Shrill - Lindy West

My pick for a feminist book for my 2018 Popsugar reading challenge, Shrill is an angry book.  And why shouldn't it be?  Women get the short end of the stick in pretty much every area of life.  West isn't at the very bottom of the social structure--she is straight and white, which are two points in her favor--but she is overweight and loud, which are two things that society does not take kindly to.  Take, for example, the recent internet kerfluffle that was "Describe yourself as if a male author was describing you," in which many older (read: not twenty-three-year-old) and/or overweight women had to point out that either they would automatically be relegated to the role of villain, or they wouldn't be in a book written by a man at all.  West has a career built in comedy, but it's one she fought for tooth and nail against pretty much every odd, and in this book she takes on that, as well as the struggle to just be seen as a person while fat and female.

West is loud.  She is opinionated.  This book has probably made a lot of people angry, because how dare a woman--and a fat one at that--have opinions like that?  How dare a woman not find rape jokes funny?  How dare she not find it flattering that men threaten to rape and kill her for protesting against the very un-funniness of rape jokes?  How dare she put it out that hey, it's hard to be a fat person, so please stop piling on the emotional abuse on top of an already challenged existence?  How dare she suggest that we don't go out of the way to shame and humiliate each other?

Nothing is off limits here, and that's probably one of the things that will make people mad.  West is a modern woman.  She has had an abortion, one she does not regret, though the emotions surrounding it were hard for her.  She is in a relationship with someone of another race.  She has struck out alone, written scathing articles directed at her own editor and climbed a professional ladder.  She has dealt with death and grieving and rejection and basically every sort of humiliation that she could possibly face.  In Shrill, she tears into all of it.  She mourns the loss of her "funny" card, from when the comedy community turned on her for speaking out about rape jokes.  She talks about online harassment, about being absolutely terrified at some of the things anonymous commenters threaten and the personal details they reveal they know, the fear that stalks her at the things they say--Are they watching me?  How do they know that?  She swears, she mocks herself and others, and she is angry, and justified in being so.  The title of the book, cooked up during the 2016 presidential campaigns, is deliberate, because West's anger, like so many other women's, comes to the surface in a time when a populace--including a majority of white women--would elect a sexual predator rather than a woman.

Her writing is good.  It is raw in some instances, but it reads like it seems West would speak, and that makes the book seem like a conversation, and a deeply personal one at that.  Is it the most polished thing in the entire world?  Probably not, because it's hard to be completely polished while being so forthright.  However, West has an extensive journalistic background, and that expertise shows here.  Among her new writing are excerpts of some of her former works, and in reviewing them she adds a few points of polish and remarks on things that she wished she had done, reflecting that not only is she not writing a 260-page rant--this is much more than that, more structured, more thought-out, more everything--but that it's largely her professional growth that has attributed to this.  That said, there are points where her writing is shocking, particularly at the beginning, and I found myself reeling back somewhat.  Maybe a bit more of easing in would have been good for the reader who wasn't quite prepared, but wanted to know--but then again, maybe that would defeat the point.

Overall, a harsh read, but a good and important one nonetheless.

4.5 stars out of 5.