The Witches Are Coming Book Summary: Lindy West’s Fierce Essays on Feminism, Power, and Survival

Welcome, fellow bookworm! “If you’re not furious, you’re not paying attention.” Lindy West’s 2019 essay collection The Witches Are Coming is the battle cry of a woman who has been fighting the internet’s worst trolls for a decade — and winning. This summary of The Witches Are Coming by Lindy West covers her sharpest essays on the Trump era, abortion, fat acceptance, and why women’s anger is not a problem to be solved but a power to be claimed.

Funny, furious, and deeply humane, this is the sequel to Shrill — and the angrier, sharper older sister. Let’s dive in.

Book and Author Details

Author: Lindy West (born 1982) is an American writer, comedian, and activist. A former film critic and columnist for The Stranger and Jezebel, she became one of the internet’s most prominent feminist voices — and one of its most harassed. Her memoir-in-essays Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman (2016) was adapted into a Hulu series starring Aidy Bryant. She is a leading voice on fat acceptance, abortion rights, and confronting online abuse.

Publication: 2019, Hachette Books, 272 pages. Follow-up to Shrill.

Genre & Audience: Essays / memoir / feminist nonfiction. For feminists, readers of cultural criticism, fans of funny-angry writing, and anyone trying to understand the Trump era’s gender politics. Best for readers who like their social commentary with jokes and their jokes with teeth.

Table of Contents

• One Minute Book Summary
• The Book in Three Sentences
• The Witches Are Coming — Full Summary
• Characters
• 6 Main Key Lessons and Concepts
• Quotes
• Conclusion

ONE MINUTE BOOK SUMMARY

The Witches Are Coming collects Lindy West’s essays from the heart of the Trump era — years when, as she puts it, the mask came off American misogyny. Across pieces on abortion (including the searing “The Day I Became a Witch,” on her decision to end a pregnancy), the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, the cult of Ted Bundy and true-crime misogyny, fat acceptance, climate despair, and the everyday labor of being a woman online, West argues that women’s rage is rational, that the personal is political, and that humor is a weapon. The title essay reframes the witch — history’s symbol of the woman punished for power — as a figure to reclaim: the witches are coming, and they’re done apologizing. Written with West’s signature blend of comedy and fury, the collection is both a time capsule of 2016–2019 and a timeless argument for taking women’s anger seriously.

The Book In Three Sentences

Lindy West’s essay collection takes on the Trump era’s misogyny — from abortion rights to the Kavanaugh hearings to fat-shaming — with comedy as sharp as her fury. She reclaims the witch as a symbol of unapologetic female power and argues that women’s anger is rational and necessary. Funny, furious, and humane, it’s both a time capsule and a battle cry.

The Witches Are Coming — Full Summary

Part 1: The Personal as Political

The collection’s most powerful essays are its most personal. In “The Day I Became a Witch,” West writes about her abortion — not as tragedy or trauma but as a straightforward medical decision she made and doesn’t regret, and about the fury of living in a country where strangers feel entitled to legislate her uterus. The essay is funny (West can’t help it) and absolutely unflinching: she names the procedure, describes the experience, and refuses every frame — victim, sinner, brave survivor — except her own: a person who made a choice. Nearby essays take on the Kavanaugh hearings (the national gaslighting of believing women only until it’s inconvenient), the “Ted Bundy is hot” true-crime industrial complex (why do we romanticize male killers and dissect female victims?), and the exhausting performance of likability demanded of women. West’s method throughout: start with the joke, land the argument, leave the reader unable to unsee it.

Part 2: The Body

West — who has written for years about fat acceptance — extends Shrill‘s body politics into new territory. These essays take on diet culture’s latest disguises (“wellness”), the medical establishment’s fatphobia, and the particular cruelty of a world that treats fat women’s bodies as public property and punchlines. But she also complicates her own position: writing about health, desirability, and the limits of “body positivity” as a corporate slogan. The throughline is autonomy — the radical idea that a woman’s body belongs to her, whether she’s fat or thin, pregnant or not, “healthy” or not. West’s great gift is making the political feel intimate: these aren’t lectures but confessions, jokes, and war stories from a decade of being the internet’s favorite fat woman to hate.

Part 3: The Culture

The collection’s cultural criticism is where West’s comedy background shines brightest. She dissects the 2016 election and its aftermath — the particular madness of watching an admitted sexual predator become president while women were told to be “civil.” She takes on “civility” itself as a weapon used to silence the powerless. Essays on comedy (who gets to be funny, who gets to be the joke), on social media (the economics of harassment), and on climate change (the despair of caring in a world that won’t) broaden the book beyond gender while keeping feminism as the lens. West is particularly sharp on the liberal pieties of her own side — the performative wokeness, the circular firing squads — because, as she notes, the witches have to get their own house in order too.

Part 4: The Witches

The title essay and the collection’s closing pieces bring it home: the witch as reclaimed archetype. Historically, “witch” was what they called a woman with power they couldn’t control — the healer, the outspoken, the unowned. West argues that every woman who refuses to apologize for her anger, her body, her choices is a witch in the old sense, and that it’s time to stop running from the word. The final essays are, unusually for West, almost hopeful: not optimistic about the world, exactly, but defiant about the response. The witches are coming — not to burn anything down, she clarifies, but to stop asking permission. The book ends where it began: with a woman who has been told to be quiet, choosing volume.

Characters

1. Lindy West (narrator) — The authorial voice; comedian, feminist, and veteran of a decade of online warfare, funny and furious by turns.
2. The Trolls — The collective antagonist; the harassers whose abuse taught West everything about power and performance.
3. The Witch (archetype) — History’s punished powerful woman, reclaimed as the book’s patron saint.
4. West’s Family — Her husband, parents, and loved ones; the human stakes behind the polemics.
5. The “Wellness” Industry — Diet culture in a yoga mat disguise; a recurring satirical target.
6. True-Crime Culture — The Ted Bundy romantics and victim-dissectors; embodying misogyny as entertainment.
7. The Civility Police — Those who demand politeness from the powerless; West’s favorite hypocrites to skewer.
8. Fellow Feminists — Allies and occasional targets; West critiques her own movement’s failures honestly.

6 Main Key Lessons and Concepts

1. Core Message: Women’s anger is not hysteria, bitterness, or a PR problem — it’s rational data about an irrational world. West’s central argument is that the demand for female “civility” is itself a tool of control, and that fury, properly directed, is a form of intelligence.

2. Purpose: West wrote to arm her readers — especially women — with language, laughter, and permission. For activists: it’s a field manual for the Trump era and beyond. For general readers: it’s the funniest possible education in why feminism isn’t “over.”

3. Audience: Feminists, readers of cultural criticism, comedy fans, and anyone who lived through 2016–2019 and needs help processing it. Also valuable for men willing to listen — West is funny enough to keep you reading past your discomfort.

4. Foundational Insight: Humor is not the opposite of seriousness but its delivery system. West’s great technical achievement is the joke-to-gut-punch ratio: she makes you laugh, and while you’re laughing, the argument walks in unopposed. The insight for communicators: people defend against lectures but not against laughter — so put the truth inside the joke.

5. Supporting Ideas: The personal essay as political act — West shows that telling the truth about your own abortion, body, or harassment is itself activism, because shame thrives in silence. The reclamation of stigmatized words (“witch,” “shrill,” “fat”) as a strategy: you can’t be insulted by a word you’ve already claimed. And the critique of “civility” — politeness as the powerful’s demand that the powerless suffer quietly.

6. Practical Implications: For writers and communicators: study West’s structure — anecdote, joke, escalation, thesis — as a template for persuasive personal writing. For anyone facing harassment: the book models the only winning response — refusing to be shamed, refusing to be silent, and occasionally being extremely funny about it. For everyone: the next time a woman’s anger makes you uncomfortable, ask whether the anger or the thing she’s angry about is the real problem.

Quotes

“The witches are coming, and they’re not asking permission anymore.”

— The book’s thesis: the era of apologetic feminism is over, and unapologetic female power is the point.

“I am a fat woman who is not sorry about it, and that makes some people so angry they want me to die.”

— West on the violent reality behind “just concerned about your health” — naming fatphobia’s true face.

“Civility is the language of the powerful telling the powerless to suffer quietly.”

— On why demands for “civil discourse” spike whenever the oppressed get loud.

“My abortion was not a tragedy. It was a Tuesday.”

— From the abortion essay: refusing every dramatic frame and insisting on the ordinary reality of a common medical decision.

“If you’re not furious, you’re not paying attention.”

— West’s summary of the Trump era — and her challenge to anyone tempted by comfortable indifference.

Conclusion

The Witches Are Coming is the rare political book that’s actually fun to read — because Lindy West understands that fury and comedy aren’t opposites but allies. She takes the bleakest material of the late 2010s — the election, the hearings, the harassment, the rollback of rights — and processes it through a voice so sharp and so funny that the medicine goes down like champagne. But don’t mistake the fizz for frivolity: this is a serious argument about power, dressed in jokes because jokes are how you get people to lower their defenses.

For students of rhetoric and cultural criticism, West is a technician worth studying. Diagram her essays: the opening anecdote that disarms, the escalating jokes that build trust, the sudden turn where the laugh catches in your throat because you’ve realized what she’s actually saying. For activists, the book is both validation and strategy — proof that you can be furious and funny, personal and political, exhausted and undefeated, all at once.

For everyone else, the book’s final image is the one to carry: the witch, historically the woman punished for uncontrollable power, reclaimed as an aspiration. You don’t have to agree with every essay to feel the force of the invitation — to stop apologizing for taking up space, having opinions, being angry about things worth being angry about. Take notes on that. The witches are coming. The only question is whether you’ll be waving from the sidelines or flying with them.