For millions of women, shame is a vicious predator, the constant psychic drumbeat that tells us we are less than, that we are unworthy. We try everything we can to escape shame—ignoring it, intellectualizing it, commodifying it, even, ironically, shaming ourselves for feeling it. The reality is that women, including femme-presenting trans and nonbinary persons, experience shame more frequently and more intensely than men do—a direct result, as acclaimed journalist Melissa Petro explains, of a patriarchal culture that “urges women to feel bad about themselves [and] then punishes us when we do.” Why can’t we figure out how to break the shame cycle once and for all?

Petro excavates this pernicious phenomenon in her nonfiction debut, SHAME ON YOU: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification (G. P. Putnam’s Sons; on sale: September 10, 2024). In the spirit of Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad and Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, this courageous investigation into the modern epidemic of shame takes an unflinching look at the conditions that encourage women to believe we are deeply, fundamentally inadequate. From shame’s beginnings (Maybe she’s born with it? Nope, it’s misogyny), to its effect on our lives as adults (How the humiliation of “bad women” affects us all), Petro explores the myriad social systems that enable shame to poison our friendships, our professional lives, our romantic relationships, and our own self-image. But rather than accept shame as our existential burden in perpetuity, Petro argues that is precisely by understanding shame as a systemic problem that we can uncover the necessary strategies to liberate ourselves from its grasp.

Conquering shame is a subject that is deeply personal to Petro herself. After it was discovered that she did sex work in college to help pay for her tuition, she wound up an unwitting New York Post cover girl, a public denigration that ultimately cost her her teaching career. The experience was humiliating, but it also changed her life, and her continued commitment to writing and speaking about this and other presumably shameful parts of her past has empowered others to share their darkest secrets with her—so much so, that she considers herself to be a “shame whisperer.” It is her intimate relationship to shame that makes her uniquely suited to not only reassure us that shame need not dictate our lives. . . but also to offer us a path forward.

Blending investigative reporting, science, literature, and hundreds of women’s personal stories, including her own, SHAME ON YOU presents a raw, unflinching, accessible, and intersectional approach to shifting shame off our plates and living our best lives in an over-exposed, image-obsessed world.