Adrienne Truscott was inspired by the life of Victoria Woodhull. Photograph: Tim Knox

On the fateful day of this story, I was 25, hungover and two-thirds of the way through her biography. She was an inspired, brilliant provocateur partial to saying things like this in America in the 1800s:

It makes no difference who or what you are, old or young, black or white, pagan, Jew, or Christian, I want to love you all and be loved by you all, and I mean to have your love.

I found her magnificent. She was to be loved, but not trifled with.

I was on my way to a small cafe on New York’s Upper East Side, where it is not unheard of for the egregiously wealthy and overly-tended-to patrons to ask their waitress to turn the pages of their newspaper while they read it. A waitress had once been asked to raise a coffee cup to a patron’s lips. I was the gal waitressing, a questionable trade I had been plying for about 10 years by then, a period in which I was also a prodigious practitioner of free love – by which I mean plentiful, without gendered preference and uncompensated.

I had taken the train to work, bleary-eyed and paying the price of the previous night’s intake, but awakened in spirit a bit by reading Victoria’s biography. The ardent, passionate, highfalutin language of her feminism had been igniting my imagination and awkwardly littering my speech.

As on most mornings, I arrived at the regrettably named Café Word of Mouth with the daily papers, the front pages of which, on this sad day, were reporting a death. Linda McCartney – photographer, musician, vegetarian, humanitarian, mother, shag-haircut-wearer, reluctant keyboard player, iconic rock-star spouse, battler of cancer – had died after a lost fight with this last and least glamorous identity.

It struck me harder than I can explain. Linda McCartney had always ignited confused feelings in me. She seemed pretty rad, but she wasn’t as pretty as most rock wives and had often been described, as though by way of explanation for awkward questions thought but never asked, as “not conventionally pretty”. She was certainly no Anita Pallenberg or Jerry Hall. And this fact alone stirred a profound guilt in me. That I even noticed it, and then, worse, wondered such shallow things as how she and Paul had gotten together.

Anyway, her death was sad, and though I had never before been her singular champion, all that was about to change. Enter a nameless fat fucker, one of an unstoppable army cluttering the Upper East Side: champion of steaks, end-of-year bonuses, cream-based, gout-inducing sauces, tailors who will let out the waists of expensive trousers monthly, unquestioned universal men’s rights and privilege.

Café Word of Mouth’s very first customer of the day was exactly the kind of man who, without the advantage of looks, charisma or grace, and with at best a cartoonist’s dark take on the human form, had somehow succeeded in this world, and very possibly enjoyed the company of women easily his aesthetic superiors, whether for free or by dint of his financial superiority.

Dear reader, I realise these shallow observations may seem unbecoming and unsophisticated, but it’s important that I go on – this man was repugnant. Time and diet had taken their toll. There was no hope even of placing him in the category of the “not conventionally pretty”. This man was hard on the eyes – even my bloodshot, half-lidded and crossed ones.

As he and his equally unattractive male colleague passed me and headed for a table, he picked up the newspaper, looked at Linda on the cover and said this aloud, and without shame of being overheard: “Jesus, she’s so ugly, you’d think cancer would have taken one look at her and run in the opposite direction.”

In that moment, I was as sure as a shitbox that this was one of the most inhumane things I’d ever heard. It was like he was saying this: “She is not pretty enough to live.” Where moments ago my vision was merely blurry with a hangover, I was suddenly blind with rage. The callousness. The cruelty. Most of all, the hypocrisy.

Is it fair to treat a woman worse than a man, and then revile her because she is a woman? Rude contact with facts chased my visions and dreams quickly away, and in their stead I beheld the horrors, the corruption, the evils and hypocrisy of society, and as I stood among them, a great wail of agony went out from my soul.

But I silenced this wail in myself and replaced it with the polite lilt of a waitress working for tips. I approached, I asked questions, I took orders, I smiled tightly and brought coffee, which I was sure I had boiled myself with a burning anger.

The next thing I knew, I was penning a letter to this man à la Victoria Woodhull. I couldn’t give you a reason why it was happening like this. I was more of a John and Yoko girl. But I wrote to him that I had heard his idiotic comment about Linda McCartney and her cancer and lambasted him for his callousness, his unfeeling and abject dismissal of another human being who had done little wrong in the world, his arrogance, his meanness. I employed conjunctions no longer in vogue or even in use.

But I saved the worst for his appearance.

I told him that if the cruelly democratic criteria of cancer’s assault were indeed to baulk and retreat at the challenge of “conventional ugliness”, then his balding, corpulent, mottled, unshapely, narrow-eyed form, itself a display of his ignorance and ugliness, was surely the best insurance he could hope to have for a long and cancer-free life. And I ended it by saying: “What’s the betting that when I give you this note, and say a little coyly, ‘Read this when you have a private moment,’ you will smile knowingly at me and humour yourself that it is a cute, almost conventionally attractive waitress, coming on to you, a man of means.”

He left the restaurant. I walked calmly to the phone and called my boss, an overwhelmed Frenchman who had the day off. I told him he would have to fire me by day’s end, briefly explained the circumstances, ordered lunch and waited. It was a slow day. Lunch was delicious. About an hour passed and then the phone rang and I answered it.

He said: “I want to speak to the manager.” I said: “I am the manager.”

He said: “There’s a waitress there that I want fired.” I said: “I am that waitress.”

He said: “I’m going to tell your boss.”

I said: “I already told him.”

He raged impotently: “You don’t write me a letter like that.” “But I did write you that letter like that, didn’t I?”

“I’ll have you fired,” he said. “I hate this job,” I said.

“You’re in trouble,” he said. “I’m not,” I said. “And you can do nothing right now but know that you’re a bit of a pig.”

I finished out the week there, and Victoria’s biography, as I wasn’t inspired to do my best work on a job I was not sorry I had lost. Word of mouth at the cafe was that I was a goner, though I convinced them to give me an unwarranted two weeks’ severance pay. Unheard of for waitresses. I’m a bit of a huckster too.

A letter arrived before I left, with an imposing letterhead and an address – a last-ditch effort by the puffy patron at trying to have some final word. I showed it to my boyfriend who promptly wrote a letter in return challenging him to a duel at dawn in Central Park attended by his allergist, to defend my honour. That dawn came and went, and no shots were reported.

I’m known for losing things – my keys, my temper, occasionally; when I was 13 my classmates voted me “most likely to lose my head if it wasn’t fastened on”. I’ve lost my head many times since, and just this week I lost a lover and my favourite hat. At least one of them is in the boot of a taxi somewhere in Melbourne. Both will be sorely missed for reasons entirely different.

But that stupid job I lost for Linda and Victoria, and for good. I never waitressed again, and my fortunes have improved since.

• This is an edited extract of Adrienne Truscott’s essay in Between Us: Words of Wit and Wisdom from Women of Letters, published by Viking on 19 November and available as an ebook.