Lindy West privately writing to Dan Savage to oppose his anti-fat remarks

Lindy West privately writing to Dan Savage to oppose his anti-fat remarks was an early attempt to make a personal and professional injury legible to the person producing it. In November 2009, West e-mailed her boss about his writing on fatness, asking him to recognize that fat people were human beings rather than targets for familiar contempt. The correspondence did not change his public commentary, but it clarified the limits of a private appeal and became part of the path toward West’s public self-identification as fat.

Background and Stakes

The exchange took place as West was beginning to reconsider the shame she had attached to her own body. Around that period, she encountered The Full Body Project, Leonard Nimoy’s photographs of fat women shown laughing, embracing, and looking directly at the camera. She first clicked away, then returned to the images. Their presentation of fat bodies without ridicule unsettled the assumption that such bodies had to remain hidden. West began to consider that her body did not need to be a secret and that its value need not depend on the judgment of strangers.

That shift stood against a wider public climate. In the mid-to-late 2000s, Savage repeatedly wrote about what he called an obesity epidemic, amid a national campaign against fatness. West understood the rhetoric as routinely presenting fat people as unattractive, irresponsible, costly, or harmful to others, with concern for health serving as its justification. She objected not only to the claims themselves but to their force in a culture where fat people were already widely stigmatized.

Savage’s stated position particularly troubled her because he rejected the idea that a person could be both obese and healthy. West saw this as defending a restrictive public-health claim while dismissing the possibility that fat people might speak for their own lives and well-being. Her disagreement was not abstract: she was a fat writer on Savage’s staff, and his arguments reached readers alongside her own work.

Workplace Pressure and the Decision to Write

The workplace made the conflict immediate. West’s writing appeared in the same newspaper where Savage published his views, and he was her boss and the person who had made her a writer. She was earning $36,000 a year there. Comments on posts about fatness included abusive and threatening remarks, and some commenters explicitly connected her body to Savage’s opinions, asking how it felt to have a boss who supposedly despised her. The online hostility turned his public rhetoric into a question about her standing at work and whether she could safely object to it.

West knew that she and Savage had generally gotten along, and that he had sometimes praised her work. Still, she wondered why he continued writing about fat people without considering how those arguments affected a fat colleague. She also worried about readers who might interpret her silence as agreement. The issue therefore involved more than whether Savage personally disliked her: his position circulated under the authority of the same workplace that employed her, while her silence risked being read as complicity or self-rejection.

Before writing privately, West had been trying to manage her visibility and pursue recognition through being capable, friendly, and good at her job. She later grouped the e-mail with those efforts and with a brief public challenge to Savage, all of which she felt had failed to make the harm count. The decision to write was an attempt to address the source directly before escalating into a public confrontation.

The Private E-mail

West sent the message in November 2009. When she later revisited the exchange while writing her book, she found that her memory of the e-mail as timid and pleading did not match the original. The message was pointed and irreverent: it challenged Savage’s depiction of fat people as though they were advocating constant overeating or claiming that fatness carried no risks. West argued that his position repeated a stereotype already dominant in public culture rather than breaking new ground.

She also described the consequence for her personally. Fat-targeted abuse was already reaching her online; now commenters invoked her boss’s writing to frame her as the object of his contempt. West told him that she did not want to face further abuse from inside her own workplace. Her appeal thus joined a critique of the argument to a concrete account of its effects on an employee and colleague.

Savage’s reply was brief. He asked whether West had ever detected personal animus from him. She answered that she had not, clarifying that personal hostility was not her point. Savage then treated her criticism as an accusation that he was a bigot, despite her distinction between his personal feelings and the effects of his public writing. West later characterized this response as a deliberate evasion: the exchange had shifted from what his words did to whether he, as an individual, harbored animus toward her.

West followed up by restating that fat people already knew they were stigmatized, and that she did not believe he personally was a bigot but thought he was behaving like one. She emphasized that the subject was painful in her daily life. Savage did not write back. They did not discuss the exchange at the office.

Aftermath and Significance

The private appeal produced no discernible change in Savage’s writing. For the next year, he continued posting semi-regularly about the supposed horrors of the obesity epidemic, while West returned to ignoring the subject. The silence between them did not resolve the conflict; it left the workplace and public argument substantially as they had been.

West later placed the e-mail in a sequence of unsuccessful efforts: trying to earn recognition by being good at her job, privately telling Savage that his writing harmed her, and making a quick, vague public criticism. Looking back, she remembered how frightening it had been to send the message, how quickly Savage had dismissed its central concern, and how soon his commentary resumed. That retrospective contrast between her remembered timidity and the sharper original e-mail also records a change in her own account of the event: she was not merely asking for personal reassurance but challenging a public argument that shaped how fat people were treated.

On February 11, 2011, after another exchange with no response, West published Hello, I Am Fat, a public essay accompanied by a full-body photograph and a caption identifying her age, height, and weight. She described the post as a decisive act of self-determination and noted that before then she had used the word fat publicly neither as an identity nor without shame. The private e-mail did not itself bring about that public declaration, but its failure became part of the sequence that led her to stop treating a private appeal as sufficient. The action matters as an early instance of West naming the gap between a colleague’s personal regard and the effects of his published words—and of her effort to make that gap impossible to dismiss as merely private.