Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman by Lindy West

Fergoodnesssake Go Read This Book! 

Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman by Lindy West

How did I locate this amazing gem at our local library? Did I just browse across it? YES, I think that is how it happened! However it happened, let me just say that, during these early weeks of my job that has had me truly overwhelmed, this book has been a GO-TO, in spite of my busyness. I didn't want to miss a word of it.


Lindy West, mostly according to Wikipedia, is an American writer, comedian and activist. She is the author of the essay collection Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. The topics she writes about include feminism, popular culture, and the fat acceptance movement. But she's so much more than that. She's me. She's you. She's all of us in spades.

Her realism had me literally laughing out loud, crying, again laughing out loud, and then closing the book to think...all in about a two page tirade...just READ IT. 

West uses her platform to talk about being fat. Yes. Fat. I have always lived in a culture of tiny*; so have you. Tiny waists, tiny bottoms, tiny tops, tiny necks, tiny ring fingers, tiny thighs (PLEASE get the center fat from your thighs removed so that the thighs no longer touch each other!), tiny feet, tiny wrists. We have all lived in this weird cultural obsession with thin. Not healthy, thin. We barely see it, we barely notice its power. But it's there and it's in our heads.

We females and males who are "larger" know that moment that someone looks from our eyes to our hips, to our thighs, to our oversized tunic. We know the second we're so very seen and unseen at the same moment. We know the exact second the other person's eyes squint in frustration at having to be exposed to "larger". It's unfair to them. It's uncomfortable for them. 
We're SO sorry.

Lindy West opened my eyes to this in this book full of essays that range in subject from Kick Ass Femaling to Body Pride to the hilariously unfunny career of comedians to The Abortion Story to painful relationships that make you laugh until you cry to revolutionary self love to self loving ANYWAY to those compromising, painful years of young adulthood. Shrill is the book I've been looking for this year. All I can do is share some moments from the book with you and hope you'll go out and get it. It's about body positivity, yes, but it's SO much more.
Go get it.
Because I care about you; I want you to read it.

Here are a few of my favorites:

I believe unconditionally in the right of people with uteruses to decide what grows inside of their body and feeds on their blood and endangers their life and reroutes their future. There are no ‘good’ abortions and ‘bad’ abortions, there are only pregnant people who want them and pregnant people who don’t, pregnant people who have access and support and pregnant people who face institutional roadblocks and lies.
For that reason, we simply must talk about it.

I reject the notion that thinness is the goal,that thin = better—that I am an unfinished thing and that my life can really start when I lose weight.That then I will be a real person and have finally succeeded as a woman.

I am not going to waste another second of my life thinking about this. I don’t want to have another fucking conversation with another fucking woman about what she’s eating or not eating or regrets eating or pretends to not regret eating to mask the regret.

OOPS I JUST YAWNED TO DEATH.

Please don’t forget: I am my body. When my body gets smaller, it is still me. When my body gets bigger, it is still me. There is not a thin woman inside me, awaiting excavation. I am one piece.

One time, I noticed that the little waxy strips you peel off the maxi pad adhesive were printed, over and over, with a slogan: 'Kotex Understands.' In the worst moments, when my period felt like a death - the death of innocence, the death of safety, the harbinger of a world where I was too fat, too weird, too childish, too ungainly - I'd sit hunched over on the toilet and stare at that slogan, and I'd cry. Kotex understands. Somebody, somewhere, understands.

When I look at photographs of my twenty-two-year-old self, so convinced of her own defectiveness, I see a perfectly normal girl and I think about aliens. If an alien came to earth - a gaseous orb or a polyamorous cat person or whatever - it wouldn't even be able to tell the difference between me and Angelina Jolie, let alone rank us by hotness. It'd be like, 'Uh, yeah, so those ones have the under-the-face fat sacks, and the other kind has that dangly pants nose. Fuck, these things are gross. I can't wait to get back to the omnidirectional orgy gardens of Vlaxnoid 7.

...who decided that “astronaut” would be a great dream job for a kid? It’s like 97 percent math, 1 percent breathing some Russian dude’s farts, 1 percent dying, and 1 percent eating awesome powdered ice cream. If you’re the very luckiest kind of astronaut ever, your big payoff is that you get to visit a barren airless wasteland for five minutes, do some more math, and then go home—ice cream not guaranteed. Anyway, loophole: I can already buy astronaut ice cream at the Science Center, no math or dying required. Lindy, 1; astronauts nada. (Unless you get points for debilitating low bone density, in which case… I concede.) Not

Feminists don’t single out rape jokes because rape is “worse” than other crimes—we single them out because we live in a culture that actively strives to shrink the definition of sexual assault; that casts stalking behaviors as romance; blames victims for wearing the wrong clothes, walking through the wrong neighborhood, or flirting with the wrong person; bends over backwards to excuse boys-will-be-boys misogyny; makes the emotional and social costs of reporting a rape prohibitively high; pretends that false accusations are a more dire problem than actual assaults; elects officials who tell rape victims that their sexual violation was “god’s plan”; and convicts in less than 5 percent of rape cases that go to trial.

I had been erroneously led to believe that “veterinarian” was the grown-up term for “professional animal-petter.

The active ingredient in period stigma is misogyny.

As a woman, my body is scrutinized, policed, and treated as a public commodity. As a fat woman, my body is also lampooned, openly reviled, and associated with moral and intellectual failure. My body limits my job prospects, access to medical care and fair trials, and – the one thing Hollywood movies and Internet trolls most agree on – my ability to be loved. So the subtext, when a thin person asks a fat person, ‘Where do you get your confidence?’ is, ‘You must be some sort of alien because if I looked like you, I would definitely throw myself into the sea.”

When you raise every woman to believe that we are insignificant, that we are broken, that we are sick, that the only cure is starvation and restraint and smallness; when you pit women against one another, keep us shackled by shame and hunger, obsessing over our flaws rather than our power and potential; when you leverage all of that to sap our money and our time—that moves the rudder of the world. It steers humanity toward conservatism and walls and the narrow interests of men, and it keeps us adrift in waters where women’s safety and humanity are secondary to men’s pleasure and convenience.

To be shrill is to reach above your station; to abandon your duty to soothe and please; in short, to be heard.

And for those of you who wondered if I would ever give out full stars for a book review, today is the day and I thank Lindy West from the bottom of my heart for Shrill.

*  Except for the HUGE hair and shoulder pads of the 80s.