Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(28)

I’m aware of the pull all the time: I should change careers; I should shut down my social media; maybe I can get a job in print somewhere; it’s just too exhausting. I hear the same refrains from my colleagues. Not only that, but those of us who are hardest hit often wind up writing about harassment itself. I never wanted Internet trolls to be my beat—I want to write feminist polemics, jokes about wizards, and love letters to John Goodman’s meaty, sexual forearms. I still want that.

I wonder if I’ll ever be able to get back to work.





Strong People Fighting Against the Elements


I never wanted to fight virtual trolls; I wanted to fight real ones. With a sword.

My fixation on the fantastical is not difficult to trace. When I was very small, my dad read out loud to me every night before bed. It was always fantasy: Tolkien, Lewis, Baum, Tolkien again. I remember him nodding off in the chair, his pace and pitch winding down like he was running out of batteries—Bifur, Bofur, Bommmmbuuurrrrrrrrrrrrr. To this day, if someone even mentions riding a barrel down the Celduin to Lake-town at the gates of Erebor, the Lonely Mountain (even if they’re just talking about spring break), I am incapacitated by nostalgia. I made him read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe so many times that I could recite much of it from memory—I didn’t know what “air raids” were, but I knew that when they happened, you went on a permanent vacation to a country manse where a wizard let you use his inter-dimensional closet. I wonder if we can get “air raids” in Seattle, I thought.

Dad was a jazz pianist and an ad copywriter—an expressive baritone who was often employed as a kind of one-man, full-service jingle factory. By night, he worked in bars, sometimes seven nights a week, a lost breed of lounge entertainer who skipped dizzyingly from standards to Flanders and Swann to Lord Buckley and back again. Once in a while, I still meet Seattle old-timers who blush like teenagers. “I loved your dad. Used to go see him every night.”

My grandfather was a radio producer (The Burns and Allen Show, Lucky Strike Hit Parade), and in the 1940s, when he took a job at CBS, it was suggested that he change his name from the unwieldy and, perhaps, at the time, uncomfortably Austrian, “Rechenmacher” to the more radio-friendly “West.” So my dad became Paul West Jr., and now I am Lindy West. Sometimes people think “Lindy West” is a pseudonym. I guess they’re right.


Eighty years removed, my grandparents’ Old Hollywood existence seems impossibly glamorous. I imagine shimmering laughter and natty suits. Hats on heads, hats in hat boxes. Scotch in the winter, gin in the summer. Grandma Winnie sang with Meredith Willson’s orchestra, and when my dad was a little boy in the ’30s, she worked in movies (under her maiden name, Winnie Parker, and her stage name, Mona Lowe), dubbing the vocal parts for Carole Lombard, Dolores del Rio, and other leading ladies who, apparently, couldn’t sing. Dad had stories of going to Shirley Temple’s birthday party, of nearly fainting when his dad nonchalantly introduced him to his friend Lou Costello, of Gene Autry trying to give little Paul a pony to keep in their Glendale backyard.

They drank hard—“eating and drinking and carrying on,” as my dad would say. He once e-mailed me a little vignette he wrote in his creative writing night class:

“The living room is the part of the house I remember least, from the inside anyway. I remember it a little better from the sidewalk in front, along Kenneth Road. I remember standing there looking at the bright gold harp that stood framed by the green brocade draperies—draperies I once hid behind when my mother and father were screaming drunk.

“I heard a dull ‘thunk,’ followed by a big crash, and when I peeked out from behind the drape, my father was lying on the living room floor, blood spurting from his big, already knobby nose. Mother and the other couple in the room, my uncle and his wife, were laughing hysterically when my grandmother came down the wide staircase. ‘Vas ist?’ she said—with stern, Viennese dignity. ‘An orange,’ my uncle giggled, ‘Winnie hit him in the nose with an orange!’ They were all helpless with laughter. ‘Be ashamed,’ Gramma said.”*

I never met any of those people. In fact, I’ve never met any family from my dad’s side at all. My grandfather had a heart attack and died unexpectedly in 1953 when he was just forty-four, two days before my dad’s high school graduation. There was some dispute about the burial, between the deeply Catholic Rechenmachers in southern Illinois, who wanted a Catholic funeral, and my dad’s lapsed Hollywood branch, who didn’t. Paul West Sr. ended up in a Catholic cemetery in Culver City, where lingering animus led to nobody visiting him for the next fifty-five years, until, on a whim, my sister and I tracked down the grave. We called Dad and told him where we were. “Golly,” he said, his voice rough.

You could tell that my dad never fully recovered from that loss (and it wasn’t his last). My sister and I called him “sad dad”—underneath the exuberance there was a towering melancholy. I sometimes told people my dad reminded me of Robin Williams, and they would assume I meant the drive to entertain, the old showbiz patter. But it was really that ever-present Pig-Pen cloud of kind-eyed sadness.

My dad had four wives; my mom was the last. I think about how much faith it must have taken to keep going—to insist, over and over again, “No! I really think it’s going to work this time!” Plenty of people are irretrievably jaded after one divorce, let alone three. My dad went for it four times, and the last one stuck. You could frame that as irresponsibility or womanizing or a fear of being alone, but to me it was a distillation of his unsinkable optimism. He always saw the best in everyone—I imagine, likewise, he stood at the beginning of every romance and saw it unspooling in front of him like a grand adventure, all fun and no pain. “Oh boy!” I can hear him saying each time. “Isn’t she just terrific?” The idea that a relationship is a “failure” simply because it ends is a pessimist’s construct anyway. Dad loved lots of people, and then found the one he loved the best.