Lindy West reflects on Shrill, which turned out not to be the story of her life

“I was given the illusion of power while the real deciders had private calls without me, and you can only be undermined so many times on an adaptation of your own life before you start to question whether you even know who you are.”
— Lindy West

In 2016, the American writer Lindy West published Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, a collection of essays on fat-shaming, sexual violence, pop culture and many other things. West had been writing for newspapers, magazines and websites for years, gaining a reputation for being vulnerable, fearless and feminist.

Three years later, a television series also named Shrill — starring Aidy Bryant, who was at that time still in the Saturday Night Live cast — made its debut.

Shrill ran for three seasons. The series was inspired by West’s life, especially when she wrote for an alternative weekly, but we’re learning the connections between fiction and reality were not that substantial.

West was one of the show’s writers, and on the Internet Movie Database, she’s identified not just as an executive producer, but also one of its showrunners.

That turns out to be an exaggeration. Showrunners are responsible for everything in the show, from scripting in the writers’ room to countless details during production to making sure edits are made and that each episode is finished on time.

This week, I’ve been listening to West’s newest book, Adult Braces, which contains connected essays that focus on her life in recent years. In one of the chapters, she revisits the making of Shrill, and what she learned from the experience.

“The show would never have gotten made without a star attached — a real star, not me,” she said, after describing how she and Bryant had to scramble to get a pilot script finished when the studio (the show was carried on NBC-owned Hulu) unexpectedly put it on the (much too) fast track.

“It’s not like if you watch Shrill, you won’t see me in there. I was writing scripts, attending castings, approving props, choosing background actors, interviewing post-production crew, getting hugged by the CEO of Warner Bros. Television. I personally got to cast the dog,” she writes.

“Despite all the psychological torture, self-inflicted and otherwise, I did learn how to make TV, and I’ll always be grateful for that. But Shrill was never my show, and in the ways that matter to me, I was never really there. My real personality wasn’t in the room and didn’t often make it onto the screen.”

West is far from the first writer to see their good ideas change (and get changed, or swapped, or watered down, or just eliminated from the page) during the adaptation process.

What’s interesting is that she was, literally, in the room.

In Adult Braces, she makes it clear that even though the basis was her story, her own ideas were discounted during scripting. The quote at the top, about the illusion of power over your own narrative, speaks to how hard the process must have been.

Adaptations gone awry

Writers have been used to awkward feelings, or worse, when their work is adapted to the screen.

“Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes” is a well-known observation by the late English spy novelist John le Carré, whose books have been in the Hollywood pipeline since the Sixties. (The most recent is the second season of The Night Manager.)

At least West found that Shrill was a show that had value, even if her own vision did not land on the screen. There are horror stories aplenty of what went wrong.

For many years, Billy Hayes has been apologizing for how Turkish people were represented in the 1978 film adaptation of his memoir Midnight Express. (Oliver Stone wrote that screenplay, which portrays prison officials as sadists.)

Many film fans admire Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining; Stephen King, who wrote the original novel, is not among them, as he felt the film upended what he was trying to say.

Agatha Christie did not much like many of the adaptations of her work, and with reason. Tony Randall as Poirot? Mon dieu! It’s significant to note that the thorough television adaptations of her work, with David Suchet as Poirot and Joan Hicks and others as Miss Marple, were commissioned through her estate, after her death.

More recently, Rick Riordan, author of the popular Percy Jackson novels, groused that the scripts for the film adaptations made him feel like his work went “through a meat grinder.”

A postscript on Shrill

In Adult Braces, West has an anecdote about the end of Shrill which feels like a scene right out of a clever, self-deprecating sitcom.

When the show was cancelled, West didn’t even take the call from the network. She knew it was coming, and she was relieved.

Then a hardcover book of photographs of three years of on-set production arrived from the production office, plus some keepsakes. “I literally do not appear,” she writes of those photos.

Insult to injury: the post-it on top was addressed to one “Linda West.”