Shrill is a series of essays/memoir about being a big, bold woman in a world that demands that we be small, quiet and perfect. Some chapters cover cultural issues from a personal perspective – the disrespect for and devaluing of non-skinny people, the repulsive comedy of rape culture, and the horror of abuse from internet trolls. And some chapters are straight-up memoir, sharing the stories of the author’s life. One of the more fascinating stories she shares is how she took on a public war […]
A Book That Rubs in What We’ve Lost
Like many people, I’m sure, I set out to find some of Carrie Fisher’s writing after hearing of her passing, and crying a lot over various tumblr posts about the fierce, proud, witty, wonderful woman we’d just lost. It was surprisingly easy to get my hands on a copy of Wishful Drinking, Fisher’s short, sharp memoir that’s largely just a collection of anecdotes about her remarkable and exciting life, and I devoured it in a matter of hours. It definitely did not help with the […]
“It’s sort of like glowing in your own dark.”
In honor of the late Carrie Fisher, I picked up her audiobook of Wishful Drinking. This was written/performed about 8 years ago after Ms. Fisher went through electroconvulsive therapy, with a side effect of the therapy affecting her memories. So she wrote the show/book to help her remember. I highly recommend the audiobook version, as Carrie reads/performs her own work. We tend to skip around in time a lot, which I suppose is understandable given her condition. Before I picked this up I really had […]
This kid has had a rough life, I tell you what.
I shoulda done the audio on this one. I’m so used to hearing Hannah’s voice from her own mouth (long time My Drunk Kitchen watcher, since episode 5), I’m sure it would have smoothed over the issues I had with the style this one is written in. It felt simultaneously overwritten and underwritten at various points, like the voice wasn’t completely comfortable with itself. But any issues with the writing aside, it’s hard not to get sucked in to Hannah’s story. She tells it in […]
The town, not the planet
In Dispatches from Pluto, British-born travel writer Richard Grant takes a trip to meet a friend in the Mississippi Delta, and ends up buying her father’s old plantation house. Moving his girlfriend and dog from a tiny Manhattan apartment, they throw themselves into Delta life – battling the snakes, armadillos and sometimes alligators that inhabit their garden, wrangling weeds that grow faster than they can yank them, hunting food for the table, discovering how hard it can be to heat a creaky old house […]
Did I Write a Book and Forget??!
In this fractured, fearful and uncertain climate, one woman is challenging the status quo, speaking truth to power, and asking the questions the system doesn’t want you to ask. That woman is Jessi Klein. Her question: “Seriously, did Richard Gere shove a gerbil up his butt? Like all the way up there? Whatever, I’m just going to believe it’s true.” Now, I’m not going to pretend the occupancy status of American Treasure Mr. Richard Gere’s backdoor is the central thesis of Klein’s […]
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