Lindy West’s Adult Braces is a Delightful, Honest Portrait of Life After the Blog & Social Media Eras

But you wouldn’t know that from the internet discourse.

I have been a fan of Lindy West since her days of writing for The Stranger (and discussing her then-boss Dan Savage’s fatphobia on This American Life). Some of her earliest writing about contending with misogynistic fatphobia within the worlds of writing and comedy found me just as I was coming into my own fat liberationist politics, and she was high atop the list of writers in that sphere whose work truly saved me from a lifetime of eating disordered turmoil and outward-directed bigotry.

I loved her book Shrill, I loved her writing for Jezebel, and when she became active on Instagram, I followed her there, too. Her regular reposts of TikTok videos were what properly got me acquainted with that platform, actually, and in her approachable, consistent use of social media, I began seeing the Instagram as potentially useful for writers, when I’d previously written it off as a shallow distraction for bathing suit models and professional vacationers. Looking back, I think I became a really active Instagram story poster in 2020 in part because of how fun West made it seem to be online.

I have long admired Lindy West. She always wrote about her own life with a funny candor but never felt needlessly overexposed. The stories she told about herself served some kind of greater point in the narrative — an illustration of rape culture norms within the comedy scene, a stirring call of fat courage that brought the reader on board to her conception of herself. But still, they remained funny and flawed.

I was just coming into my own voice as a writer and failing sometimes at telling my own stories, either blasting past the truth in pursuit of wacky & distancing Millennial humor, or leeching my wounds for every lingering drop of blood so that the reader would know what I was saying was serious. Lindy West never did that, she struck a tone both casual and heartfelt that never felt like a put-on, and defined a register that would continue to be imitated by legions of popular nonfiction writers in the years to come. But very few could do what West did with the honesty and seeming ease of West herself.

Because I have followed her work fairly closely, I was relatively plugged in when the news of West’s controversial polyamorous triad with her husband, the musician Ahamefule Oluo, and arts curator/producer Roya Amirsoleymani (originally Ahamefule’s girlfriend) broke.

I saw the scandalized blogsnarkers speculating that because she was fat and had spoken openly about having insecurities, Lindy West couldn’t possibly be happy with her three-way marriage. Scores of concerning-trolling comments cast Ahamefule as deceitful abuser, Roya as sexually alluring cipher, and West as miserable sad-sack who needed online strangers to ‘save’ her from her choices by…publicly humiliating her. Then there were far viler takes on alt-right sites like Kiwifarms, which I saw because unfortunately, many of my queer fat friends are regularly harassed on those platforms, and West’s only one or two degrees of separation from them and share many enemies.

Witnessing all this judgement and stigma, and feeling a bit of the heat of public notoriety myself, I made the conscious choice to look away. I have my own complicated feelings about polyamory, which I’ve written about before, and appreciate being a gossipy bitch about other people’s business as much as anybody, but I truly appreciated the work West has done, didn’t think any of us had enough information to get a read on how things really were for her. I knew that even if she were unhappy in her marriage, a barrage of criticism would only bring further harm and isolation to a person who didn’t deserve it, and most of all, I didn’t find it enjoyable to leer over something so obviously private and complex that had taken on a life so separate from the people actually living it.

Seeing a writer like Lindy West— witty, powerful, open, adaptable Lindy West — reduced to a well-worn stereotype of a jilted wife when that was so transparently not the story she was telling made me sad. It seemed completely divorced from reality. I didn’t want to be a part of an internet mobs anymore, a even well-intentioned parasocial one.

A few months ago, West began promoting her new memoir, Adult Braces, with punchy storytime-style videos all about her transition into polyamory, describing the month-long solo road trip that helped her come to terms with the new arrangement she, her husband, and Roya were forming.

I remember seeing the videos and thinking to myself, fucking shrewd move, girl! Take the online masses hunger for details and milk them for some royalties! I thought taking advantage of her viral #poly moment and the intrusiveness of strangers to move some books was smart, maybe even empowering, though a part of me worried the release of the book would stir up more harassment or create tension in a relationship that was now even more enticingly on display.

Adult Braces came out in early March, and since then it’s been the subject of some very high-profile, skeptical reviews that once again cast Lindy West as romantically defeated and lying to herself. The snark-posters of Reddit and fatphobes of Kiwifarms have sucked every last bit of discourse marrow from the details, revisiting their favorite screencaps from West and her polycule for body language ‘evidence’ of her misery, combing through her archived posts, performatively begging for her to get divorced, and just generally visiting even more scrutiny and hatred in her direction.

But it’s not the bad-faith read of West and her polycule’s choices that I’m interested in exploring today; that topic has been talked to death, West herself has already had to speak out against it and ask people to stop, and no matter how obsessively anyone tries to analyze her, the fact remains that none of us have enough information to evaluate the quality of her life from the outside.

No, what compels me the most about Adult Braces is something completely different, and I haven’t seen it praised enough: this is a book all about being a famous author and internet person for multiple decades running, and the almost inevitable tensions that this role creates between the temporary, narrative self that has to be crafted to tell a coherent story, and the messy changeability of being a real person who ages, endures new traumas, recovers from old ones, reevaluates all their evolving relationships, and can see almost any situation from about a dozen different angles at any given time.

I’ve never seen a book conquer the dual truth and falsehood of using your own life as your writerly inspiration, how it can make you so good at mining details from your past and twisting them around in different lights that you can wind up tricking even yourself with your performance, and how complicated it is to do all of this while living in the public eye in real time.

The book really made me feel seen. And it speaks to a moment that I think a lot of creators of a certain age demographic (mine, aka Grey Bones in the Grave) seem to be entering: we have grown disillusioned with performing our personalities for social media, we have lived through enough internet eras to have created “content” as multiple contradictory selves, and we want to put down all the posturing and defensiveness and simply be honest, even if our truest story is not politically useful or convincing to others or moral-seeming. Adult Braces is a book that fully contends with its author’s fame and her present feelings about her prior writing, in a way that makes it feel substantial, unguarded, and fully alive.

The cover of Adult Braces.

Early in Adult Braces, West writes about the period after her first book, Shrill, became a breakout success in 2016. She describes the time as harrowing, and herself as withdrawn and depressed — sudden fame brought with it being recognized in public, which made her feel uneasy, and it awoke online mobs that had harassed her for writing feminist takes on the prevalence of rape culture in comedy and fatphobia in, well, the whole world. West was already pretty accustomed to being hated by violent, cruel men online, but her success only inspired more of it.

For a while, this took all the reward out of writing — here’s how she describes it:

As all this was happening, West was simultaneously being praised by a massive audience of predominately fat-positive women, who needed somebody to be the symbol of self-love and self-possession they’d been denied. They showered West in attention and stories of their own body hatred, sexual assaults, and abortions, all subjects that West had become famous for writing about, until openly Being a Person Whom Awful Things Had Happened To (and Having Humor and Courage in Spite of It) became a huge part of West’s career. She writes:

This phenomenon — becoming a public fat-positive figure, a person who loves herself where others can see it, and for money — was another form of objectification, the snarling fat-hatred West had always endured turned upon its head and framed as a positive, but a further reducing of her to object nonetheless. West writes:

I haven’t seen a writer talk about hating even the positive consequences of fame like this before. A few authors I admire have talked about feeling ashamed of their work and borderline suicidal while on book tour — and that’s given me solace, because having to do a promotion junket always dusts up a cyclone of self-loathing in me — but about how much it sucks to be an empowering symbol of a hated group you can’t help but be part of?

I haven’t seen many do it, certainly not authors of West’s level of exposure — for the most part, it’s only been other transgender influencers that I’ve seen complaining about the burden of being “good representation” online. And being publicly trans is a beat that’s pretty easy to hate, because we’re awash in death threats and sexually menacing DMs every single day we show our faces (this is quadruply true for trans femmes). Anybody who listens to #transvoices knows that public scrutiny got way worse for us after The Tipping Point. Everybody who cares about trans feminism understands how unrewarding and frankly scary it can be to have to serve as the counterpoint to Norman Bates and Buffalo Bill.

But to hate being a bestselling author? To get your life story adapted into a Netflix show and loathe it every second, and walk out of the experience totally demoralized and unable to write?

I don’t know any writer who speaks so frankly and in such detail about suffering from success, other than, well, me. I complain about that shit constantly, becoming even modestly ‘famous’ wrecked my social life and writing for a couple of years, it felt like, though I always feel like saying so makes me a spoiled, short-sighted baby bitch who can’t handle getting something that I wanted and worked toward intentionally and that makes my life vastly easier than a majority of people’s on the planet.

But Lindy West’s writing feels like permission to admit that it was the entire enterprise of becoming a professional voice of transness/disability/queerness/fatness that sucked, and would inherently, that it places onto individuals like West and me far too much symbolic weight and responsibility and demands too much simplicity in return, uplifts us to a platform from which we cannot help but fall.

Stories about our personal lives can’t do the full ‘community’ justice, and they are not morality lessons with satisfying arcs (no matter how much we massage the details to make it seem like it). The lofty, liberatory political ideals we sometimes put in writing are not betrayed by us having feelings of doubt and internalized stigma, but to the audience who draws courage from the banger lines we put in our books, it can certainly feel like it.

So many fat women, trans people, and disabled people are absolutely starving for support, and writers within these groups can make ourselves sound so supported and loved — until the wonderful husband of The Witches are Coming is caught kind-of-but-not-really cheating while the audiobook is being record, or the Autism-accepting boyfriend in Unmasking Autism gets dumped for not being super into the whole trans thing before the book even comes out.

West established herself professionally with her singular voice, but it was also her identities — feminist, fat woman, survivor, abortion-haver — that large segments of her audience got attached to and saw as inspiring projections of themselves. But to love her for only this is to sell her short — it’s her writing and her thinking as a flawed fat feminist woman that makes her so damn compelling, and makes her stories so useful, and so it’s infuriatingly short-sighted for her fanbase to have soured on her for things like losing weight some of the time, or not always feeling sexy.

When she appeared noticeably thinner on Instagram a few years ago (around the time that news of her polyamorous triad broke), West’s audience took it as a personal affront, and referred to her as yet another “fat body” they were being forced to watch shrink on public display. But West is not a “fat body” built to inspire the ire of bigots or to emotionally uplift other fat people — she is a person whose relationship to her fatness is as dynamic as any person’s is.

In Adult Braces, West does the brave work of describing how that relationship has evolved. She describes her weight fluctuating in tandem with mental health challenges and lifestyle changes — something that’s true of a lot of people, but which can feel unhelpful to acknowledge in certain “body positive” circles, because our enemies can frame it as ‘proof’ that anybody can stop being fat if they just really want to (and they should).

West admits to feeling desexualized and unwanted in her body at times, conflicted about how she approaches food, and when she seeks out support, has a jarring realization that nobody else is flying the health-at-every-size plane: her nutritionist learned most of what she knows about fat-positivity from Lindy West’s writing! It turns out that nobody is a perfect beacon of body acceptance, or a fully equipped movement leader. Roxane Gay got bariatric surgery. I don’t like some of what testosterone did to my body. We are all permitted body autonomy and fat & trans people still need liberation regardless — and these realities shouldn’t have to be unspeakable in order to secure those goals.

In one of the most memorable portions of the book, West revisits a line from Shrill about her powerful fat body ascending a mountain:

“Maybe you are thin. You hiked that trail and you are fit and beautiful and wanted and I am so proud of you…But you didn’t carry this up the mountain. You only carried yourself. How hard would you breathe if you had to carry me. You couldn’t. But I can.”

Years later, West describes trying to make her way up a punishing mountain in rural France on her honeymoon, struggling to make headway after hours of ascending with no food and water, and this line returning to her in her mind. She wonders whether all the bombast of her first book was ever true:

“Did I lie when I wrote that in Shrill? CAN I CARRY THIS UP THE MOUNTAIN?”

But there is no lie in West’s writing, or any straightforward truth either. The interwoven time periods that make up Adult Braces show this: there have been years when she was ascending mountains, and years when she physically couldn’t, ages where she felt sexy and capable followed by spiraling dejection. The challenge is that creating the work demanded coherence, the live creation of one single, compellingly-written self.

I love that in this book, West is so willing to drop the old performance of herself in favor of a new one without throwing any of her many selves away. I find it really regrettable and unfairly limiting of her as an artist that so many of Adult Brace’s readers have been unwilling to look past the curtain of Professional Feminist Lindy West and see the human behind it with grace.

The real story, as fragmented and multivalent as it is, is far more interesting, and it makes me feel that, as sometimes self-hating Autistic trans person, I haven’t been doing anything deceptive by being proudly defiant in my writing. Like West, I was playing a necessary role, and rounding up my desire to be courageous into a version of me that might help readers actually get there. But it is not a failure of fat liberatory politics or neurodiversity or queer rights to admit that it’s damn hard to be that person at all times.

As I wrote about in Unlearning Shame, all marginalized people stand to gain when we build more collective power. That power comes from us coming together, often driven forward by a resounding rallying cry — but it is not a betrayal if the person who made that cry still hold internalized shame. That Lindy West sometimes compares herself unfavorably to her husband’s thin girlfriend doesn’t mean she’s given up on the politics that birthed The Witches are Coming and Shrill. It just means that she wrote what she needed to read. And I did too.

Throughout the book, West talks about the kaleidoscopic trick of writing about one’s life , and how quick we are as writers to tidy up the shards of our existence into an easy, recognizable portrait:

When you write about your life often enough, or for long enough, this kind of rearranging becomes habitual. I know what my audience wants to hear, and what values they expect me to hold, so when my honest, in-the-moment reactions to life don’t gibe, I have to decide whether to smooth myself over into a more sanguine version, or build myself a defense.

Six months ago, in an essay about nonmonogamy, I tried framing my own desire to feel special as a needless ‘insecurity’ I had to work through. That was wrong. If I want to be happy in a relationship, I really do need special treatment and to pull rank over anybody else my partner sees. I am a relational Sheev Palpatine mastermind manipulator and also a very lovable king baby and I want what I fucking want and I have basically always conspired to get it. But I also wanted to sound more ‘evolved,’ because otherwise I would be an unattractive, needy failure of a queer person.

A gif of Sheev Palpatine featuring the lyrics of Taylor Swift’s Mastermind, in one of the most hilarious fandom posts I have ever seen on the internet and can never stop reposting.

In Adult Braces, West writes about having wanted to believe that her relationship with Oluo was perfect, and needing to broadcast to the world that a fat, outspoken feminist like herself could find lasting, egalitarian love. And so, in her earlier writing, she cast the couple’s inability to talk about stressful life problems as a cute, mutual “no serious talk in bed” ritual. In previous books, she shone a light on the adorable aspects of her engagement, not mentioning that it came with an ultimatum from Oluo that the couple be polyamorous, which at the time made Lindy feel miserable.

It breaks the illusion for West to show us her own tricks. That makes me feel far closer to her as a reader because of how often we all trick ourselves. Who hasn’t sated themselves on crumbs of affection when they were in love? What person who dates men hasn’t told herself lies, like “he only used that condom in the trash for masturbation” or “that glance between him and his coworker meant nothing” (both things that I’ve said to myself)? This is, occasionally, how patriarchy works on us. It is also sometimes how we avoid confronting the fact that there is a conflict between our partner’s desires and our own feelings, how we allow it to quietly fester until everything blows up.

West says she tried simply ignoring that Oluo was polyamorous until it was undeniable. She permitted him to date others, but demanded that he never tell her any details. She owns up to the fact that she helped engineer a situation in which some kind of devastating reveal would be inevitable, and shows us how the sunny relationship she wrote about was more than she’d made it out to be. But the online response to the book has seemed hell-bent on denying West any power or choice, as if a famous, attractive, best-selling author renowned for her wit has zero options.

It makes sense for West’s audience to be angry at Oluo, but how does acting as if she has no power or desirability help her? Is that really an act of somebody who adores her writing, or even understands it? And if we as readers have such a hunger for revealing writing, and want to hear so much about an author’s subjectivity, why do we punish it?

The Jezebel magazine logo.

On the In Case You Missed It podcast episode about Lindy West’s new book, writers Kate Lindsay and Scaachi Koul talk about how West’s career was shaped by the sensibility of the blog-era internet.

West came up in a time period that spawned a million XOJane It Happened to Me articles, an era that definitively shaped my own irreverent but exposed voice and taught me the way to snare reader interest was to lay myself bare. After decades of trading her privacy for acclaim and money that never stretches as long as it seems like it should, West is once again being lambasted, now just as much by her fans as her detractors.

Adult Braces may have tried to get her more genuinely concerned readers back on board with the healthiness of her marriage, but if the loud public response to the book is any indication, it hasn’t succeeded. Looking at much of the outcry and discourse, though (and keeping in mind the sales statistics — which would be fantastic for most authors, but are an under-performance for a powerhouse like Lindy West), I wonder how many of her critics and scolds have even read it.

Reading the book, of course I didn’t always share West’s complete interpretation of events, or “agree” with all her choices — but that seems like a nonsensical thing to even say, because it is a fucking book, a creative work a person reads sequentially and then reflects upon in order to enrich their understanding of themselves and the world.

I read Adult Braces because Lindy West has a singular voice that entertains me, a perspective that has helped me grow and continues to, and because I’m also a messy, public person who has narrated my life and relationships to great effect, then turned back and questioned whether I should have done the whole thing.

Because I am coming to the book with that attitude, I can say that it absolutely succeeded! I learned a lot about West’s perspective, and it gave me a ton to chew on for myself! The book made me think about a lot of my relationships, how meaningful it is to repair bonds after betrayals, and how tempting it is to cross your own boundaries when you are desperate to not be left alone. Sometimes both those things happen in the same relationship! Sometimes there is unspeakable beauty alongside immense hurt, and sometimes to be with someone is to stand with them atop a pile of all your past selves and be grateful that you didn’t throw anybody away even though you totally could’ve (and many people would have said that you should)!

The public response to Adult Braces doesn’t really tell us anything about the realities of West’s life itself, but it does show that the age of sacrificing privacy for artistic acclaim is now long gone. Everybody is on TikTok now ripping their chests open, telling stories about sexual assaults and switching between alters, having seizures on camera and staging fake break-ups to get Spotify streams. The market’s too saturated, the audience so spoiled by the endless scroll that they won’t engage with any creators in good faith, or God forbid, take enough time off their favorite social platform to purchase or read a book.

This risky confessional stuff just isn’t rewarding like it used to be, and it’s sad when someone who does it as expertly as West gets treated like just another adulterous couple getting handsy at the Coldplay concert.

There is value in telling untidy stories and contradicting oneself and being so brave about it. But the reader has to be willing to meet story where it is.

This is my version of the “carrying oneself up the mountain” line. These days this quote kinda makes me CRINGE!

When I was writing Unmasking Autism, I was trying very hard to convince myself of the freedom of the life that I had built, and the joy of the long-term, straight relationship I was in.

I wanted my writerly voice to be a gentle cloud of reassurance that readers could sit on top of as I floated them through the otherwise terrifying process of getting back in touch with their real disabled selves. I thought that I had to make myself sound like a fully self-accepting Autistic person. I tried to make the way things were sound good, because I wanted it to be true and I felt like a fraud.

I used to get so overstimulated by my boyfriend’s music playing that I would scramble and hide underneath the bed. Eventually I decided to buy a more lofted bed so that I’d have more room to crawl around, and when it arrived from Wayfair, my boyfriend helped me put it together, because back then, even just following furniture assembly instructions sent me into a fit. My boyfriend made a few kind jokes about me living underneath the bed.

In Unmasking Autism, I turned this brief exchange into a lovely story about having a supportive and Autism-affirming partner, keeping the details vague enough that readers could assume he had had taken great initiative to build a lovely under-the-bed nest for me.

I told a story that might have inspired actual couples in the world to treat one another better. I felt ashamed as I wrote it because I knew that I was lying to myself. It was especially embarrassing when I was no longer in that relationship upon the book’s release, and when I began reexamining how lost and emotionally neglected I felt in the relationship in my next book.

I had put myself and my ex partner at emotional risk by creating comforting nonfictions about our relationship. I am doing it again right now. I’m sure there were many times when my boyfriend was encouraging toward me, and preemptively changed his behavior so that I would feel more comfortable. I just cannot remember them as clearly because I spent the last few years of the relationship feeling so forlorn and upset with him. But if I were to narrate that entire relationship in detail, most readers would take my side.

In the public eye, Lindy West is currently suffering from the fact that most readers are doing the same thing about Oluo, while also lashing out at her for being a multifaceted person who has held many emotional truths inside all at once, and across time, and whose job it is to put those truths together into enriching stories.

It is an impossible task, making a satisfying performance of your life. The actual details will bleed in. Your husband will get caught deceiving you. You will be revealed in all the ways that you have used narrative to gently and lovingly deceive the readers, and you’ll show all the ways that you deceive yourself.

This is not actually a writerly failing. It does justice to human complexity. Everything Lindy has said about Oluo is true and untrue all at once. Everything that I have written about my relationships, my many genders, my life experiences, it was all true, and it was the creation of a belief that was happening in real time as I wrote it. I expect the reader to follow me as I move through this meaning-making, and to see that it is an effort, so that they might do a little making of meaning themselves.

A book is a performance, but it is also a collaboration with the reader, who is asked only to follow the story, notice the unreliability, and craft an interpretation all their own. But too many of Lindy West’s readers (at least the vocal ones on social media) no longer see the act of reading as collaboratory. They approach books instead as content, and reading as a search for either validation or viral outrage.