You wrote the memoir by yourself, but obviously, you wrote the pilot with them. So you mentioned, Aidy Bryant and Ali Rushfield. And then, Ali Rushfield, our showrunner, signed on and then Aidy (Bryant) signed on and three of us put the pitch together and pitched a bunch of places and picked Hulu and then we made a show. I ended up going with Brownstone, which was Elizabeth Banks’ company. I was kind of like, “Oh, really? People want to do this? Okay.” Kind of over the course of having those meetings, I started thinking about, “What would this look like as a TV show?” I got more and more excited about the idea and it really started to take shape in my head. I mean, not that I wasn’t proud of the book or didn’t think that it had something to offer the world, but it was like, it’s hard to think of your own life as a television show. I probably had, I dunno, 12 meetings or something. And so that summer, maybe in July or August of 2016, I went to LA and just had a bunch of meetings with different production companies or people who are interested. The book came out in May 2016 and then, I was approached by TV agents who wanted to shop the book around and see if anyone wanted to option it. Now you have a show that is sort of based on your life sort of not, um, how did this adaption come about? So you wrote your memoir Shrill and it came out in 2016. A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to chat with Lindy by phone and talk about adapting her memoir, representation, fat people on TV and how comedy has grown in the last five years to include more diverse voices. Now, a TV show based on her life and the fat and female experiences, also called Shrill, is coming to Hulu Friday, starring SNL’s Aidy Bryant and produced by Elizabeth Banks and Lorne Michaels. In 2016 Shrill, West’s comedic memoir on fat shaming and coming of age as a woman in a world that wasn’t made for you, was published to critical acclaim. That’s where I first came across writer and activist Lindy West.

Since movies and TV rarely showed any normal depictions of fat women, I often went to books to read what I couldn’t see.

As a fat woman, you could say that I have been hungry for positive fat portrayals of women in media.

Shrill memoir