Book Review: Nasty Women compiled by 404 Ink

Compiled by 404 Ink

It took me longer than I thought it would to get through the collection of essays compiled by 404 Ink called Nasty Women. As I read through the writings of the 22 women from 22 different backgrounds with 22 different voices, I found inspiration to write myself, to find out what my own voice had to say. So 22 times I stopped, reflected, and digested the power of their words that I had slowly chewed through my brain.

While the collection mostly centers around women of the United Kingdom, there are a few from elsewhere—from the Mediterranean, from the U.S.—or who speak from the perspectives of those with one foot living in a Western Culture, while the other foot lives in another culture. Each individual woman, of any definition of the word, walks the path of Other in a world that has cast them to do so, which is really the heart of the compilation.

With a play on the accusation thrown by Donald Trump during the 2016 U.S. presidential election toward his opponent, Hillary Clinton, during which he called her, “such a nasty woman,” the book raises the voices of women who have been challenged by the world around them to step forward and speak their experience and injustices.

I really don’t know how to review a compilation of essays. How can one critique the voices of so many without going into each piece individually? I think of my review of the novel 2020 by Kenneth Steven, which was also compiled of different voices. But the difference was that it was fiction (though a fiction horrifyingly close to reality), and was of one writer. This book is a classroom’s worth of writers.

I can, however, praise the publisher for choosing voices that I believe will be heard. Never before have I hugged a book, repeatedly, each time for a different reason, or shed tears after reading a segment. As I read these essays, their experiences ran through me, some of which are impossible for me to comprehend simply because I don’t have their backgrounds. There is power in these words expressed behind the identity from women of color, those speaking of mental illness, of poverty, of discrimination in its multitude of forms. They speak of stereo types that both men and women are meant to fit into, women rock idols, rape, gendered violence of any form, music scenes, immigration, paganism, and simply learning to find peace and fight within themselves.

If there is anything that can be taken away from this book, if you can’t see past the many struggles that thousands of men and women go through on a daily basis due to their identities, backgrounds, and/or skin color, it’s how to find the inner strength to find peace within the self. What these “nasty women” have done is found that which makes them Other, that which makes them supposed outcasts and puts a burden on their shoulders, and used it to lift them up, as their platform. They have taken their trials and are shining their light onto the reader as a beacon of confrontation. And the end of each essay, without words, unspoken, there is the silent question of, “I’ve showed you my vulnerability, what are you going to do about it?”

I don’t really care who you are, what your background is, what your stance on feminism is in regard to this book. What I do care about is that it’s read. Read it. Learn from it. Embrace it. If it makes you uncomfortable, then you now have a jumping-off place to question yourself, and find out just why it is that you’re uncomfortable, and ask yourself, is your discomfort just?

“Real life isn’t like fiction; there are no neat and tidy endings…Though ignorance is bliss, I always think there is a power in knowing. At the very least, the knowledge can inform all your future choices.

“I know there will be many bumps in the road ahead, I know that I may not have yet gone through he worst, and I know I have many choices ahead of me. Choosing to tell my story was just one of them.” p.100-101, “Choices” by Rowan C. Clarke

Essays and Writers

Katie Muriel: "Independence Day"

Kristy Diaz: "Why I'm No Longer a Punk Rock 'Cool Girl'

Claire L Heuchan: "Black Feminism Online: Claiming Digital Space"

Jen McGregor: "Lament: Living with the Consequences of Contraception"

Laura Lam: "These Shadows, These Ghosts"

Mel Reeve: "The Nastiness of Survival"

Laura Waddell: "Against Stereotypes: Working Class Girls and Working Class Art"

Sim Bajwa: "Go Home"

Becca Inglis: "Love in a Time of Melancholia"

Rowan C. Clarke: "Choices"

Ren Aldridge: "Touch Me Again and I will Fucking Kill You"