The Good Witch of the Northwest

Lindy West is sitting in a director’s chair—so big, she says, it’s “almost a hammock”—in a Portland, Oregon warehouse filled with cameras and an inordinate number of crew members with handlebar mustaches. As she glances up at the monitors, watching actors repeat lines she helped write, she reflects on her hypothetical death.

“I was exhausted, but I felt proud of myself,” she says of a recent six-mile mountain hike across often treacherous terrain. As she was traversing a high, narrow trail, she crossed paths with three other hikers, all young and fit.

“I had this realization that if one of them accidentally bumped me off the trail and I tumbled down this ravine, and if someone caught it on video, people would think it was funny,” she says. “It wouldn’t be ‘Woman Tragically Plummets to Her Death.’ It would be ‘Look at the Fatty Roll.’ ”

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or nod grimly when West shares stories like this. The 37-year-old writer and producer has made a career of this balancing act, pointing out injustice while also being one of the most uproarious social critics of her generation.

Dressed in a Queen T-shirt knotted at the belly and a form-fitting leopard-skin skirt, West exudes fabulousness with just a hint of I’m not entirely sure about this. She’s also exhausted. They’re in the final weeks of shooting the second season of Shrill, a series inspired by her best-selling essay collection of the same name. (The show returns to Hulu in January.) The first season was beloved by both critics and viewers, and the show was promptly renewed. The pressure is on to keep the bar high.

“It feels like a lot more responsibility,” she says, keeping an eye on a scene in which Aidy Bryant, the Saturday Night Live regular and Shrill’s lead, gets into a heated exchange with her fictional boyfriend. “I’m glad I wasn’t given this kind of long leash when I was 23. I probably would’ve made something really bad.”

Over the course of the day, West mentions several times that for most of her career it was just her on a couch, wrestling words out of her head in an otherwise empty apartment. Now she’s sitting in a crowded soundstage where “there are always a million moving parts and a million things to do. Sometimes it’s a last-minute zhuzhing of the script, and sometimes it’s the props department needing me to sign off on some tiny detail that viewers probably won’t even notice.”

Shrill the TV show follows Annie Easton, a character loosely based on West. While the similarities between the two are hard to miss—both Easton and West are writers living in the Pacific Northwest who champion fat-positivity and get hounded by trolls, oblivious passersby and many others—the fictional counterpart has a long way to go before she reaches present-day Lindy-ness.

“I’ll watch a scene and be like, “Aw, Aidy is the prettiest leading lady I ever saw.’”

“She doesn’t seem like a character who’d be like, ‘Yes, I’m a witch and I’m hunting you,’ ” West says, referring to her recent book of essays, The Witches Are Coming. (The title is from her 2017 New York Times op-ed about #MeToo blowback and men bemoaning “witch hunts” despite “millenniums of treating women like prey.”) Of the character’s development she adds, “I think we’re going to move in that direction slowly. It’s her journey toward becoming shrill, or learning how to own that.”

West is long past learning how to embrace her inner shrill. She practically owns the word now. She built a career as an outsider critic and satirist of misogynist culture, but she’s no longer an outsider; she’s a best-selling author and a writer and executive producer on a hugely successful TV show.

The subtitle for her first book is Notes From a Loud Woman. But she doesn’t need to be loud anymore. Everyone is listening.

Which isn’t to say she shouldn’t be loud. The rules change, however, when the world has stopped shushing you, when outlets like The Guardian and The New York Times are lining up to offer you regular columns and Elizabeth Banks wants to produce a TV show with you. Being loud is a weapon of the ignored and disenfranchised (and, of course, of angry mobs with digital pitchforks), not so much somebody who has the spotlight and a captive audience.

“I was so desperate to make people laugh,” West says of her younger self. “I was afraid to be sincere, because it’s vulnerable.”

It makes you wonder what, if anything, she’s scared of now.

“You think?”

West wrinkles her nose, not sure if she wants to take a compliment. We’re in Portland’s Pearl District, on a break from the Shrill shoot, and talking about her new book—in particular her essay about the late comedian Joan Rivers that I keep insisting is brilliant. West isn’t so sure.

“I was worried it was dumb,” she says. “I was worried that I was unfairly picking on her.”

I contend that it’s a careful meditation on a woman largely considered a pioneer in comedy. Uncertainty looms over every sentence as West contemplates an icon stuck in a rigged system. “Instead of fighting for us lost, last girls,” she writes, “she turned around and gave worse than she got.”

It’s a far cry from the West of a decade ago. In 2010, when she was a relative unknown writing for the Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger, her caustic reviews of movies such as Sex and the City 2 went viral thanks to snarky but hilarious observations like “What is the lubrication level of Samantha Jones’s 52-year-old vagina?”

West can barely stand to reflect on that early incarnation. “I didn’t know anything,” she says. “I just wanted to be funny. And I was so mean. Some of the stuff that I wrote about people’s work, I would die—I would die if someone wrote that about me.”

She settled into a more confident voice at the self-proclaimed “supposedly feminist website” Jezebel in 2012, where she wrote some of her most challenging and controversial essays on sexism, bigotry and body shaming. She could still be ruthlessly funny, but the stakes were higher, and she was learning how to be more nuanced.

“So much of Lindy’s writing revolves around issues that aren’t black or white,” says Jessica Coen, editor in chief at Jezebel during West’s tenure. “They can’t be distilled down to a single hot take.” Many of the topics she writes about (abortion, fat-phobia) don’t seem like they’d be entertaining, Coen says, but West always pulls it off because “she writes with so much energy and wit, so while the topic itself might not be a delight, reading her always is.”

Comedian Patti Harrison, who has a recurring role on Shrill, was affected by West long before she joined the cast. She recalls watching West debate the topic of rape jokes with comedian Jim Norton on Totally Biased in 2013. West argued that “you don’t get to say that comedy is this sacred, powerful, vital thing that we have to protect because it’s speaking truth to power blah, blah, blah, and then also be like, ‘Well, it’s just a joke—I mean, language doesn’t affect our lives at all, so shut up!’ ” For Harrison, it had a seismic effect on how she approached comedy.

“I was doing improv in college at the time, and I believed nothing should be off limits,” she says. “But Lindy was so funny and so smart. I wanted to be provocative, and I thought you should be able to say anything, but she shifted my thinking.”

When Shrill became a TV show, West was given a chance to shift people’s thinking on a larger scale. She went from commenting on pop culture to being a part of pop culture. But is Shrill changing minds en masse? Or is it just a dot on a TV landscape that idealizes tiny bodies and isn’t about to change because of one norm-busting heroine?

Martha Plimpton, who became friends with West long before she co-founded the #ShoutYourAbortion social media campaign in 2015 with fellow Seattleite Amelia Bonow, says she understands the tug-of-war between idealism and making a commercial product.

“You can’t overhaul the whole fucking system by sheer will alone,” she says. “I’m still figuring it out myself. There are parameters that’ve been set up that you have absolutely zero power to change. You want your producing and activist sides to intersect as much as possible, but you also can’t torture yourself over what you can’t do.”

West, however, is optimistic that Shrill can make an impact. “I can feel it affecting me, and I made it,” she says. “I’ll watch a scene and be like, ‘Aw, Aidy is the prettiest leading lady I ever saw.’ I’m not like, ‘Who is this fat woman?’ Once you start normalizing it in your brain, I think the process happens really fast.”

By way of comparison, she recalls a cultural norm whose evolution she witnessed in her early 20s. “The thing that keeps me going, and I don’t know why I always return to this when I’m feeling stressed, is the smoking ban,” she says. “It seemed unfathomable that you could get people to stop smoking. But then they made a rule, and now it’s unfathomable that bars ever allowed smoking. You can create a new normal, and people who are otherwise resistant will get used to it. You forget what life was like before, you know?”

West still gets hate mail. Just the other day, she tells me over dinner, she received a message from a man who wrote, “You’re stupid and I heard you wrote a stupid book and I hope it tanks.”

But long gone are the days when she would get daily death and rape threats. It’s no coincidence that she left Twitter in January 2017.

West insists it wasn’t the trolls alone that drove her off the platform, but she’s glad that dealing with them is no longer a central part of her job description.

“Why are you entitled to engage with me?” she says of the armies of men who insisted on attacking her—usually anonymously—online. “This is the stuff that started to drive me crazy.” Every time she hit back at the barrage of toxic masculinity, it felt “bad for my mental health,” she says. “I already feel like I have psychological effects from that time of my life when I had to seem impervious to pain. It’s not good for you.” And, she adds, “it’s not good for your brain to be numb to that.”

Eventually West let go—not just of Twitter but of the idea that trolls can be reasoned with, or that there’s value in proving how much abuse you can endure. Through the Twitter breach, she emerged as a woman who’s more focused, more equipped to fuck up the patriarchy. “Hopefully it’s a little bit of a rallying cry,” she says of the “witches” title of her new book.

Her next thought reminds me that, earlier that day, we had spoken of the fears that plagued her as an emerging writer.

“There’s power in this label that people are putting on you, and we can assume that power,” she says. “They’re scared of us.”

West is vague when discussing what’s next for her. More books are likely, and she’ll stay with Shrill for as long as there’s an audience. But she has ambitions that are less about the next career move than, say, exploration.

“I’ve always had the unspoken thought in my head that I can’t go to Japan because I’m too fat,” she says. “I’d just Godzilla the whole place, knock everything over and break all the chairs. But that’s crazy. It’s a regular-size country.”

She’d also like to try downhill skiing or scuba diving, two things that terrify her. But her real dream—— “Here,” she says, pulling out her phone. “I’ll show you.”

As she scrolls through Instagram, she tells me about her friend Jenny, who has recently taken up horseback riding. “Jenny told me to follow this Instagram page called African Horse Safaris. It’s a real service, and you’re basically on a horse that’s galloping across the savanna.”

She hands me her phone and points to a video. A saddle-cam captures a horseback rider chasing a tower of giraffes somewhere in Tanzania.

“Are you kidding me?” she says, laughing. “That’s not CGI, that’s real!”

Does she actually want to go to Africa and ride horses amid the roaring wildlife? “I don’t know. But it’s made me wonder: Is there a reason I couldn’t do it? I’d have to learn how to ride a horse. It’d have to be a big horse. But horses are strong, whatever.”

She keeps flipping through photos and videos. “I’m sure it’s probably scary. But maybe that’s why I need to do it.”

In a weird way, it seems like the perfect next adventure for Lindy West. This is a woman whose entire life has been about doing things that are scary and that the rest of the world told her she couldn’t or shouldn’t be doing. Is there any difference between shouting about your abortion or feeling proud of your body or pushing back against rape humor and riding a horse at top speed across an African savanna?

West smiles, still transfixed by the images of galloping horses on her phone. “I guess we’ll find out.”