Lindy West is Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman!

 Reviewed in Knox Book Beat, "Body Politic Survival," The Berkeley Times, November 3, 2022.

Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman by Lindy West
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Powerful, strong, smart women. Dynamic women. Women whose gifts won’t be shut up, put down or starved out by persons, cultural conventions nor circumstances. How I love to read their books!
      In Shrill, West grabs and floors taboos head-on: menstruation, shyness, abortion, Internet trolls, male “comedians” who thought rape jokes were funny until she blatantly branded their denial as “It’s About Free Speech, It’s Not About Hating Women.” She even challenged her editor, Dan Savage, when he was swept up in “fat-shaming” in Seattle’s weekly tabloid by volleying back with her column titled “Hello, I Am Fat” and a scathing diatribe about cheap, uncomfortable air travel and nasty fellow passengers.
     Essentially an autobiographical chronology of her essays, she begins “two weeks after the 2016 presidential election” with searing names for the backlash which struck Hillary Clinton down, which now assails Nancy Pelosi (her husband and family) and undergirds issues I call The Body Politic.  

     Ta-Nehisi Coates names it how the weight of prejudice, habit and history “all land, with great violence, upon the body.”     

“I know from experience that shrill bitches get punished” West says, but “I did not anticipate that millions of Americans would be so repulsed by the hubris of female ambition that they would elect a self-professed sexual predator with zero qualifications and fewer scruples.” The U.S. is not done yet, unwisely and unfortunately? We must keep calling out and naming bigotry and hate: who perpetrates it, what they say, where and how they say it; identifying whatever lies, misinformation and/or disinformation is concocted, what is done and said to try to make other people feel less worthy, unsafe, essentially inhuman or "other." An injury to one IS an injury to all. Public, private, online, behind your back or in your face.
     “To be shrill is to reach above your station; to abandon your duty to soothe and please; in short, to be heard.” As we go into the midterms, let us defy the pollsters’ predictions “that white women will pawn their humanity for the (supposed) safety of white supremacy.”  

“Progress is still winning,” she asserts, “Be brave, and be shrill.”

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