Like, okay, you think being fat is unhealthy, or you think being gay is wrong and trans people are going to hell, but. She kind of gets to the root of something I've always wondered about, which is: why do you fucking care? This can apply to a number of things. Lindy West claims her fatness in this book, rejects condescending 'kind' words like 'big', and smashes all the arguments that concerned thin people come up with. While this sells itself as being about a 'loud' woman, I'd say it's more about being a fat woman. There is not a thin woman inside me, awaiting excavation. When my body gets bigger, it is still me. When my body gets smaller, it is still me. If you admit the most humiliating things you've ever done, if you say the most creative insults about yourself before anyone else can, what has anyone got to hold over you? I imagine the latter was therapeutic and, in many ways, empowering. She swears, she uses funny footnotes, she admits to some of the most embarrassing things that have ever happened to her. West has a really engaging conversational writing style. BUT I started reading this yesterday evening and stayed up late until I'd finished it. I had also never heard of the author before reading it (though I now realize I had actually read a couple of her articles in the past). I'm not sure why, as I didn't even really know what it was about outside what the title told me. Of all the feminist non-fiction books I've had on my to-read list, this one was calling to me the least. 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. 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.

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.įrom 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.

Notes from a loud woman