Hype Women
Breaking Free From Mean Girls, Patriarchy and Systems Silencing You
Erin Gallagher
Wiley
Written for women who are tired of a lot of things — making themselves smaller to fit systems that empower men, regularly navigating the fallout of mean girls’ insecurities, serving and serving and serving kids, partners, parents, bosses, the community, the greater good, ad infinitum at the expense of themselves — Hype Women is Erin Gallagher’s manifesto for breaking free.
Reading more like a memoir than a workbook (although there are plenty of exercises listed throughout), Gallagher recounts in three parts her metamorphosis from “A Crawling Caterpillar,” to “Cocooned and Dissolving,” and finally, “The Monarch.” Along the way, the author points out the often insidious ways women are manipulated, sacrificed, and silenced, and challenges readers to identify the malevolent systems and people in their own lives and begin the process of remembering “who the fuck you are.” That’s where the power is, we find, and the key to the real fulfillment of choosing ourselves, every day.
The book’s foreword by Jamie Lee Curtis, ever positive role model, describes the moment in 2023 when colleague Michelle Yeoh won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. It’s captured in a glorious, joyful photograph, the “spontaneous spark” to launch the Hype Women movement.
Michelle Yeoh leaned over to me and whispered that she had never been nominated for anything in her life before and she was nervous. One minute later, when her name was called as the winner, I threw my hands up in a joyous gesture of excitement and support and watched in awe as she stood proudly on that stage and spoke her truth.
That moment and Curtis’s unadulterated joy for her colleague may have ignited Gallagher’s book, but the Hype Women movement has been growing a long time. Fed by the author’s personal experiences with her chaotic family, the trauma of losing the business she created, the exhaustion of sacrificing herself to serve everyone else, and especially the realization that mean girls got to go, Gallagher shows how women can support each other and why even hyping themselves is critical to being who they are meant to be.
Gallagher grabs her story by the lady parts and tells it all. Intimacy is her gig, and even when it feels too personal, it matters in the big picture. Her story is fierce and its themes utterly recognizable. As the author says herself, “LFG.” ◼
