Paired Reading Guide: I'm a Fan and Wordslut

A Paired Reading Guide: I'm a Fan by Sheena Patel & Wordslut by Amanda Montell

What if the voice in your head (the one criticizing your body, comparing you to other women, rehearsing conversations you'll never have ) isn't yours at all?

Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan immerses you in a narrator consumed by obsession, jealousy, and the compulsive surveillance of another woman. It's uncomfortable. It's recognizable. And if you read it alone, you might think: this is just how women are.

Amanda Montell's Wordslut traces how English itself was engineered to position women as lesser, deviant, invisible—how words for women degrade over time while words for men stay neutral, how vocal patterns get policed, and how the language you speak perpetuates hierarchy and patriarchy.

Read them together, and something else emerges: the third space.

What This Guide Offers

My reading methodology developed from years of teaching graduate-level critical thinking to women inside and outside of academic institutions.

The Paired Reading Method: Cognitive science research shows that reading two texts together creates what I call a "third space"—emergent understanding that exists in neither book alone. This guide teaches you to build that space deliberately.

Four weeks of structured practice:

• Week 1: Reading the fiction first (and why order matters for memory)
• Week 2: Applying linguistic theory retroactively
• Week 3: Conceptual metaphor analysis (Lakoff & Johnson's framework)
• Week 4: Close reading for repetition and pattern recognition

A complete curriculum framework including cross-medium exploration (film, scholarly articles, podcasts), weekly reflection prompts, and a monthly disruption challenge that takes the reading off the page and into your life.

Research-backed reflection protocols designed for long-term retention and transfer so what you read actually changes how you think, not just what you know.

Who This Is For

• Women who want to read with more intention and depth
• Readers who finish books and feel like they should have gotten more from them
• Anyone interested in feminist linguistics, gendered language, or the politics of desire
• People building their own intellectual practice outside traditional institutions

What You'll Walk Away With

• A reusable methodology for reading any two texts in productive friction
• An introduction to conceptual metaphor theory
• A disruption experiment: one month of linguistic disobedience

...because reading is resistance.

22 pages. Includes weekly reading guides and a complete 10-step curriculum framework.