Aggregated Discontent

Confessions of the Last Normal Woman

De: Harron Walker

Narrado por: Harron Walker

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

“A delicious reading experience—like hearing your smartest friend eviscerate the worst person you know.”—Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches

“Such a brilliant writer, with so many surprising moves.”—Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby

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.

Cover image: “Cover of Spy Magazine” © Sussex Publishers, LLC. Used with permission.

©2025 Harron Walker (P)2025 Random House Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“Journalist and cultural critic Harron Walker takes sharp aim at modern white womanhood in her debut book that interrogates how bath bombs, pink marketing, and the United States’ antiquated healthcare system all work against the women it claims to protect. It’s a collection of essays that’s part memoir, part investigation of the girlboss-ification of the modern labor system.”—Rolling Stone, “10 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2025”

“A Harron Walker take is always coming from a better angle, somewhere unexpected yet inevitable when viewed against the whole of culture. In a time when everyone else is zigging, Walker zags.”—Vulture, “30 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2025”

“Aggregated Discontent tackles transphobia in the workplace, American womanhood, whiteness, autonomy, and so much more. Buckle up!”—Queerty, “16 LGBTQ+ Books to Add to Your Must-Read List in 2025”