Puberty

Puberty, as Lindy West remembers it, was less a triumphant passage into adulthood than an intrusion into a childhood she did not want to leave. Its significance lies in the contrast between the safety and ease she associated with being a child and the new bodily changes she experienced as confusing, embarrassing, and difficult to discuss. The recollection also looks forward: years later, seeing fat women presented with dignity helped her question the shame that had shaped her understanding of her own body.

Childhood and Resistance to Change

West describes childhood as a fortunate, uncomplicated time, sustained by adults who cared for her and made the world feel warm, orderly, and safe. She had little desire to grow up. Puberty therefore arrived not as a welcome milestone but as one more demand that threatened a life she already liked. Her resistance was rooted in the ordinary security of childhood, as well as in apprehension about what growing up would require of her body.

The prospect of physical change unsettled her before menstruation began. An early exposure to a film scene involving breasts had left her bewildered about what bodies did, while she was already unsure about having a vagina. The idea that it would change further, and that her body would require regular shaving, seemed senseless to her. In her retrospective account, these are not signs of a child who eagerly anticipates maturity; they establish the mismatch between adult expectations of a natural transition and her own unwillingness to welcome it.

West summarizes the experience of puberty as a betrayal by the body. That compressed formulation gives the account its governing perspective: biological change is not presented as an uncomplicated blossoming, but as something that happened to a child who had neither requested it nor found its meaning reassuring. Her comic exaggeration conveys frustration while keeping the underlying unease visible.

Menstruation and Secrecy

The language surrounding periods intensified West’s confusion. Adults and popular explanations could frame menstruation as a celebratory sign of becoming a woman, yet the subject was also treated as private, suitable for closed-door conversations rather than ordinary speech. To her, those messages contradicted one another. The expectation that girls should regard the change positively sat beside a rule that it should remain hidden, making a routine bodily event seem at once ceremonial and forbidden.

West’s account rejects the promise that menstruation would transform a girl into a confident adult. In her recollection, a young person remained essentially the same inexperienced child while having to manage a new monthly occurrence, along with the practical concerns and discomforts associated with it. The prospect of dealing with supplies, cramps, bodily changes, and the possibility of embarrassment at school made adulthood seem less like a reward than an accumulating set of obligations. Her humor is directed at the euphemisms and rituals that obscure those practical realities, not at the child who found them difficult.

Her mother, apparently aware of her anxiety, took her to Growing Up Female, a four-hour mother-daughter puberty class held in the elementary school library on a sunny Saturday. The class discussed reproductive anatomy, including penises and nipples. West recalls that attending did not make the eventual arrival of puberty feel less awkward. The episode distinguishes access to information from emotional readiness: a formal class could explain the subject without dissolving her reluctance to speak about it or experience it.

First Period and Family Consequences

West remembers the arrival of her first period only in fragments and is not certain of the setting. She thinks she may have been swimming near her uncle’s house, at a shallow inlet where the tide covered the exposed flats. What remains in her memory is confusion, panic, and the unfamiliar bathroom where she tried to manage the situation. The uncertainty itself is significant: she says that avoidance had made the memory difficult to retrieve, so the episode is narrated as scattered recollection rather than as a clear, confidently dated scene.

That avoidance continued beyond the first occasion. For years, West did not reliably tell her mother when menstrual supplies had run out. Her mother, who was menopausal, would then have to make a grocery-store trip at inconvenient hours, while West remained silent and cried in the car. The repeated pattern shows how shame could shape a family routine: the difficulty was not only the bodily event, but also the inability to ask for a practical need to be met plainly.

One morning, her mother could not get to the store before work, and West went to school wearing an old-fashioned menstrual pad belt kept in the family first-aid drawer. The incident brings the consequences of silence into a concrete school-day predicament. It also marks the limits of the strategy: avoiding conversation had not made the need disappear, and the lack of supplies left her to use what was available. West presents the memory as an especially low point in a longer history of not speaking up, rather than as a single isolated embarrassment.

Retrospective Meaning

West’s later encounter with Leonard Nimoy’s The Full Body Project offers a contrast to the secrecy and shame that had accompanied her earlier understanding of bodily change. The black-and-white photographs show fat, naked women laughing, embracing, and looking directly at the camera. West had not previously seen women with bodies like hers presented without ridicule. Her first response was discomfort, shaped by the assumption that such bodies should stay hidden; she clicked away, then returned to the images.

That return opened a different possibility. The photographs allowed West to consider that her body did not have to remain a secret and that its value need not depend on the judgment of people who despised fatness. She declined to enroll in another session of a diet program, and the images continued to matter because they offered not an instruction to change her body but an example of bodies like hers being treated with dignity. Nimoy’s work made pride seem possible, including pride in her body rather than pride despite it.

The account does not claim that this later recognition erased her ambivalence: West describes both distress at the stigma attached to being fat and strength in the body she inhabits. Instead, the retrospective connection clarifies how the earlier experience of puberty belonged to a broader struggle over who gets to define a body’s worth. The child who found bodily change confusing and humiliating is remembered alongside the adult who encounters a more affirming image of fat women. Together, those moments make puberty part of a longer history of learning to distinguish bodily experience from the shame imposed on it.