Title: Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

Author: Lindy West

Publisher: Hachette Books 2016

Genre: Nonfiction

Pages: 272

Rating: 4/5 stars

Reading Challenges: 

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 humorist Lindy 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.

One of my book clubs picked West’s newer book, The Witches are Coming, as our July selection. But on eof the members said that we should read her first book before if we could. SO I grabbed it from the library and started reading. Overall, I really enjoyed this collection of essays focused on identity and sexism. I really enjoyed West’s voice throughout the stories. Often I was laughing and then crying, all in the same 5 pages. There are some really powerful messages in this collection. My issue with most essay collections, is that the message started to become repetitive when reading them all in a row. I think i prefer collections where there are multiple authors writing about a topic. Still a good read.

Next up on the TBR pile: