have been together five years.
Virginia
You're well into this.
Lindy
You can come at me and tell me that I should have gotten a divorce, but the ship has sailed. I have a whole new life now. I live in a log cabin in the woods. I'm in my forties. I don't know what you want from me. Roya and I have a vegetable garden.
Virginia
We're not breaking that up, guys.
Lindy
Come on. If anything, they should divorce me. I am the worst wife. I am the worst of the two wives. Roya is always cleaning. She opens the bills and then she pays them immediately. She sorts things into piles. I'm like, Oh, boy.
Virginia
There are a lot of practical benefits to multiple wives. Even in the book when he ends up in the hospital and she's texting you medical updates. I was like, This just seems great. Someone giving really clear information about what's going on.
Lindy
It's so easy for me to make these jokes and be flippant about it. Then I'm like, God, I sound like I'm just using Roya for her clerical skills, which is not the case. I also love her.
Virginia
It doesn't sound like you're using her for her clerical skills. It sounds like you have someone to share the mental load of life with, and that's what everybody wants and needs because there's so many things that we're all keeping track of at all times. To have another brain available to do any part of that labor is a gift.
Lindy
Roya, if you're listening, thank you. I love you.
Virginia
I want to chat about your podcast for a minute, because I am a huge Text Me Backolyte. I love that you host it with your best friend Meagan Hatcher-Mays. You guys are so funny and great together. I love podcasts of best friends. I used to have one with my best friend Amy, and now my current co-host, Corinne, is also a really good friend. I feel like more best friends need podcasts. It's such a good concept. Talk about what's fun and hard about making a podcast with your best friend.
Lindy
I totally agree. People sometimes ask me and Meagan, "What's the secret to long term best friendship and keeping a best friendship healthy and alive?" The answer is, start a podcast together. Meagan and I haven't lived in the same city since when she left to go to law school in either 2007 or 2008. We weren't in touch as much as you would think best friends would be. It's so easy to have the day-to-day meat of your life just involve the people that are right in front of you, that you can touch and see. Meagan and I have the kind of friendship where, when we did see each other, it would just snap back into place. We weren't even texting all the time. For years, sometimes we wouldn't talk to each other for months at a time, and now I talk to Meagan every day. Even though she's in DC, I know the minutia of what's going on in her life, and she knows what's going on in mine.
When you're in your twenties and you have a best friend who lives in the apartment next door, you're enmeshed in each other's lives in that beautiful, fun way, and we would absolutely not have ever been able to recapture that if we didn't have this podcast. So that's so fun and cute. I don't want to say that everyone should have a podcast, because there's so many.
Virginia
We need our audiences. We can't handle that competition.
Lindy
Exactly. Some of you might be too charming, and I don’t like that.
Nothing has been healthier for the friendship than doing the podcast. I remember when we started pitching the podcast, we had a whole round of pitch meetings and someone was like, "Oh, well, good luck. Every best friend podcast ends up breaking up the best friends."
Virginia
Oh, my God!
Lindy
I was like, "Ah! Not me and Meagan. Never." And it has not broken us up. But I do have a lot of sympathy for Meagan. Again, I know I'm being hard on myself, but I think working with me is hard, because my brain, she is not as sharp as she used to be. I forget things. I say I'm going to do things and then I don't do them. We produce our podcast independently. So everything that needs to be done, we do it.
I do see how the friendship could break down, but luckily, I'm aware of it, and so I work really hard to not be quite as hopeless and incompetent as is my nature. Luckily, the podcast is stable enough that we can afford to have a producer.
Virginia
Yeah, that helps a ton. Thank you, Kim.
Lindy
Oh, my God. I don't know what we would do without producer Alli. Anything that I can pay someone else, where I can outsource the responsibility, that's what I do, because otherwise, I'm a person that really needs a manager, a handler. For example, someone to remind me to make sure that I am on the right time zone for a podcast that I'm supposed to appear on (I was 25 minutes late).
Virginia
Time zones are real hard. They trip me up every week.
Lindy
So anyway, that's the challenge. One of these days, Meagan might get so mad at me that she ends the podcast, but hopefully not.
Virginia
Fingers crossed. It feels like you guys have a good thing.
I think best friend podcasts, and particularly the way you guys do it about a friendship, it helps remind us to de-center monogamy a little bit. The reason those early twenties friendships don't last a lot of the time is because straight people get married, and then that takes over. Suddenly that is the most important relationship, meanwhile, this girl's been by your side for so many years. Are you kidding me?
Lindy
I know, totally.
Virginia
What happened to that friendship? Anytime we can celebrate friendship, especially female friendship, I think it's so important.
Lindy
I agree. And you know, it's hard, because even if you personally have some conviction, like, 'I'm not going to let my female friendships degrade.' Not everyone else has that. You need the other person to be bought in.
Virginia
You both need to be on the same page.
Lindy
But then everyone's getting these husbands. That's the nice thing about being in a throuple, it's so much more customizable in terms of how much time you get to yourself because there's another person. Once you get over feeling left out, which, I think, at the very beginning, sometimes Aham and Roya would go do something, and I'd be like Why?
Virginia
Yeah, of course.
Lindy
But now everyone can go spend time alone, because even if someone else is feeling lonely and pouty, there's another person. It's amazing. Now I'm like, "All right, so are you guys like going on a date soon?" or "You guys, I heard about a good restaurant that maybe you guys would like," so I can watch The Traitors. Hello?
Virginia
I need some couch time with you not on it.
Lindy
I feel like non-monogamy has given me my personal life back in a certain way, my social life, or it just allows for a more fruitful social life. Also, I think philosophically, having deep connections with people outside of your marriage is really important and very healing.
Virginia
Agreed. Big time agree.
Ok, we've got a few last questions. This is a question from the Burnt Toast chat. One of our listeners, Meg, asked, "I'd love to hear about Lindy's relationship to fatness and how it has changed over her years of writing about it."
Lindy
What a weird time to have a relationship to fatness. I will say that the age of GLP-1s has thrown me into a tizzy. I've said some things that I'm not proud of, been judgmental, then come all the way back around to what the OG fat activists were saying all along.
It's hard to have a body. I believe this. I'm not here to tell anyone what to do with their bodies. I don't know how you could spend your life cataloging all the ways that society makes it impossible to be fat and not understand why people still pursue thinness. But that's a slippery slope. It gets easy to then be like, Well, maybe I'm allowed to pursue thinness if I believe in autonomy. I've gone around and around. I've been prescribed GLP-1s, was tempted, and then couldn't afford it, and was like, Oh, I never ... Thank God.
I mean, if you need it, and you take it and it helps your life, Godspeed. Amazing.
I feel like I talked and thought my way all the way back to- ultimately, most people don't lose weight, become thin, stay thin. Your body is your body. I think the only answer is - even though it's really hard - to learn how to live in the body that you have because it's very likely that this is the body that you'll have for the rest of your life.
So what are you going to do? I don't want to go back to waiting to have a thin body. I found myself being sucked backwards into this paradigm, because all of a sudden, now everyone's getting skinny and being like, "It is better!" You're treated better. Yes, we know. Life is easier for you. But it doesn't change the fact that there's nothing morally wrong with being fat. It's not better to be thin.
People really want to weasel out of some of the lessons we've learned over the last 20 years. Unfortunately for them, I'm pretty confident that the original thinking was sound. I think people figured it out in the '70s, probably even before that. The only path to happiness is learning to love your body in whatever form it takes, because there's no guarantee that it's going to - much like a husband - there's no guarantee that you can turn it into the body that you think you want, or that you think you deserve.
Even with all this eating disorder stuff, I feel like I figured that out, too. Again, it was the wisdom of the elders, which is nourish yourself and strengthen your body if that feels important to you and good to you. Don't think about being fat or not being fat.
I'm having a lot of back pain right now. It's this cycle where my back starts to hurt and then, I love hiking. That's been my central form of exercise. I used to go lift weights. I like being strong. It feels really good, and I am really strong, and I like doing things that I'm good at. Now that I live in the woods, I don't have a gym, so I go hiking. Then if my back starts to hurt, I can't go hiking. Then the more I don't go hiking, the more my back hurts, the harder hiking is. Anyway, I get into this cycle where, as of right now, as of this podcast, I'm having a hard time walking any distance at all.
Virginia
I've been there. It sucks.
Lindy
It sucks! But then I had this epiphany a couple weeks ago where I was like, I am allowed to go to physical therapy. I realized that in my head, I was like, Well, just pushing through the back pain is my punishment for being fat. Well, my back probably hurts because I'm fat. I was still doing it, you know? And then I was like, No, I think actually I'm allowed to seek professional help just like thin people go to physical therapy. Both of my partners go to the chiropractor and go get massages, and I don't.
Virginia
It's legal for us now.
Lindy
It's legal for us now. I'm actually going today to get some guidance on which strength exercises you can do that will help so that I can get back to doing the things that I enjoy doing, from a weight neutral perspective. I just would like to be able to see the top of the mountain. I truly, at this point in my life, and it's been a rocky couple of years, I do not care what my body looks like. But I do want to be able to do the stuff that I want to do. I do want to be able to hike.
Another thing that happened, during COVID, when there was nothing to do, all I was doing was hiking, and my body got smaller. This is what really has fucked me up. My body got smaller then, and I was in really good shape, and I was running, which has never happened to me before. I loved it. It was so cool. I could run all the way around the lake. What?
Virginia
It's amazing. Yes.
Lindy
And then, again, I got into this cycle where my back hurt, and then I lost all that conditioning. At the same time, GLP-1s came out and it was just the weight, that was the heaviest shame I've ever felt in my life. I was like, I'm garbage, because I had achieved this thing that fat people never achieve, even though I wasn't trying to, but still, it's so seductive, the pride. I didn't feel proud. It wasn't like that, but it's still like, again ...
Virginia
You start equating the things you're enjoying doing with thinness. You're like, I can do them because I got thinner, instead of, I can do them because I'm doing them. I'm hiking, so I'm getting better at hiking. Actually, the weight loss was a side effect. It wasn't the cause. But our brains, all the programming is there to be like, It's because I'm thinner, so I have to stay thinner. I have to get back to that. I couldn't possibly achieve that now that I'm bigger again.
Lindy
Right. Exactly. And then I got bigger and lost the ability to do all those things and blamed it on the weight, even though I knew that's not what happened. I have cycled out of that, without the weight loss, but gotten back into good hiking condition in mostly the same body. Things will sort of rearrange. It's all so complicated.
I'm at this point where I'm like, I don't fucking care what I look like. I just want to be able to hike and I just want to be able to have breakfast and not be anxious and ashamed that I'm either doing diet culture or doing binging. The solution for me is oatmeal and physical therapy.
Virginia
I think those sound amazing.
Lindy
The fat elders were right. Always listen to them.
Virginia
Always listen to the fat elders. You'll start doing physical therapy, and I'm not going to tell you exactly what's going to happen, I'm not psychic, but when I've done it, they give you five dumb exercises and suddenly your back feels like a million times better. You're like, Oh, wait, so I didn't have to torture myself to lose 100 pounds? I could just do some clam shells. Ok.
Lindy
There's two components. There's being out of breath and there's my back hurting. I don't mind being out of breath. I'm used to it. Also, that part goes away pretty fast if you're walking up a hill every day. But for some reason, because I conflated those two things in my shame backpack, it's like I have no choice but to push through the back pain. Yeah, I do have a choice, and that's a horrible thing to do, probably bad for the back.
Virginia
Well, I'm excited for your physical therapy journey. I think that'll be great. All right, last question before we do Butter, since you did take this epic cross-country road trip, we feel you are well-qualified to recommend car snacks.
Lindy
Oh, my God. I have so many opinions on car snacks.
Virginia
I knew you would. I'm excited for this.
Lindy
The problem is that I like all snacks.
Virginia
Any snack could be a car snack.
Lindy
Exactly. Here's my snack philosophy. I like to have a savory, a chocolate and a fruit. For me, that would probably be cheddar Bugles, maybe Airheads. They sell a box of six. Although Airheads are intense. Maybe a SweeTart, or a roll of SweeTarts, and then chocolate. Reese's Pieces, it's not chocolate, but I categorize it under chocolate.
Virginia
Plus, protein.
Lindy
My fourth category is protein. I like to get a beef stick or a bag of jerky, and then I like a really big Coke Zero.
Virginia
Coke Zero, not Diet Coke. That's controversial here.
Lindy
I like both. I was just saying to someone else, Diet Coke is savory and Coke Zero is the dessert.
Virginia
That is very true. That is a very helpful way to distill them.
Lindy
If a gas station has a fountain Coke Zero, I will get that. But I love a Diet Coke. A very large one of those. The fruit candy is at the bottom. Sometimes I won't even have a fruit. Sometimes I won't have a SweeTart. Just yesterday I had to drive all day because I had a million errands, and I'm excited to announce that it's Easter, so the Cadbury mini eggs are out. They have arrived.
Virginia
They have arrived? This is big news.
Lindy
They is risen.
Virginia
Zombie Jesus has brought us the mini eggs once again.
Lindy
That was my car snack yesterday. I was driving along, just housing handfuls of mini eggs. That would be obviously seasonal. You can't always get it. But that's an elite car snack.
My final car snack thought is that, obviously we're boycotting, I think, but someday I would like to be a person who owns one of those little clips that goes on your air vent that fits one McDonald's sauce tub. Have you seen those?
Virginia
I have not, but I'm picturing a little barbecue sauce tub.
Lindy
Yeah, and then you can have your nuggets while you're driving.
Virginia
That solves so many issues.
Lindy
I know. Can you imagine? Actually, you know what? That might be part of my eating disorder recovery. Maybe that's one of my steps that I need to do.
Virginia
It feels like an important step.
Lindy
Because why do I not have one of those? It could only be because I'm doing diet culture.
Virginia
It sounds like a very diet culture decision that you could stand firm against. Get yourself that barbecue sauce ...
Lindy
Sweet and sour for me. But I respect all the sauces. There's no bad sauces. All sauces are good sauces. To me a car snack is what's keeping me awake a lot of the time. You need a little crunch, and then sometimes your tongue will get tired of the sugar, and then you need to return to the savory. Or, if you're being really virtuous, the beef, even though I also want to stop eating beef because cows are my dog. I don't know what to do about that. Don't get me started.
Virginia
That’s a whole other podcast, really.
Lindy
Because there's no other ... Actually. Well, nope, don't need to get into the jerky. But most other jerkies are not good.
Virginia
No, they have not replaced beef jerky taste-wise yet. Agreed. Well, that was an epic car snack recommendation list. Thank you very much. I'm excited for the next time I drive my car.
Lindy
Was I supposed to just pick one?
Virginia
No, you definitely were not.
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Butter
Virginia
All right, we wrap up with butter, which is our recommendation segment. You obviously just gave us a whole bunch of butter. But do you have anything else you're loving right now?
Lindy
I want adults to consider the quesadilla more often. I think a quesadilla should not be categorized as a child's food. There are few things as satisfying as a perfectly executed quesadilla, or even a poorly executed quesadilla.
Virginia
It's still going to be melted cheese, so how bad could it be?
Lindy
Yeah, and it's customizable. You can put whatever you want in there, beef or chicken, avocado.
Virginia
Mushrooms.
Lindy
You could put mushrooms in there. You could put sweet potato.
Virginia
Literally, anything that's in the bottom of your fridge that you're like, I bought all this because last-Saturday-me had big visions of cooking, and then I didn't cook. Now it's kind of gross, but not off. You can chop it up and put in a quesadilla.
Lindy
I just thought of an invention: broccoli cheddar quesadilla. What if we steam some broccoli, we chop it up real small, and we put it in the quesadilla? Then it's like broccoli cheddar soup, but it's a quesadilla.
Virginia
You're really onto something there.
Lindy
I think I am onto something. Have you ever put broccoli in a grilled cheese? Also, a good one.
Virginia
Delightful.
Lindy
I just want adults to consider the quesadilla. And also, while we're at it, the Shirley Temple.
Virginia
I'm with you on the quesadilla. I haven't had a Shirley Temple since I was nine, so ...
Lindy
I mean, you've got to be willing to really down some sugar.
Virginia
Some plastic cherries.
Lindy
But sometimes, and I speak from experience, if you order a Shirley Temple at a very fancy cocktail bar, they'll give you the fancy cherries. And then you're really cooking with gas.
Virginia
I also feel like the mocktail menu at a fancy bar is more fun because they're all sort of Shirley Temple inspired. They're like, 'What would a toddler drink? We'll make that.' That's what I want to drink.
Lindy
I'm the toddler. I stopped drinking because once I hit my forties, I started to get a hangover, mid while drinking the first glass of wine. I was like, This is just not worth it. You know what I love and doesn't make me sick? Juice, and that's what mocktails are. They're juice, except for now, when they're trying to make fake alcohol. I want my juice to taste like alcohol? No, thank you.
Virginia
No, I just want it to be delicious. Maybe some ginger, if we're mixing it up, but that's about it.
Lindy
I also like a mocktail menu.
Virginia
Well, that was some excellent butter. I will do a butter that pairs nicely with your butter. I'm on a real chili crisp kick right now, partially inspired by the fact that I bought a jar of chili crisp six months ago, but I couldn't open the jar. Some jars really plot against you. I had a huge victory last night where my boyfriend tried to open it and he couldn't open it either, but between the two of us, we got it done. Now I'm putting it on everything I eat because I've waited so long to have this chili crisp in my life. It's great because it's tiny, so you can really place your spice with your bite thoughtfully, which I like. Hot sauce sometimes goes a little everywhere, and it's easy to over-do.
Lindy
Is this the classic chili crisp with the sad lady on the front? Because there's all these new, upstart young chili crisps.
Virginia
I think this is maybe a hipster chili crisp. I want to say it's called Don DeLillo, but isn't that an author?
Lindy
Yeah, but he could have gone into chili crisp making. I don't know what he gets up to.
Virginia
It's possible. [Post-recording note: The chili crisp is actually Don Chilio. No word on DeLillo's involvement.]
Lindy
I don't know if he's alive or dead.
Virginia
He's making chili crisp in very hard to open jars. But after six months, we achieved the strength. Anyway. I'm on a real kick with it right now. And it's cold and flu season here, so if you feel like you're a little bit sick, have something really spicy to clear out the sinuses. Good stuff.
Lindy
I like when something is trendy, and then you are like, Ok, enough. But then you get to come back to it and be like, It was trendy for a reason.
Virginia
Yes, I feel like I bought this to be cool when chili crisp was really having a moment on TikTok, but then I couldn't open the jar, so I couldn't participate. Now I'm like, The TikTok girlies were onto something with this one. It's pretty good.
Lindy
Yeah, it rocks.
Virginia
All right. Well, Lindy, this was amazing. Thank you so, so much for doing this. I could talk to you all day. So fun.
Lindy
I know, likewise. Really fun. Thank you for having me. Wait, it's over? We're not talking anymore?
Virginia
I mean, we can hang out all day, but you should probably tell folks where they can find you and support your work and all that stuff.
Lindy
Oh, my God, yes. Ok, so first and foremost, Adult Braces comes out March 10.
I'm going on book tour from March 10 through basically the end of April, so you can come see me all over the country. I'm doing the book tour in a van as a road trip. Please follow me on Instagram @thelindywest. I will be travel vlogging from the road.
Also, I've got a podcast. Text Me Back!!! podcast. You should listen to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. What else do I have? I have a Substack called Butt News, which is mostly about movies, although lately I haven't been writing about movies so much because I've been doing makeup tutorials, because, again, I'm learning how to be an influencer. Those are really fun.
Oh, if you live in Oklahoma City, I'm doing my one woman show, Every Castle, Ranked at the Oklahoma City Repertory Theater in April. I don't remember the dates. For two weeks in April, there's a bunch of a bunch of dates. If you live within six hours of Oklahoma City, you should come. It's going to be really fun.
Editor's note: Lindy will be at the Oklahoma City Repertory Theater April 10-19.
Virginia
I live nowhere near Oklahoma City, and I feel a strong sense of FOMO about this. Sounds amazing. Please do an east coast version.
Lindy
I want to do, eventually, a full tour of it, but I don't know how to book a theatrical tour. As soon as I figure that out, I will be there.
Virginia
Great, perfect.
Lindy
Thank you. Thanks to everyone who in the future comes to my book tour. I can't wait to see you.
Virginia
Yay! Awesome. Thank you so much. This was great.
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The Burnt Toast podcast is hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow Virginia on Instagram and Threads 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.
This podcast is produced by Kim Baldwin. You can follow Kim at @theblondemule on all platforms and subscribe to her newsletter at The Blonde Mule.
The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.
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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!
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