What do you want to be when you grow up?  How would you have answered that question when you were a kid?  Lindy West, the brilliant, funny, and insightful author of Shrill, is my new author crush.  She literally changed my view about so many things as I read her book.  She was asked that same question as a kid, but her reminiscence is both hilarious and biting with a big dose of (from my perspective) “wow, I never thought of that before.”  She writes: “Thanks to a glut of cultural messaging, I knew very clearly what I was not: small, thin, pretty, girlish, normal, weightless, Winona Ryder.  But there was precious little media telling me what I was, what I could be.  For me, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ was subsumed by a far more pressing question: ‘What are you?’”  The awful truth, as West explains, was that fat women were portrayed as “sexless mothers, pathetic punch lines, or gruesome villains.”  Don’t believe her?  Wait till you read her list.  Her book makes you think long and hard about how readily we discriminate against others, no matter their brilliance or delightful personalities.  In fact, this book makes you think about a whole lot of important issues.