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Summary
Summary
Shrill is an uproarious memoir, a feminist rallying cry in a world that thinks gender politics are tedious and that women, especially feminists, can't be funny.
Coming of age in a culture that demands women be as small, quiet, and compliant as possible -- like a porcelain dove that will also have sex with you -- writer and humoristLindy West quickly discovered that she was anything but.
From a painfully shy childhood in which she tried, unsuccessfully, to hide her big body and even bigger opinions; to her public war with stand-up comedians over rape jokes; to her struggle to convince herself, and then the world, that fat people have value; to her accidental activism and never-ending battle royale with Internet trolls, Lindy narrates her life with a blend of humor and pathos that manages to make a trip to the abortion clinic funny and wring tears out of a story about diarrhea.
With inimitable good humor, vulnerability, and boundless charm, Lindy boldly shares how to survive in a world where not all stories are created equal and not all bodies are treated with equal respect, and how to weather hatred, loneliness, harassment, and loss, and walk away laughing. Shrill provocatively dissects what it means to become self-aware the hard way, to go from wanting to be silent and invisible to earning a living defending the silenced in all caps.
Author Notes
Lindy West is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times . She is the bestselling author of Shrill , a memoir which has been adapted into a Hulu series starring Aidy Bryant, and a forthcoming book entitled The Witches Are Coming . She lives in Seattle.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
West, a GQ culture writer and former staff writer for Jezebel, balances humor with a rare honesty and introspection in her debut. Over the course of the book, West details finding her voice as a writer and a feminist through stories about her family, her weight, having an abortion, and the emotional toil of being harassed online. West's chronicle of the series of highly personal online attacks-and of how much Internet conversations have changed in the past decade-marks this book as required reading. Always entertaining and relatable, West writes openly and with clear eyes about embarrassing moments and self-esteem issues, and has a remarkable ability to move among lightheartedness, heavy hitting topics, and what it means to be a good person. By reading about West's thought-provoking responses to online rape jokes, gender-specific attacks, and being trolled about a family tragedy, readers learn by example how to navigate the Internet's sometimes soul-sucking terrain with dignity and retain a sense of adventure. Agent: Gary Morris, David Black Agency. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In this uproariously funny debut, West, GQ writer and fat-acceptance activist, blends memoir, social commentary, and ribald comedy in a biting manifesto. Starting with the admission that she was not at all happy to get her period, West describes her inspiring progression from body hate to body love. Readers will delight in West's clarity as she describes her childhood (there are no positive depictions of fat people in Disney) and beliefs (why it's so offensive to ask fat people where they get their confidence), illuminating the insidious way our culture regards those who are overweight as subhuman and revolting moral and intellectual failures. She debunks objections to the obese as a drain on health care and advocates movingly for empathy because it's hard being fat. Despite the book's serious subject, West's ribald jokes, hilarious tirades, and raucous confessions keep her narrative skipping merrily along as she jumps from painful confession to powerful epiphany. Sure to be a boon for anyone who has struggled with body image, Shrill is a triumphant, exacting, absorbing memoir that will lay new groundwork for the way we talk about the taboo of being too large.--Grant, Sarah Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THIS PAST APRIL, editors at The Guardian published the results of a study that analyzed more than 70 million reader comments posted on the news site since 1999. Special attention was paid to the 1.4 million that had been blocked or deleted by moderators for violating community standards. Of the 10 authors who saw the most harassment - whose articles were most routinely met with hostile comments ranging from condescending to life-threatening - eight were women; the two men were black. The No. 1 recipient of such passionate expressions of free speech as "I hope you perish in a gasoline-explosion-induced car crash" was Jessica Valenti. This is not Valenti's first rodeo. A long-time blogger and a co-founder of the site Feministing, she is, at 37, now among the old guard of professional feminists who made their careers online. Since starting the blog in 2004, she has written four low-threshold-to-entry books on women's issues aimed at a general readership: "Why Have Kids?," about parenting; "The Purity Myth," about society's fixation on chastity; "He's a Stud, She's a Slut," about the sexual double standard; and "Full Frontal Feminism," a gateway text for young women who might fear the F-word but still align with its message. Not exactly cutting-edge stuff, but feminism is equal parts philosophy and praxis, and reactionaries are born every day. Should the thought occur to you that Valenti's beat is old news, that we've moved past it and should have more interesting questions to tackle, I suggest you read the comments. Valenti's commitment to holding the line for a certain common-denominator feminism in hostile territory is admirable. This is thankless work, and after more than a decade of it she is clearly tired. "I know I'm meant to be the bigger person," she writes in "Sex Object," her latest, addressing the anonymous men who flood her inbox with threats and insults. "I know you're not supposed to hate people because hate is bad for your soul." But so is knowing that "whatever you work on, whoever you are, the nameless horde of random people who go home at night and kiss their wives and children would like for you to disappear." Likewise, of the men who approach her after speaking engagements: "I have become too exhausted with men online to interact with well-meaning information seekers in real life." Of putting on a brave face and laughing off offenses: "This sort of posturing is a performance that requires strength I do not have anymore." "Sex Object" is Valenti's first memoir, and it sets out to tell the story of how women manage the expectation that they exist as vehicles for male desire first and as human beings second, and only once the primary aim is achieved. An ambitious person, young Valenti took the perfectionist's course: "If I was going to be a sex object, I was going to be the best sex object I could be." But the real story of "Sex Object" is one of burnout. Colorful material - coke binges, hospitalizations, the discovery that a stranger on the subway has ejaculated on her pants - is told straight, with minimal energy. The men who appear, two-dimensional figures with monosyllabic names, run together in a laundry list of half-sketched disappointments and transgressions. The writing that feels truest to life describes Valenti feeling sapped of it. Nowhere is it written that losing steam, or hope, is a betrayal of the feminist project. But Valenti is nevertheless on the defensive: "The feminism that's popular right now is largely grounded in using optimism and humor to undo the damage that sexism has wrought," she writes. "No one wants to listen to our sad stories unless they are smoothed over with a joke or nice melody. ... No one wants to hear a woman talking or writing about pain in a way that suggests that it doesn't end. Without a pat solution, silver lining or happy ending, we're just complainers - downers who don't realize how good we actually have it." Maybe, she offers, "it's O.K. if we don't want to be inspirational just this once." It is O.K., of course, and perhaps there's no better illustration of the way everyday sexism grinds one down than the fatigue that drags on this book. But Valenti short-sells her peers when she suggests humor is a pandering concession or a rictus grin women must wear to mask their pain. Humor needn't be a diluting agent; it can be a Trojan horse. As the saying goes, if you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, or they'll try to kill you. Lindy West, another American columnist at The Guardian who built her career writing online, has changed more minds this way than you could count. One of the most distinctive voices advancing feminist politics through humor, West is behind a handful of popular pieces - "How to Make a Rape Joke" on Jezebel, "Hello, I Am Fat" on The Stranger's blog, "Ask Not for Whom the Bell Trolls; It Trolls for Thee" on "This American Life" - that have helped shift mainstream attitudes about body image, comedy and online harassment over the past several years. Culture molds who we are, West argues, but it's ours to remold in turn. Aesthetic excellence and being a good person are mutually exclusive only to the lazy and insincere. We could keep laughing through "edgy" jokes about race, rape, S.T.I.s and fat people, for instance, but why should we if the jokes aren't funny, and the laughs only prove to someone, somewhere, that they are unlovable? "Isn't it our responsibility, as artists, to keep an eye on which ideas we choose to dump into the water supply?" "Shrill," West's first book, is a director's commentary of sorts on her most memorable stories, several of which are reprinted here. The later essays, about her father's death, are the most ambitious as writing, but the hits hold. My favorite is her work on being fat, the word she prefers. ("I dislike 'big' as a euphemism," she writes, because "I don't want the people who love me to avoid the reality of my body.") With patience, humor and a wildly generous attitude toward her audience - meeting readers at their point of prejudice so that she may, with little visible effort, shepherd them toward a more humane point of view (it's worth noting that West is the only writer to have an internet troll publicly apologize to her on national radio) - she reminds us that "fat people are not having fun on planes. There is no need to make it worse." Before you ask, West knows from diet and exercise: "I know the difference between spelt bread and Ezekiel bread. ... I could teach you the proper form for squats and lunges and kettle bell swings, if you want" - but "the level of restriction that I was told, by professionals, was necessary for me to 'fix' my body essentially precluded any semblance of joyous, fulfilling human life." She decided instead to stop treating her body as a work in progress. Her blood work, if you care to know, is perfect. As a teenager, West thought that "chasing perfection was your duty and your birthright, as a woman, and I would never know what it was like - this thing, this most important thing for girls." Such is the double bind of sex-objecthood: You resent the standards but still want to meet them, because that's the ticket to love. Ultimately, she did come to know this most important thing, and like Valenti, saw the double bind thrown back at her in the form of a contradictory threat, issued from deep inside the great male unconscious of the internet: You are too fat and ugly to rape, but I would rape you anyway. West's humor, I admit, is not always my style. At times it feels juvenile, irritating - "a bit much," as she says. I dislike all caps in print, of which she is fond, because I am NO FUN. Overall, "Shrill" feels hasty and unfinished, less like a book than the assembled material required to consummate a book deal. But no matter, there is good work here that represents a decade of public service for which she deserves years of back pay. If this is the culture industry's way of thanking West, so be it. She deserves the moment in the sun. DAYNA TORTORICI is an editor of n+1.
Guardian Review
West's memoir is full of a wild, joyous vulgarity and ranges from body images and rape threats to puberty and her love for her husband In 2013, Lindy West got a message on Twitter from her dead father. "Embarrassed father of an idiot," his bio said. But no: "My dad was never mean. It couldn't really be from him. Also, he was dead -- just 18 months earlier, I'd watched him turn grey and drown in his own magnificent lungs." Someone wanted to hurt her. At that moment in her career, West was fielding daily online harassment for her opposition to rape jokes in standup comedy. "I was eating 30 rape threats for breakfast at that point (or, more accurately, 'You're fatter than the girls I usually rape' threats)," she writes in this memoir. "No one could touch me any more." But that Twitter message was something different: it was about her dad. "What could I do? It's not illegal to reach elbow-deep into someone's safest, sweetest memories and touch them and twist them and weaponise them to impress the ghost of Lenny Bruce or what-the-fuck-ever." So she wrote about it. And -- as they say -- you won't believe what happened next. The tweeter apologised. "It was the lowest thing I had ever done. When you included it in your latest Jezebel article" -- West was a columnist for the online magazine -- "it finally hit me. There is a living, breathing human being who is reading this shit." In a subsequent conversation on the radio programme This American Life, he said (his name isn't given) he had been overweight, and, as West writes in Shrill, "reading about fat people, particularly fat women, accepting and loving themselves as they were, infuriated him in ways he couldn't articulate at the time". Being a woman means certain men think they have dominion over your body; being a fat woman means they don't bother to hide it. Fatness thus confers a grim power of discernment, an antenna for character that survives even if you become skinny. Fatness gives you an insight into a world of cruelty many people can't imagine. I always like to come across the word "fat" in a snug, happy, adjectival nook somewhere. Fat toffees. Fat salary. Fat grin. Fat as something luxurious, friendly, and plentiful rather than gross and wrong. Because fat is normally one of the bad words, toxic in its blunt monosyllabic force. Fat can't be argued with: it is not just an aesthetic condemnation (You're ugly), it's a moral condemnation (You're lazy). Online, it is spat at women like machine-gun fire. In the real world, "fat" is often replaced with simpering euphemisms such as zaftig, Rubenesque, big, heavy -- with the implication that "fat" is so bad it is literally unspeakable. But West is a witty, joyfully vulgar, and, yes, fat writer unwilling to accept the story that her body is shameful. "Every cell in my body would rather be 'fat' than 'big'," she writes. If being a fat woman gives you a front-row seat on human cruelty, being a woman who writes on the internet pushes you into the arena with the lions. People reveal themselves to you when there is no accountability: behind a screen, you can say almost anything. "Kill yourself, dumb bitch": if you have experienced bias or harassment, talking openly about it will almost certainly bring you more. This is how it goes: let's say somebody makes a rape joke. You object. So people make more rape jokes, except this time they're about you. You object more loudly. Rape jokes are now rape threats, and they're pouring in, a flood of them, every day, except some of them say, "You're too fat to rape", or "Kill yourself, pig lady", because the internet is a place where your most private self is up for mauling, where the rules for how to treat other people don't apply. You push on, even with the grim certainty that describing your pain will invite more. And more pour in, multiplying and multiplying. It is now your job to be mad about it. That is what happened to West. "I never wanted internet trolls to be my beat," she writes. "I wanted to write feminist polemics, jokes about wizards and love letters to John Goodman 's meaty, sexual forearms." Her pain, her body, her fear -- these are now her beats. West's range is wide. Shrill 's early chapters flash with wild, exuberant profanity. She opens with a riff on fat fictional characters, such as the Queen of Hearts from Disney's Alice in Wonderland -- "fat, loud, irrational, violent, overbearing, constantly hitting a hedgehog with a flamingo. Oh, shit. She taught me everything I know." She tackles not just trolls but puberty ("a fancy word for your genitals stabbing you in the back") and early years spent trying to hide her body ("I didn't go swimming for a fucking decade"). Later, she becomes more sober and personal, writing about her father's death and her love for her husband. Shrill mixes humour with pathos so effectively that those qualities magnify each other rather than cancelling each other out. West has somehow stayed open and vulnerable in the face of constant attack, abuse that would turn a lot of people into a brittle shell, instead of a warm, capacious and funny writer. West has made a bargain: paying a price in terms of time and mental health for a chance at fighting both the shadowy beast that is sexist culture and the specific beasts filling her inbox with injunctions to suicide. She knows that in order to do it, she is offering herself up as a sacrifice to them, the beasts who eat your softest and most vulnerable parts and leave you bleeding. She does it because she thinks she can make it better. I hope she's right. I think she is. - Annalisa Quinn.
Library Journal Review
GQ culture writer West's essay collection addresses topics such as fantasy literature, fat acceptance, rape jokes, and being a woman on the Internet with sometimes bittersweet, frequently hilarious results-step five of "How To Stop Being Shy in Eighteen Steps" involves joining a choir with "uniforms that look like menopausal genie costumes." In one of the most powerful pieces, the author describes being targeted by an online troll who had adopted the persona of her late, beloved father (his Twitter bio read "Location: Dirt hole in Seattle"). After writing about the situation for Jezebel.com, West was contacted by the troll, who apologized and agreed to join her on an episode of NPR's "This American Life" to discuss why he'd done such a cruel thing to a complete stranger. West's prose is conversational and friendly in tone, hacking away at the patriarchy with a smile. VERDICT This is a natural fit for fans of Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist, Felicia Day's You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost), and Jenny Lawson's Furiously Happy.-Stephanie Klose, Library -Journal © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Lady Kluck | p. 1 |
Bones | p. 12 |
Are You There, Margaret? It's Me, a Person Who Is Not a Complete Freak | p. 23 |
How to Stop Being Shy in Eighteen Easy Steps | p. 34 |
When Life Gives You Lemons | p. 51 |
You're So Brave for Wearing Clothes and Not Hating Yourself | p. 67 |
The Red Tent | p. 80 |
Hello, I Am Fat | p. 86 |
Why Fat Lady So Mean to Baby Men? | p. 108 |
Strong People Fighting Against the Elements | p. 124 |
The Day I Didn't Fit | p. 134 |
Chuckletown, USA, Population: Jokes | p. 149 |
Death Wish | p. 165 |
It's About Free Speech, It's Not About Hating Women | p. 195 |
The Tree | p. 213 |
The End | p. 223 |
The Beginning | p. 232 |
Slaying the Troll | p. 241 |
Abortion Is Normal, It's Okay to Be Fat, and Women Don't Have to Be Nice to You | p. 255 |
Acknowledgments | p. 259 |