Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Why is, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” the go-to small talk we make with children?

Shrill by Lindy West

The Witches are Coming by Lindy West

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Shrill 4/5 Stars If you’ve seen the show, you’re already pre-disposed to like this book. If you like this book, that might well have been the reason you watched the show. Regardless, this is a very good memoir, with a clearly defined, already tempered and recognized voice. And I happened to read hear the audiobook version, and that version is good because so much of the book is carefully written in Lindy West’s voice, and she reads the audiobook. While this book touches a little […]

A book for everyone

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(Sidenote: In posting this review, I’m noticing that the Kindle version is just $2.99!) 4.5 stars. As a person in the 21st century who exists both in the real world and the internet world, I had a passing knowledge of who Lindy West was. I had mostly only encountered her work that went viral however, so I didn’t go into this book as a hardcore fangirl, just as an interested bystander. I think after reading this, I can probably be classified as a hardcore fangirl. […]

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This is a 4.5 star reading experience, but I’m rounding it up to five because the audiobook increased my appreciation for Lindy as a writer and overall human person. The essays in this relatively short (but not too short) book cover a range of topics, from living with a female body, period shame, abortion, a multitude of essays covering her experiences across all parts of her life as a fat person, dealing with online trolls, sexism, rape jokes in comedy, the death of a parent, […]

Rest Well, And Dream of Large Women

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In case you haven’t encountered her on the internet, Lindy West is a writer and comedian who battles trolls–the kind that dwell on Twitter instead of beneath bridges. She’s also an audaciously loud, unapologetically fat woman in a world that prefers its women to be quiet and thin. I identified with a lot of what West wrote about in Shrill. Her lifelong struggle with body image issues, her journey to find her voice as a writer, and–most recently–her incredible screw-up of a freelance project. Today, […]

More Like Notes from an Opinionated Woman…

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Maisie Williams got some press at the beginning of the year for the following quote”I also feel like we should stop calling feminists ‘feminists’ and just start calling people who aren’t feminist ‘sexist’ — and then everyone else is just a human. You are either a normal person or a sexist. People get a label when they’re bad.” I feel like I fall into Maisie’s definition of a feminist rather than Lindy West’s more outspoken advocating for the female cause. I didn’t know who West was prior to Shrill (although […]

We’re all building our world, right now, in real time. Let’s build it better.

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I first heard of Lindy West when she did a segment for This American Life where she confronted a troll who had been so hateful as to create a fake account with her recently deceased father’s information just to hurl abuse at her.  She wrote about how much it hurt and the troll actually apologized and took down the site.  Later he was willing to be interviewed by her and talk about his motivations.  It’s an extraordinary moment in journalism. I follow her on twitter […]



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