Book Club: "The Witches are Coming" by Lindy West

In honor of Nonfiction November, we chose Lindy West’s “The Witches Are Coming” as our monthly book club pick. We all read it, then had a lengthy video chat discussing our opinions. (There was wine involved, natch.) Below is a (slightly) edited transcript. Did you read this one yet? We’d love to hear your thoughts on Instagram or in the comments below!

EE: So now shall we talk about white gentrification and fatphobia?

Shannon: Yeah.

Moira: I love it.

Shannon: Wait, can I start because I feel like people, and by people, I mean Momo, assumed that I would like this one. So I want to set the stage.

EE: OK, but should we all set our stage with our familiarity of Lindy West?

Shannon: Yes. So I read “Shrill” in 2016 before the election. So I was in a very different state of mind than present day. And I mean, I read Jezebel, she wrote for Jezebel, right?

Moira and EE: Yes.

Shannon: So I read Jezebel fairly regularly, but I wouldn’t say I sought out Lindy’s stuff in particular. It was more like I just read Jezebel, and I think I followed her on Twitter. Yeah, so that's my background, and also I really liked I liked “Shrill” the TV show quite a bit.

Moira: I loved it.

Shannon: There was an abortion in the first episode which we can get into.

Moira: I, too, read “Shrill.” I read it just under two years ago, I think, and I enjoyed it. But, and we. can revisit this, I had some of the same opinions I had about this one. I read her stuff on Jezebel, and I actually read her on The Stranger, because I used to read Dan Savage’s stuff directly there. So, I think at the time aI had read the “Hello, I’m Fat” back and forth. Anyway, I think I follow her on social media. I’ve heard her stuff on “This American Life.”

Shannon: I did hear that “This American Life” story as well.

Moira: And I really like that.

EE: I've never read anything by Lindy West. This was my first foray. And I have never actually watched the show, which is weird because I feel like it would be right up my alley, but I don’t like to watch things as they come out because I don’t like to think about TV while I watch it.

…I went to Lindy’s reading at Sixth and I. And I thought, “why not, that'll give me like a good indicator of who she is and what she is,” because I'd seen pictures and I knew a little bit about her but not a ton and she's very engaging in person which may have heightened my enjoyment of the talk.

And she read the Ted Bundy chapter, which was a good one for a crowd because it gave her a lot of opportunities to yell about white male privilege, but during the question and answer period…I don't know. It's one of my personal pet peeves when people treat a columnist—no matter how talented they are—like they have like the answer to ending systemic racism in America.

Yeah, and obviously as you both know, I found that a jarring experience because I got called fatphobic because I like walked in the room.

It was just a weird, kind of hostile audience, and I don't know if I am not in the right space, and I’m also not fatphobic, you know, so whatever. And yea, this is my first Lindy experience and I think I’d like “Shrill more.” I love Aidy Bryant, and I remember reading they couldn’t get clothes for her, which is crazy.

So should we start with our rating and then just start talking?

I give it 3.5.

Moira: 3.25

Shannon: 2.75

EE: I couldn't tell as I was reading it who it's for. But it wasn’t for me. It felt like entry level political activism.

Shannon: Yes, which is why I wanted to caveat that I read her first book before the 2016 presidential election, when I obviously had the same beliefs, but I read it thinking Hillary was going to win. It was a very different landscape at the time.

But I just couldn’t tell who this was for. And also, one of the footnotes at the end, I found…she doesn’t really have a unique voice, you know, she writes in internet speak? Like one of the footnotes was just like, “PSA: Rideshares are so cheap bc drivers are being exploited. Bye!” And she was on Twitter for so long and Jezebel but still.

EE: Isn't that her full-time gig now like besides Shrill?

Shannon: She writes op-eds for the Times. I mean this felt like a series of op-eds.

EE: She wanted to go viral.

Shannon: I think the only reason I didn't give it a 2.5 is because I did enjoy the Adam Sandler chapter very much, because I also strongly dislike Adam Sandler and his career.

(Note: this is a recurring theme throughout our discussion.)

Moira: I did like the Adam Sandler chapter, but the last sentence…where she’s like, “women deserve the chance to do more than reflect the glow of men” or whatever, I just feel like she was trying to loop it back clumsily to the central point.

Yeah, so I will say I sort of have a visceral reaction to Lindy West politics: I really hate knee-jerk liberalism, and I'm very liberal.

(We argue about who is the most conservative for a while. It’s a tie between EE and Moira. There is some shaming about the fact that the Washington Post quiz said Moira was supposed to vote for Yang or Buttigieg)

Moira: I find there are two things that that really bother me about Lindy West: she makes these really facile political arguments.

I think she makes intellectually dishonest arguments and I wrote a few down which we can get back to where I can see them now. I think this is also going back to the “Hello, I’m fat” exchange with Dan Savage. And he makes the point in his rebuttal that she searched his columns to find the most offensive things she could and then took them out of context. And I feel like she does that writ large in her books and a few things got me in this one.

So the part where she’s talking about Lil Bub the cat. And she talks about “The Office” and she says something like on TV in 2006 Michael Scott says “I wouldn’t call someone re*****d a re***d.” But the point of that isn’t that Michael Scott is supposed to be so funny and that this is such clever and incisive commentary. The point is that Michael is a total fucking buffoon and we’re supposed to be mad at him for saying that.

And Lindy is smart enough to know that and so it strikes me as really dishonest and and I don't like that at all.

The other thing is where she talks about “Clueless” and the culture of, like, not caring. That’s also not the point. We’re supposed to infer from Cher collecting her skis for the Pismo Beach disaster relief that she’s trying to change. I think Lindy’s smart enough to know exactly what she’s doing and it comes off as cheap to me.

Shannon: Yeah if I recall correctly, Cher wasn't doing the whole thing to get a man…I'm going to go into “Clueless” because I fucking love “Clueless”…

The whole thing about the “don't you think that includes athletic equipment” just shows how in her bubble she was. But she was trying to change.

Moira: Which is the opposite of the point that Lindy was making.

EE: The one thing that really stuck out to me, and I say this as what you would consider a former fat person—like at my largest I was a size (redacted).

Moira: Not everybody’s judgment of you is because you're a fat person, Lindy. And I’m sure some people are assholes but also some don’t like you maybe because you’re a dick.

(We take a moment to drink wine and take a screenshot from our video chat.)

Shannon: Like it’s a very facile understanding of political stuff, it’s entry-level anger.

EE: I also think that we were both spoiled, Shannon, because we both had read Jia Tolentino earlier this year and “Trick Mirror” was so good.

Shannon: It’s so good.

(Note: Shannon reviewed “Trick Mirror” earlier this year.)

Moira: Nice, I need to read it.

Shannon: Like, Jia’s read everything and it was insane and [the Lindy West], I was just like, OK I don't need to read more about this. The take I'm looking for is more like—and this is also me having just read “Catch and Kill”—is something more like, what do you do when the networks we’re supposed to trust like NBC are run by these horrible men and they dictate the news that we get?

Moira: Hey, yeah, I also have this thing with Lindy West humor too, and when you said “Internet speak,” it really resonated with me too—and also it's not just Internet speak, but circa 2007-2009 Internet speak.

Shannon: The era of Jezebel hot takes.

Moira: Yeah, which was funny at the time but we've evolved, right? And then I get that this is a personal thing too, in that there are people who find gross-out humor amusing, but I'm not one of them and and like when you say like “doodie”…

EE: Really kind of your mark for us to discuss was the abortion chapter.

Shannon: That was the one, that and the Adam Sandler one.

I really fucking hate Adam Sandler.

They were my two favorite chapters, but I wish she had talked more about it. It seemed like just an aside that rich women will always be able to get abortions.

She fought really hard (with the networks) because I think it must have been difficult to get an abortion in the pilot (of the Hulu show “Shrill”) where it's just something the character does because she doesn't want to be pregnant and moves on.

Moira: I also would like to caveat that I am extremely pro-choice.

I don't have the same feeling about abortion as Lindy West and I think it's legitimate that people don't grieve after their abortions or I think that's totally fine. I think the extrapolation to happiness after an abortion…

I just feel like can't we universally agree that it be better if you didn't have to have the abortion in the first place.

EE: And I have complicated feelings about this because as a person of faith…

The abortion thing is like intellectually kind of hard for me to understand because I'm also like pretty far far left feminist and like believe it.

You know, like it's taking a lot of intellectual reckoning over the years to come up with my position, which is basically as succinctly said by Amy Poehler: “good for you, not for me.” I'm 33 years old. If I got pregnant tomorrow, I would probably have the baby.

However, if Shannon got pregnant tomorrow and wanted to have an abortion, I'll be the first person to show up and hold her hand. It is just such a personal decision.

I feel like there are so many things that we could do better as a country, like condoms, affordable birth control…

I think you should make the choice that's right for you. I think that it should be safe for everybody. I think it should be available everywhere.

Everything that Alabama has done to abortion makes me want to die inside and renounce my state citizenship.

So I love that she made it available in a TV show and started to remove the stigma and the stigma thing rings a lot of bells because HIV has a lot of stigma. For those of you who are just reading this and don't know me in person. I used to work in HIV/AIDS.

But yeah, I thought this was the most moving chapter of the book. Everything else had a toss-aside pithy message, like basically “white men are bad” and “Donald Trump is going to end the world.”

But this was I thought the best of the book.

Shannon: I'm sure some people grieve after they have an abortion. I'm sure some people don't, so I think that it's important to show different representations and there's usually only one in the media.

If a character ends up having an abortion, it's usually just, they grieve about it or it's a whole thing…and I will die on this hill that Miranda (Hobbes) would have had the abortion.

Moira: Yeah, absolutely.

This is another one where I fall between you guys because I certainly could picture myself having an abortion at earlier times in my life and not not having it be a life-defining experience. I do get concerned when I sense that people are being flippant about it. I think regardless of your concept of at what time life begins, certainly it's a far more complicated issue than birth control and and and I get that there are situations in which it's not preventable.

And I know that “Shrill” does does address the fact that the Morning After pill doesn't work on women who weigh more than 175 pounds or so.

EE: I read that in an article after show came out and I was like “what now?” …Like as a woman who weighs above that.

Moira: It might actually be and in some studies, it's more than 160 pounds.

Shannon: It's a low bar. I weigh more than that. And you can keep that in (the transcript).

(We talk about IUDs and Thinx underwear for awhile.) (RIP Dora, Shannon’s IUD of 1 month.)

EE: Back to abortion.

Shannon: But I mean, the argument that you get to steer your own future—that's not a noteworthy argument in 2019.

EE: That, and I love that she started the “Shout Your Abortion” movement.

(We talk about HIV for a while. We really can’t stay on track.)

Shannon: Well, one line that I underlined.

It seemed like kind of a throwaway line, but I wish that she had talked about it more because the line was, “whatever your sphere is, however big or small, you get to make choices within it, and if you care about healing the wounds of the world, I hope you become a real demon bitch about diversity and never let anyone sleep.”

And, for people who don't know, I work in the beauty industry and I am a demon bitch about diversity. So I wish she had talked about that a little bit more because it's hard sometimes.

But sometimes like as a white woman, I feel like yes, I can talk about diversity. But am I the right voice?

Because I don't want to sound like Lindy West blathering lessons that people already know, and while I want to be an ally, I don't want to feel like condescending and like, we need to have X person here for optics.

Also, when you have four models at a shoot and you want to be representative and diverse, you end up feeling a little tokenistic when you make model requests because you don’t just want 4 white women or 3 white girls and 1 light-skinned woman.

So, we also try to encourage people to speak up about things like this in meetings because it's not just me, even though I’m the one putting briefs together.

(Shannon talks a bit more about how she is a broken record about diversity at work; censored for privacy reasons.)

EE: And for as much as Lindy West screams about diversity, it was 80% white women at the reading.

Moira: So the her sister-in-law wrote a book which I didn't read. “So You Want To Talk About Race?”

Yeah, so did you read the New York Times review of “The Witches are Coming”? It was written by a black woman. The critique was also that she leaves out non-white women.

Shannon: Lindy’s married to a person of color. Obviously now I didn’t realize that was her sister-in-law, but…

As I said, it felt like if I were 19 and didn’t know anything about feminism, this could be the perfect book.

EE: The line I wanted to discuss is, “is there such a thing as a likeable woman?”

Moira: I mean I'm of two minds about this. I struggle with this a lot.

And I think I spend a lot of time on this in therapy but I struggle with like, what space is a woman allowed to take up?

How true to my personality am I allowed to be while still operating in the spheres that I want to operate? I do desire to be liked, I think probably more than the average person. I'm a pleaser.

And I think I have definitely really acutely felt the struggle of “any woman who speaks her mind is strident” and “she's abrasive” and it’s really upsetting to me. However, when you turn that on its head it becomes, “can you never say that a woman is being strident or abrasive?”

I feel from time to time that Lindy West is both of those things in a way that I'd also criticize a man and listen, if I were to face hordes of internet trolls, I would probably be galvanized as well. But I feel like her reaction to criticism is to flop and to default to her status on whatever margins she sees herself to be on and you know probably is on.

I guess she's marginalized. I feel like she defaults to those margins to deal with criticism. And even when the criticism is like “f*** you b****. I'm gonna rape your fat ass,” you know, which is awful…there IS legitimate criticism though, that I feel like she attributes to her size or to being female.

EE: And like and as you said like, well, I am the classic example of a people-pleaser. My Enneagram is 2-wing-3 and INFJ so both of those are like “the helper, the people-pleaser.”

It's something I've been working on in therapy for 15 years and I cannot figure out how to not be concerned about making other people feel okay with my life choices.

So. If anyone has a solution, please comment below.

I wake up at 2:00 in the morning concerned that I hurt somebody's feelings 8 months ago.

Likeability for any human—much less a female human—but I guess in the lead up to 2020.

I've been getting so angry about a glowing media coverage at Pete Buttigieg compared to the much more qualified women in the field.

But my dad was saying somewhat derisive things about Kamala Harris.

And I said, “would you say the same things if that was a white man saying what she said” and he actually took a moment to reflect and said “no, I’m not sure I would.” That's really striking to me and I don't know if I like it's a generational thing or if it's a regional thing or if it's a male/female thing.

We ask our men to be angry and powerful and strong and women in the public eye have to face a very different bar of being likeable. I think it's hitting me with the entire presidential campaign and everything is happening. Like Michael Bloomberg, assuming that he can buy himself a spot in the race is really annoying me in a way that I can't really articulate.

Shannon: Well you know, now someone needs to stop and frisk him on the way to the debate or something.

(Moira makes an off-color joke about Cory Booker)

EE: And I wanted to read this quote, you can fact check me. “We are still told to wring our hands over who is likable who is feminist enough, who is too feminist, or if nominating a woman as a risk worth taking when the alternative is Donald Trump when a woman gets angry the typical responses.”

Bleeding out of what her whatever—say “vagina,” Lindy, be a grown-up.

Shannon: That's a quote from that Donald Trump said about Megyn Kelly.

EE: “She shouldn't have taken all that sexual harassment or her bosses hand on her ass. So personally, it's just mix it mix signals locker room talk. She shouldn't blow it out of proportion of men can choose how they treat us in this. This is the world they choose.” And then she said she ends on what I think is a legitimate point, but also it's a throwaway line and you mentioned that feminism is a collective manifestation of female anger—men suppress her anger for a reason.

Shannon: Yeah, if you want to read a better book about female anger read Rebecca Traister’s “Good and Mad.”

Moira: I also would argue that feminism isn't about female anger at all. I would argue that feminism is about equal social, sexual, political opportunity for men and women and are we angry because of our lack of all those things? Certainly, but at its core is feminism about anger—absolutely fucking not! And it makes me mad that she makes that point because that's what drives the criticism of us. And it's not about anger. The anger is secondary to the cause.

Shannon: I just mean, I think there are better books about female anger.

EE: I mean, I'm angry about a lot of things in this world. A lot of it is about white men. But they've given me reason to be mad. I'm just saying that, and I know you agree with me, I've read so many amazing feminist books this year.

Not on purpose just…”Know My Name,” “Catch and Kill.”

(Read Shannon’s review of “Know My Name” here,” Elizabeth’s review of “Know My Name” here, and Elizabeth’s review of “Catch and Kill” here.)

Shannon: My thought is that Lindy is trying to capitalize on what is probably a fairly young female audience and wrote this book and it's derivative. I was hoping for something that would be like, inspirational.

Can I make one last little plug? During the chapter about Gervais and Adam Corolla and Louis CK, my fave…

(Note: Louis C.K. is not Shannon’s fave.)

There was a note in the chapter about, you know “Gervais and Corolla are not alone in presenting themselves as noble bulwarks against a wave of supposed left-wing censorship. A Netflix special, for the record, is not what silencing looks like.”

And I just want to call out that one of my favorite comedians is Jen Kirkman and she has two Netflix specials. Watch them both. They are both pre 2016 election, but.

In the second one, she basically makes a whole aside about rape and goes on a what men would call a rant: “I’ll stop talking about rape when men stop doing it” type of thing and it's example of a rape “joke,” which I use loosely.

It's not really a joke, it’s done right, and she's been pretty vocal on her podcast about not getting more specials. Not necessarily because of that line, but I’m just calling out that line as an example. Because a lot of alt-right dudes who harass her on Twitter went after her and rated it one star on Netflix.

So again, the standards for being female and successful are super different—and also watch her specials.

I flew to Athens, Georgia to see Jen, and she called out someone in the audience for heckling her, saying she was gonna have them kicked out because, “just like your state, this show is not a democracy.” And Stacy Abrams is the rightful governor of Georgia.

EE: Well, I will a very weird story. So I have been a very cool kid my entire life and in high school, my biggest extracurricular was student government.

And basically what happened was, it's a YMCA-sponsored program and in the fall, this youth judicial—you argue a court case and there are student judges. That's probably why I'm a lawyer say because I got to be a judge for three years. And then in the spring is youth legislature, and you have a mock legislative session. People from around the state submit bills and if they pass, they can be signed into law by the youth governor and then actually the packet of bills that is signed into law is given to the actual governor of the state of Alabama, and he has sponsored some of them down on the floor because some of them are really good. However, every year that I can remember and still to this day because I was an alumni advisor for a long time.

(Shannon discusses being in Young Republicans in high school. Yes, truly.)

EE: So Alabama has a very convoluted state constitution. It's never been amended. It's only been amended—not rescinded—since 1901. So it's like 750 pages long.

So there are all these ridiculous laws in the book like that women can't wear heels more than two inches because they'll break your ankle. And they’re not enforced. But one of the rules in the state of Alabama is that it is legal for a woman to rape a man.

But so but then there was always a group of dudes from like Prattville, Alabama that wanted to rewrite the law because, “what if a really ugly girl took him behind a building and forced it upon him.”

As in, I don't think you really understand what rape is.

Moira: Now, absolutely certainly do men commit the vast majority of rapes definitely, but I also want to make it clear that men can absolutely be raped on that note.

Moira: Final pass, Lindy West, you're smarter than your book and I wasn't pleased.

Shannon: I’m pouring wine and I don't want to spill it on my white couch.

…Final thought: I was very underwhelmed by this book. I was not clear on who the audience was.

I do think I agree with MoMo: Lindy is smarter than this and it's good that she's off Twitter because hopefully it will give her a chance to define her voice in not-Twitter-speak.

And also, yeah Adam Sandler’s movies still suck.

EE: And mine would be that in theory, we are all her target audience and that we are what I think is her target demographic. But this is more for a 2011 Moira, Elizabeth and Shannon. And we’ve all grown up.

We've all read better things on these topics that these probably would have gone viral on Jezebel in 2009 but nothing is particularly noteworthy in 2019. And that honestly, I hope for more because I had heard great things about her.

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