New note by jmakesart

jmakesart
2026-03-18T22:36:09+00:00

@HebrideanHecate @Biff Transcript 1/?

Say It with Me Now: Open Marriages Never Work

All Lindy West proves in her new memoir, ‘Adult Braces,’ is that she loves being treated like a child by the man she was supposed to grow old with—and the woman who has taken her place in his bed.

By Kat Rosenfield

“If you think I have been brainwashed and I am secretly miserable, I simply do not know what to tell you.”

So proclaims the final chapter of Adult Braces, a new memoir by Lindy West that is half-travelogue, half–polyamory memoir, and 100 percent privilege-disclaiming self-deprecation of the doth-protest-too-much variety. Perhaps you recall the moment in Girls where Lena Dunham snaps, “No one could ever hate me as much as I hate myself, okay? So any mean thing someone’s gonna think of to say about me, I’ve already said to me, about me, probably within the last half hour.”

Now imagine this moment, and those two sentences, somehow stretched to encompass a 336-page work of literature—an endless hellscape of millennial self-loathing, with no way out except through a minefield of weaponized vulnerability stretching as far as the eye can see—and you will have some idea of what it was like to spend the weekend reading Adult Braces.

I imagine West would object to this characterization, much as she objects to the notion that she might be unhappy in her marriage—which, contrary to her original desires, now contains three people instead of two. West wanted to be monogamous, whereas her husband wanted to (and did) sleep with other women. She describes the heartbreak of this at length, repeatedly, and in excruciating, objectively sympathetic detail. Then, she pulls the rug out from under the reader by insisting that actually, if you really think about it, she was the one being selfish and unreasonable and—worst of all—conservative in her expectations of what her marriage should be.

“In many ways, my side of the story is easier to understand than Aham’s—mine hews to cultural norms about heterosexual love and relationships while his challenges them,” she writes, in one of the book’s more standout instances of cad apologia. West, who is something of a celebrity in the world of fat activism, now insists that her desire for monogamy is simply a form of false consciousness, developed in response to societal narratives about how no man would ever want someone who looks like her. The way she felt about the idea of her husband sleeping with other women was fruit of this same poisonous tree. But she knows now where the fault lies, and no, it’s not with her cheating husband. It’s with herself, for being scared and selfish; it’s also society’s fault for making her that way. And it might be your fault too, dear reader, if you’re still wallowing around down there in the unenlightened pits of not wanting your spouse to screw other people: “Monogamous people don’t just project their relationship insecurities onto nonmonogamous couples—they’re afraid of us.”

For millennials like me (elder, nominally feminist, and terminally online), West is something of a household name. I remember when she first came on the scene as a blogger; there was an angry theater-kid quality to her writing that made it both highly recognizable and extremely well-suited to what was at the time still a new medium, short-form bursts of prose characterized by zany overconfidence mixed with aggressive self-deprecation, all-caps for emphasis, and lots and lots of parenthetical side notes. (JOKES! Am I right, ladies?)

There was also, increasingly, a cult of personality coalescing around West herself. She was brash, ballsy, and opinionated; she was vulnerable and funny and full of rage; she was very fat, very pretty, and apologetic about neither. She was also, somehow, always at the leading edge of whatever feminism-of-the-moment. A blogging gig at Jezebel turned into a column at The Guardian turned into a 2016 memoir, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman—adapted as a Hulu series starring Aidy Bryant—which ended with West’s marriage to musician Ahamefule Oluo. It seemed at the time like a happily-ever-after. Adult Braces, releasing Tuesday, complicates that happy ending in ways that you need not read it to find out, because the book’s big reveal was spoiled in advance by none other than the author herself. In a wildly viral New York Times interview released a week before Adult Braces hit bookstores, West explained that the fairy-tale coupling she always thought she wanted is now the throupling of her dreams: “It feels like I customized marriage to the specifications that are fun and fulfilling to me.”