Aggregated Discontent

Confessions of the Last Normal Woman

By: Harron Walker

Length: 8 hrs

Publisher's summary

A searing journey through the highs and lows of twenty-first century womanhood from an award-winning journalist beloved for her unflinchingly honest and often comedic appraisals of pop culture, identity, and disillusionment

After a brief fling with corporate stability in her twenty-something cis era, Harron Walker has transitioned into a terminally single freelancer and part-time shopgirl. She's in the throes of her second adolescence and its requisite daily spirals. She wants it all, otherwise known as: basic human rights, a stable job with good pay and healthcare benefits, someone to love, the ability to feel safe and secure, the pursuit of satisfaction and maybe even contentment. And when she starts to acquire those things—well, as The Monkey's Paw famously asked, "What could go wrong?"

In sixteen wholly original essays that blend memoir, cultural criticism, investigative journalism, and a dash of fanfiction, Walker places her own experiences within the larger context of the pressing and underdiscussed aspects of contemporary American womanhood that make up daily life. She recounts an attempt to eviscerate a corporation's attempt at pinkwashing their way into bath bomb sales while simultaneously confronting her “pick me” impulse to do so. She interrogates her relationship to labor, from the irony of working in a transphobic workplace in order to cover gender-affirming surgery to the cruel specter of the girlboss that none of us ever think we'll become. She explores the allure and violence of assimilating into white womanhood in all its hegemonic glory, exposes the ways in which the truth of trans women's reproductive healthcare is erased in favor of reactionary narratives, and considers how our agency is stripped from us—by governments, employers, partners, and ourselves—purely on account of our bodies.

With razor-sharp, biting prose that’s as uncompromising as it is playful, Walker grapples with questions of love, sex, fertility, labor, embodiment, community, autonomy, and body fluids from her particular vantagepoint: often at the margins, conditionally at the center.

©2025 Harron Walker (P)2025 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Harron Walker is such a brilliant writer, with so many surprising moves. She can take the narrative sideways in a matter of sentences or accelerate it into sudden moments of insight, all to deliver the rarest thing in writing: the kind of essay that makes you reconsider your views—while also being funny.”—Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby and the forthcoming Stag Dance

“Aggregated Discontent is a real showstopper of a collection. Harron Walker is superb here, funny and biting, incredibly charming. She’s unafraid to dig into the messy meat of humanity, and to be honest, she makes it all feel effortless. Her criticism is superb and her style is bewitching. I could not stop reading; I did not want to stop reading. I found this collection completely enthralling.”—Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth