That passage isn’t a great example, but West’s book is actually the ultimate rejoinder to, as she wrote on Jezebel, “defensive comics wailing about how the ‘thought police’ is ‘silencing’ them.” In Shrill, which charts her journey from painfully shy, self-loathing teenager to outspoken, well-adjusted feminist, West is utterly candid and totally hilarious. “There’s only so much hostility you can absorb before you internalize the rejection, the message that you are not wanted.” “The thought of it floods me with a heavy, panicked dread,” writes West in her new memoir-in-essays, Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman. The experience also ruined stand-up for her. Several years ago, in the aftermath of the now-infamous Daniel Tosh rape joke ruckus, the then-Jezebel writer and lifelong comedy obsessive Lindy West wrote “ How to Make a Rape Joke,” a screed against Tosh and his defenders that went viral, landed West a TV spot debating the comic Jim Norton, earned her a scourge of Twitter hatred, and solidified hers as a major voice in the discourse on identity politics.
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