First off, and it has to be said: I love Lindy West. She’s a funny, inspiring, wonderful writer, and this book is no exception to those things despite how difficult I found it to read. I’ve been a fan of hers since the internet was a different place. We’ve performed together and she was lovely and generous and kind and passed off her drink tickets to me, a lush. I have no desire to treat her like a squeaky toy with no feelings of her own, which is how she describes the experience of being online. I totally agreed with her when she said Twitter was a machine where she fed in free labor and got back abuse. That was true, she was brave to say it, and she was brave to quit.
I still have critical thoughts about Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane, which I bought on the day it came out (audio format) and listened to immediately. It’s a memoir about Lindy West taking a road trip and deciding whether she wants to stay in an awful marriage that is making her sad by… changing her mind about it? I guess? Not by changing the marriage itself, but by deciding to choose what she already has.
I knew Lindy was in a poly marriage. I followed their coming-out and I didn’t think much of it. I saw the ripple of feedback about their awkward announcement online: their third is thinner and younger and more conventionally attractive than Lindy is, and isn’t that always the way? It was hard to watch, as Lindy is a crier and the three of them slowly strip their clothes off in a way that feels like someone is holding a gun on them, just off-screen.
But here it is again, the central tension of this book: this embattled marriage and the variable number of people in it. Not boring at all, but sordid and painful and predictable. I was also in a polyamorous marriage for 15 years. I also got my heart broken and had to disassemble my understanding of myself, of sex, of monogamy, of fidelity, to continue. My husband and I were very young, knew nothing, and wanted to remake the world with our four hands. We tried. For a while, we were very happy. When the end came, it had nothing to do with polyamory.
Listening to Lindy tearfully reconstruct the painful process of living in fear of her husband having another partner took me back to being 23 and not being able to separate what was really happening from the terror of what would happen. Because that pain and panic is about parental abandonment. It has nothing to do with marriage, and it has to be processed separately, in individual therapy. Listening to Lindy explain that she is a disgusting monster to whom no one could ever be attracted brought me back to the same shame and pain I had felt in my body, rebuffed and rejected in the same way, for the same reason, in a very similar life.
The difference between us is that I could not live that way and sought ways out from a very young age. I worked on it, faced it, strategized to live and feel better, practiced endlessly at being loved and receiving love in my fat body. Lindy didn’t. She waited for the bomb to go off. That makes for a titllating memoir, but it makes me ache for her.
A tension exists throughout the book because Lindy is hyper-aware of being observed. Early on, she describes her dedication to archiving all the shitty things people have said to her online. Ostensibly, this is about safety or possibly just grudge-keeping. However, it ends up being like someone collecting radioactive debris to prove they’ve been nuked. We all saw the nuke from space, babe. We know. The evidence doesn’t do anything but keep you in contact with that radioactivity, and we all see the results. Lindy is very, very hurt by the way she’s been observed and abused by the internet. I know that the internet is real life. I know it’s where writers like her (like me) get work and post work. I know it’s unavoidable; I also collected rape and death threats through years of my career, though hers was a scale of magnitude greater than mine. I had to learn to stop dwelling on it, stop searching for it, stop using it as a means of hurting myself to prove to others that I was hurt but NOT as proof that I deserved care.
Everyone’s brain is poisoned by the internet. Lindy’s dose was nearly fatal. I wish she had learned to monitor and control her own dosage sooner. I hope she does, now.
Lindy’s accustomed to the pressure of being a role model to fat people. In the book, she explains how that position has made it impossible for her to seek help from a nutritionist, to be happy about even a small amount of weight loss, or to feel like she belongs to herself. That’s a tough position to be in, and she takes it very seriously. What she does not take seriously or even seem to consider is that she is now a role model and public example of a poly person, particularly as a fat poly woman. Her example is not a competent or comfortable one for me, or for a lot of people who have done a lot more work than she has. Her assertion that she is not queer while she’s in a relationship with a woman (one that she admits is sexual and describes as if it is romantic) is mystifying, to say the least. Her description of her marriage as what we sometimes call “poly under duress” is concernining, particularly because fat women are often assumed to have settled for something like that, to keep a cis male partner married or domestically aligned with us.
Lindy West didn’t ask to be a representative for poly people, but since she’s accidentally become a role model before she knows how this works.
Almost entirely missing from this memoir is Lindy’s husband, the musician Ahamefule Oluo. He’s described only briefly as talented, as an insatiably sexual sex nerd who needs sex (but also exactly like her, a person who cannot discuss sex, even with him) and as her best friend. He appears in the periphery of her angst, as a shadow in the room during therapy, as a distant anchor to her road trip, as the bane of her existence and the love of her life. I appreciate her efforts to protect the privacy of those close to her, but the presentation of her husband pales in comparison to that of her girlfriend. Roya is described lovingly, in detail and in quoted text messages. She is worshiped with adjectives, as writers are wont to do, and described as a caring metamour and co-carer of Aham when he’s sick. (Ahamefule himself apparently can’t return a text about his own medical condition, which is literally being full of shit.) There’s a beautiful teambuilding between metas in a healthy polyamorous relationship, and that ribbon of shared responsibility and tenderness shimmers through a gloomy memoir about self-hatred and forced self-reckoning.
I could tell in this book that Lindy loves Roya. I could not get a clear picture of how she feels about her husband.
Memoir is a fan dance, all cover and reveal. She doesn’t owe us unstinting detail, no matter what we paid to read. But the fans don’t fall in random places. The dancer always covers where she feels most vulnerable, most exposed. There’s no talk of sex, beyond bare hinting. There’s a brag about threesomes, and a long tiresome explanation of why Lindy can’t and won’t write or even talk about sex. That’s her business, but if that’s what you came to see: you’re seeing a fan.
The metaphor of braces brackets the story. Lindy has to get braces as an adult because she was gnashing her teeth at how much she hates her body and her life. She has to get old-school metal braces because being trusted with an Invisalign counted too much on her ability to care for herself, a process she knew she would fail. The retold event of getting x-rays and braces is fatphobic and dehumanizing, as encounters with medical professionals often are, and she’s left with something uncomfortably apt: an unforgiving torture device that she must endure in order to move on as the person she wants to be. A person who can smile without hiding pain.
The metaphor of braces left me speechless. Lindy brags that she had perfect teeth as a kid. She also had two loving parents (though they fucked her up in their own ways, most notably about sex, food, and the body). She saw a dentist as a kid. As someone who grew up in extreme poverty parented by two unloving felons, I never did. Where Lindy got braces to correct her bite and confronted her lifelong avoidant habits to attempt to become a person in her forties, I have smooth gums. I went through seven extractions of my lower molars and then lost my insurance before I could go any further toward replacements. Lindy has the tools to take care of herself, and I’m glad. She admits that she’s lucky to have access and money and she’s right: she’s lucky. I hope she gets luckier still. I hope this memoir sells like a mad bastard and gets her out of debt forever and that she can make peace with her body and the illusion that any of us have a say in what she does with it.
It is still really hard to read a book about someone who has the same problems as I have had, in the same fat body I live in with fucked-up teeth, in the same difficult kind of marriage to someone who could not show me respect, where the protagonist has all the tools I wish I had to address those problems, and still refuses to grow up and deal with it.
I followed along for the two thirds of the book that are her road trip where she’s screaming crying throwing up about desirability, infidelity, and her fear of abandonment, waiting for her to talk about how she got over it.
There is no explanation. The road trip is mapped, with hearts and hamburgers, all the way to the fictional Kokomo on which she based her goal. Her emotional journey is not mapped at all. The final third of the book is I DID IT! There’s a step missing here, and if you’re following the creator of Shrill to learn how to get through something like this, she left you no breadcrumbs to follow.
This book absolutely fried me. It is not about me, but that’s the mirror effect of memoir. Adult Braces is about Lindy West, but we all read it looking for ourselves. I stared into the mirror and saw my fucking Wario.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t read it. I’m saying if you’re fat and poly, you basically have to.
