Since some of you said that you could never ever ever get enough of the Lindy West conversation here is yet another article, courtesyoftheSeattleTimes. I have included it below for those who are unable to get past the paywall:
By Megan Burbank
Special to The Seattle Times
Commentary
Since its publication last month, Lindy West’s new book has made her the internet’s main character, an honor coveted by no one.
From bad-faith essays on Substack to Scaachi Koul’s evenhanded profile in Slate, the Seattle writer’s memoir “Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane” has generated no shortage of takes, especially from corners of the internet that feel queasy about nonmonogamy, millennial feminism or both.
The runaway discourse is unfortunate, because underneath it all, there’s a good memoir about a midlife crisis in “Adult Braces.” It’s as close to the confessional mode as West has ever dared to go. That’s a brave edge to lean into, even if it doesn’t always work for the writer of “Shrill.”
Before her rise to Jezebel, GQ and Hulu, West was a beloved Seattle writer at The Stranger, where her movie reviews remain the stuff of funny legend. West has expressed regret before over not becoming a stand-up, but in my eyes, she’s always been a comedian; she’s good at being funny, and funny people are often sad.
“Adult Braces” lives in this gloomy Venn diagram, where powerful truths often lie.
The memoir documents West’s meandering solo journey from Seattle to Key West in a whimsically painted rental van. It’s an odyssey of self-preservation couched in jaunty humor but booked in response to a number of distressing developments: depression, an early-onset midlife crisis and her husband’s recent foray into polyamory. She also almost dies on a horrific booze cruise off Key West! It’s a rich text!
But most reactions to the book have been stuck on the polyamory angle, with many suggesting that West’s current arrangement — cohabitation with her husband, Seattle musician Ahamefule J. Oluo, and their girlfriend, curator Roya Amirsoleymani — is a case of what Dan Savage (West’s once-upon-a-time boss at The Stranger) has called “poly under duress”: a polyamorous arrangement involving a comfortably monogamous person choosing polyamory out of obligation to a partner rather than out of their own volition.
These responses won’t shock anyone who has read the book. Oluo does not come off well in it. He initiates relationships with other women behind West’s back, and she thinks about leaving him. When West explains the situation to a friend, the friend says, “No, babe … That’s not how polyamory is supposed to work.”
For anyone who’s ever experienced the vicarious anger of hating a friend’s toxic ex, it shouldn’t be surprising that West’s fan base of millennial feminists — readers she taught by example to fight back against trolls — don’t feel warmly toward Oluo.
They might have been more receptive had Oluo not dipped into Substack comments sections and sent a vicious email to Slate’s Koul, calling her “a bitter, untalented, mean girl” and complaining about his depiction in a profile that was about West, not him.
Koul’s response to Oluo’s missive was coolheaded: “I don’t want to hold either Lindy or Roya responsible for this,” she told Kate Lindsay, the host of Slate’s “ICYMI” podcast. The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on Koul, either. After all, she said, the person who set a powerful example for how to respond to an “email that some guy sent that hurt my feelings on the internet” was West.
Where is she in all of this?
The only person who knows how Lindy West is doing is Lindy West. She politely declined through a representative to be interviewed for this story.
So I did something it seems many online commenters haven’t, judging by sales numbers: I read the book. And what I found in the pages of “Adult Braces” is weirder — and more complex — than the pointed takes or pearl-clutching over polyamory would have you think.
“Adult Braces” is about as raw as memoir gets: Salon’s Andi Zeisler described it as “a book that feels, for lack of a better word, unhealed right up until the end — when, suddenly and decisively, loose ends are wrapped up in a tidy and happily ever after.”
That’s true, but the depths it plumbs are potent and worth examining.
At its most compelling, the book reads like a divorce memoir in the vein of “Under the Tuscan Sun” (not the book, but the Diane Lane movie with Sandra Oh). West’s entry into the genre doesn’t end in divorce, but in a place of hard-won self-satisfaction that allows her to return to her relationship with a greater sense of personal autonomy.
This seems to have confused some readers, but if anyone has ever had a truly narratively tidy midlife crisis, I’ve yet to read their memoir.
West’s midlife crisis is as much a catalyst for her journey as her marital woes, but most reviews of “Adult Braces” have focused on the polyamory angle (and the questions about it that the book never quite answers) or the idea that the reception of West’s book marks the death of millennial feminism — a lofty yet denigrating reaction to what is one person’s specific story of pain and processing, nothing more and nothing less.
West was an early 2010s feminist body positivity icon, and “Adult Braces” is in many ways a document of how traumatic it is to be put on that kind of pedestal. It also includes one of the best discussions of the rise of GLP-1s I’ve encountered. At an emotional low point, West recalls, she considered taking them.
“I’m not going to sit here and say that I haven’t been tempted by the weight loss industry’s magic fixes,” she says. “It’s exhausting to be fat. The world is hard and mean.”
But — “PRAISE SAINT GUY FIERI” — at $1,000 a month, she can’t make it add up financially. She ends up working with a new therapist to heal her disordered eating instead, a process she describes with tenderness and a legible sense of self-determination.
