Lindy West

Harvard Book Store welcomes The Guardian columnist and GQ magazine culture writer LINDY WEST for the paperback release of her critically-acclaimed memoir, Shrill.

About Shrill

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.

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.

Praise

"Lindy West's memoir is a witty and cathartic take on toxic misogyny and fat shaming. 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

"Uproariously funny . . . Readers will delight in West's biting clarity . . . Despite its serious subject, West's ribald jokes, hilarious tirades, and raucous confessions keep her memoir skipping merrily along as she jumps from painful confession to powerful epiphany. Sure to be a boon for anyone who has struggled with body image, Shrill is a triumphant, exacting, absorbing memoir that will lay new groundwork for the way we talk about the taboo of being too large." —Booklist, starred review

"There's some beautiful, joyful writing here: West defies cliches both by being persistently hilarious and deeply loving . . . In the same way that West traces the sobering long-term consequences of fighting over big cultural issues in public, she also writes with substance and grace about living in her own body in a way that transcends the sometimes facile cheerleading for body positivity that shows up everywhere, from feminist Tumblrs to the cover of Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue . . . It's not easy to talk about the work and consequences involved in changing the world; we crave triumphal stories and incidents to get outraged by. The strength of Shrill, though, is the way it captures both halves of the equation, the joy of those hard-fought victories and the pain incurred in battle." —The Washington Post