AGGREGATED DISCONTENT

Weaving memoir, investigative journalism, and cultural criticism, Harron Walker's electrifying debut is an essential contribution to conversations about identity, power, disillusionment, healthcare, post-transition life, and womanhood in the 21st century.

A couple years after a brief stint of stability in her early twenties cis era, Harron Walker has transitioned into a terminally single freelancer and part-time shopgirl, spiraling almost daily in the throes of her second adolescence. She wants so much, otherwise known as basic human rights: a stable job with good pay and healthcare benefits; a place of her own; someone to build a life with; the chance to feel safe and secure enough to maybe begin to find satisfaction and even contentment.

Blending elements of memoir, cultural criticism, reporting, and a dash of fanfiction, Walker interrogates the pressing and underdiscussed aspects of contemporary American womanhood from her particular vantagepoint: often at its margins, conditionally at its center. From trans motherhood and reproductive healthcare to the allure and violence of assimilating into white womanhood in all is hegemonic glory, Walker considers the ways in which being a woman has historically been constructed as a state of forced dependence, and how that continues to be the case for trans women in the present. With razor-sharp, biting, and often confronting prose, Walker grapples with questions of love, sex, gender, motherhood, lineage, solitude, solidarity, and community from an entirely
singular point of view.

AGGREGATED DISCONTENT is a sharp and playful mix of memoir, journalism, cultural criticism, and fan fiction, touching on identity, womanhood, relationships from Harron's perspective and experiences as a trans woman. Among these essays, she conducts her own investigation of the beauty chain Lush's corporate hypocrisy, delves deep into the life and art of Greer Lankton, imagines a delightfully subversive fan fiction universe of Anne Hathaway's films The Devil Wears Prada and The Intern, and spins an intricate philosophy on gender and motherhood from a Jenny Lewis song. Harron is clear-eyed and wry in these essays, taking readers on a journey throughout art, history, pop culture, and of course her own life, drawing insights about what it means to be trans, to be a woman, to be a mother, and to be human.

Harron Walker is an award-winning journalist based in Brooklyn. A Jezebel contributor and former senior staff writer at VICE, her work has appeared in Esquire, GQ, and elsewhere. (Twitter: 50k followers).