Writer Lindy West talks about challenges of being a fat, loud feminist

Writer Lindy West is a fat, loud feminist — and she's proud of that.

But she's also very familiar with the challenges that come with the territory, which she explores in her new book, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman.

West's work has appeared in the Seattle alt-weekly, The Stranger, GQ, The Guardian and Jezebel, and because she's so outspoken, she's often been the target of internet trolls — one of whom she famously tracked down and confronted.

West was in Vancouver Wednesday for a sold-out book reading and discussion, but before that she joined On The Coast host Stephen Quinn for a chat.

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This is a book with a lot of harsh honesty, the title says it all, I guess. Why the word "shrill" as a title?

It encapsulates a lot of concepts I talk about in the book. It's a completely gendered word. We don't use it to refer to men.

We use it exclusively to diminish women's credibility by critiquing their tone, which is an aesthetic complaint, and, of course, aesthetics are constantly used to confine and diminish women.

It's also an example of reclaiming terms that are used to hurt us, 'cause I think that's important to any social justice movement. It's why I call myself fat. And I think if you can take hold of something and define it for yourself and proclaim there's nothing inherently, objectively wrong with it, that takes a lot of the sting out of it.

It's quite a journey you recount where you are comfortable with your own body.

It's a journey I think every single person, but especially every single woman has experienced to some degree. Everybody is policed and held up to an arbitrary, seemingly impossible standard.

I always just felt too big. I was too tall. I just took up more space than the other girls. I was sort of in the way. I would knock things over and I grew up with this feeling of always being out of place and being too big for every room.

That manifested itself in extreme shyness. I tried to make my personality as small as possible in hopes of not being noticed. The book is about unlearning that instinct.

How did you unlearn that, though?

I started reading cultural critiques of bodies and the way we treat people's bodies.

The most helpful thing was looking at pictures of fat people's bodies. Just looking at fashion blogs, which seems so frivolous: it was just fat women in cute clothes and to scroll through those images and look at them and think, is there something objectively ugly about this?

And every single time, I came to the conclusion, no. I couldn't apply those prejudices to myself, either.

You're best known for taking on the rape culture trolls of the internet. Do you on any level understand these people?

I can't say I fully understand because I've never had the instinct to hurt people recreationally, but it's pretty clear that it comes from a place of pain and self loathing. Happy people don't do that.

There is a story I tell in the book about an experience with a troll who made a Twitter account impersonating my dead father. He contacted me and said 'The fact that you seem so happy highlighted my own unhappiness with my own self.'

I ended up interviewing him and had a conversation for several hours, and he was very candid and very self-aware. He hated his body, he hated his job, and he was alone, and it was an easy way to feel in control, I think, to reach out and hurt someone else.

And it had a lot to do with misogyny. There was a reason he chose women as his primary targets.

I think we have some deeply ingrained notions about what a woman's place is.

Women are conditioned to be compliant and caregivers and aesthetically pleasing in a way that's geared towards men, and men are raised in that society too.

When women reject those constraints, it's very jarring, and I think people find it really threatening.

With files from CBC Radio One's On The Coast

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

To hear the full story, click the audio labelled: Lindy West explores being a big, loud feminist in Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman