Clementine Ford, Author of Fight Like a Girl Book

The Seattle Review of Books, Seattle Weekly, and Third Place Books Seward Park continue our book club exploring who we are as Americans, where we’re going, and how we might fix our greatest problems. Reading Through It meets on the first Wednesday of every month. Drink and food specials are available from Raconteur during book clubs, so grab a glass and join us for a lively literary discussion. Every month our selected titles are discounted 20% through the date of the book club. All are welcome, no purchase required.

Our January selection is Fight Like a Girl by Clementine Ford.

In her ruthless debut essay collection, Australian activist and agitator Ford presents a feminist manifesto for the 2018 woman and her allies. Ford rails against the most contemporary issues of misogyny, from rape culture to partner violence to internet harassment. Blending memoir with critical analysis, she creates an intimate, though universal, call to arms. As a prominent feminist, Ford has seen her fair share of venom from readers online. As they’ve begged her to explain why she so deeply hates men, Ford uses this book to explore why men so viciously hate women. She meditates on society’s insistence that women physically shrink themselves, how society polices the uterus, and how society allows the female body to be defiled over and over with few or no repercussions for the perpetrator and all this in a society still predominantly run by men. Ford’s book is a galvanizing tour de force, begging women to never give up on the most radical act of all: loving themselves wholly and completely in a world that doesn’t love them back.