In the opening chapter of writer and comedian Lindy West’s Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, West laments the fact that, as a child, she had no good pop culture icons to model fat-woman success for her – especially on TV. “There simply were no young, funny, capable, strong, good fat girls.”
West’s words resonate ever more deeply now that Shrill, her debut memoir, has been adapted into a TV dramedy, co-created by and starring Saturday Night Live’s Aidy Bryant. But, given West’s proscription about the dearth of good fat women on TV – or, indeed, in the media at all – Bryant and Shrill have fairly large shoes to fill.
Because, although the landscape for body neutrality in the media has shifted just slightly between West’s memoir in 2016 and now, there is still no single television show that faithfully presents a robust, complex fat-woman protagonist with multifarious desires. There are more fat women on television, and less of them are there to be a punchline or a pity object – the leads of Insatiable and This Is Us notwithstanding – but there’s very little about the life of a TV fat woman that feels worth emulating.
The problem with asking for our art to represent us is that we judge that work primarily based on the veracity of its representation. When I encounter a work of art about another fat person, I have to ask myself: “Did this do any damage to me, as a fat person?” Just as so many other people who sit at the intersections of identity do, we end up wringing our hands hoping the thing will not actively harm us.
When I encounter a work of art about another fat person, I have to ask myself: “Did this do any damage to me, as a fat person?”
So I approached Shrill with a touch of trepidation, having recently experienced first the jubilation of Jenna Guillaume’s book What I Like About Me, and then the disappointment in the Rebel Wilson-helmed film Isn’t It Romantic. I’ve been a long-time fan of West’s writing. And, although West is credited as a series co-creator and co-writer of the pilot episode, I wondered how a millennial-geared series would approach an unruly body in 2019.
Much like West, the series doesn’t shy away when it comes to its exploration of what it means to occupy space. Annie, played with superb tenderness and effervescence by Bryant, is not a sad sack, nor is she a firecracker. She’s something in-between; and she feels distinctly, refreshingly real. She has moments of glorious physicality across Shrill’s short season: the camera allows her body to take up whole frames luxuriously, in part because Bryant’s magnetism demands it, and yet she’s never turned into a Wilson-esque slapstick punchline. And, far from a neat A to B journey, Bryant’s Annie only sporadically connects with the confident, clever and capable woman hiding behind her diffidence – especially at the series’ start.
At times it’s all achingly recognisable, like in the conversations Annie has with her well-meaning but unhelpful mother (Julia Sweeney), who spoils a nice moment walking together by saying, “You know what makes me happy? That we’re out here together exercising. You always feel better when you exercise, I can tell.”
Annie’s mother’s obsession with her weight is a tension that made me itch with uncomfortable familiarity – and one that a longer series, with an order of more than six short episodes, could allow to breathe a little more. The same goes for Annie’s relationship with her best friend (and the show’s scene-stealing MVP), Fran (Lolly Adefope) who is at once overjoyed and frustrated with Annie’s painful pathway to self-confidence.
Annie’s mother’s obsession with her weight is a tension that made me itch with uncomfortable familiarity
Though the show is fictional, many of the plot points are lifted directly from West’s real life at the Stranger, an alt-weekly paper where West got her start as a writer. That includes the hunt for a troll who uses distinctly personal details about Annie’s appearance and family life to torture her, and her explosive blog-fight with her boss (a deliciously unctuous John Cameron Mitchell), which with journalist Dan Savage.
A lesser show would’ve traded in the complexity of fatness for a superficial, cloying “body positivity” narrative – where Bryant insta-discovers she’s beautiful in her own skin, gets to date a cardboard-cutout hottie, and presses forward as the newer, brighter her. Life as a fat person is almost never this banally simple. It’s why many of us reject “body positivity” for the more relatable “”: this is my body and I live in it, and we respect each other.
In Shrill’s best moments, it doesn’t even matter what sub-genre of body-acceptance the series preaches, because it’s so determinedly a show about presenting the complete life of a fat person that gets to actually do other things besides obsessing over fatness. We laugh with Annie when her dog eats shrooms, or rage at the problematic nature of her digital media workplace. And we can feel the exquisite joy Annie feels when she attends a pool party full of other fat women, who look just like her and are enjoying themselves so intensely.
Because when art represents identity best, it shows us that being a something – a fat person – happens in three dimensions. We live complex, often worthy lives: ones that can even be emulated or desired by other fat people, watching on other screens in other places, happy to see someone modelling a life that looks like theirs.
Matilda Dixon-Smith is a writer, editor, artist and theatre-maker from Melbourne. Follow her on Twitter at .
Shrill airs on Tuesday September 10 on SBS Viceland at 9:25PM, or binge the whole first season on .
