The Stranger

The Stranger is the Seattle newspaper where Lindy West developed from a freelance writer into a staff film critic, learned the work of running a newspaper, and found the professional community that helped her speak publicly about fatness. In her account, it is at once a place of unusual creative freedom and a workplace where the rhetoric of its editorial director, Dan Savage, could make a fat employee feel that her humanity was under debate. The conflict played out not outside the institution but within a newspaper West loved and had helped build her life around.

A workplace and a school of journalism

West describes The Stranger as the best thing that had happened to her. She entered its theater department as an intern after parlaying clips from parenting magazines into an opportunity there. Freelance writing followed, then a full-time staff position as a film critic. At the paper she learned to write and to run a newspaper from editors David Schmader, Charles Mudede, and Eli Sanders, whose work she had admired since she was a teenager. She remembers an operation willing to take chances, change elections, and let its sections work with nearly unfettered editorial freedom, while balancing ethics with irreverence.

Her assignments reflected that range. Alongside goofy movie reviews, she wrote Chuckletown, USA, Population: Jokes, a column covering Seattle comedy. In December 2006, reviewing Dreamgirls, she published the first fat-positive sentence she had written in a newspaper—or, as she put it, said aloud. The sentence rejected pity for fat people, but publishing it did not yet amount to public self-identification: West worried all day that her editor, who knew what she looked like, might recognize the statement as a disclosure about her own body. The episode shows how a newspaper could offer a platform for a new idea while its author still feared the social consequences of being associated with it.

Editorial culture and Dan Savage

By the time West joined the staff full-time, Dan Savage had moved from editor in chief to editorial director and was less often in the office. His influence, she writes, nevertheless remained pervasive. He convened boisterous, productive meetings, traveled for months and then appeared to question local politicians, and emerged with sharp editorial direction when a difficult story had stalled. He also expected leftover sheet cake from office parties to be left uncovered on his desk. The detail belongs to West’s portrait of a distinctive, lively workplace, not simply to a description of its chain of command.

The paper’s internal lore captured the uncertainty of working for a powerful editor: new employees were taught the maxim “Silence is praise.” If Savage had not made his presence felt, they were doing well. West recalls colleagues turning that pressure into a joke in a Gilbert and Sullivan-style song about him. Her portrait is affectionate and critical at once. Savage had helped shape the publication and made West a writer; she says they had always gotten along, and that she sometimes received his praise. She also describes him as prolific and stubborn, capable of defensiveness and sharpness when criticized. The paper’s creative freedom coexisted with an editorial culture in which the director’s views could be difficult to challenge.

The conflict over fatness

In the mid-to-late 2000s, while West was beginning to question the idea that her worth depended on her weight, Savage repeatedly wrote about what he called an obesity epidemic. West places his position within a broader national campaign that treated fat people as responsible for medical costs, public inconvenience, and threats to children, while presenting contempt as concern for health. Savage objected in particular to fat people who said they were not imminently dying, and defended his refusal to say that someone could be obese and healthy. His 2004 column criticizing women, especially fat women, in low-rise jeans also dismissed concerns that stigmatizing language could contribute to eating disorders.

For West, the issue was personal and institutional. Comments on posts about fatness included degrading and threatening imagery, and readers began asking how it felt to work for a boss who seemed to hate her because of her body. She did not believe Savage hated her; she could not reconcile that belief with his continued writing about fat people as objects of contempt. She also worried about fat readers watching her remain silent, and about what that silence implied regarding her own complicity. Her criticism extended beyond Savage’s tone: she argued that blaming fat individuals obscured systemic conditions, including poverty, food access, public infrastructure, and failures in the health-care system.

West first confronted Savage privately by email in November 2009, asking him to remember the humanity and complex lives of fat people, including people on his staff. In her recollection, she pleaded for compassion and explained the harm of hearing a boss repeat insults used against her throughout her life. The attempt did not change the pattern. After a later public post criticizing him also seemed ineffective, she published Hello, I Am Fat on February 11, 2011, on the newspaper’s blog. The post included a full-body photograph taken that day by staff photographer Kelly O and identified her age, height, and weight. It marked her first public, defiant use of the word fat to describe herself.

Public speech, workplace rupture, and continuing ties

The response exposed a painful divide between the newspaper as West’s professional home and the newspaper as the platform for a dispute with its editorial director. The day after her post, a staff meeting addressed how West had hurt Savage’s feelings without addressing the climate that had led her to write. She considered quitting, but The Stranger meant too much to her: it was where she had found her voice and a family that had encouraged her to use it. She could not then imagine a life beyond the office, and she still loved working for Savage.

West dropped the argument and the paper returned to its ordinary work of getting the paper out. At the same time, fat readers—friends and strangers—wrote to say the post had helped them set boundaries or look at themselves with care rather than disgust. Those responses gave the publication’s platform a consequence beyond the internal dispute: a personal disclosure made at work reached readers who used it in their own lives. A few weeks later, West and Savage met for beer and soft pretzels to make sure they were on good terms. The account does not present that meeting as a resolution of the underlying disagreement; it shows instead how professional routine and personal attachment resumed alongside the public challenge.

The Stranger remains central to West’s account of how her writing and public voice took shape. She later thanked her Stranger family among the communities that supported her book. That continuing sense of belonging does not erase the conflict. The newspaper’s significance lies in the tension between its freedom to publish irreverent, consequential work and the harm West says its fat-focused rhetoric could sustain—even for a colleague whose career the same institution had helped make.