

"It made me hurt, both from laughing and crying. She comes to accept her body just as Internet trolls congregate en masse to try to rip this new confidence from her, but she's rearing to fight back.In Shrill, West is our fat, ferocious, and funny avenging angel."― NPR, Best Books of 2016

"Lindy West's memoir is a witty and cathartic take on toxic misogyny and fat shaming. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. 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.


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.Ĭoming 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.
