‘Maybe a New Audience Will Tell Me What They Think,’ Lindy West Joked a Week Before Her Memoir Release

At Symphony Space in New York City on March 10, Lindy West sat on stage with Guy Branum to talk about her new memoir, Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane. The audience was full of devoted fans—of her newsletter, her podcast, her books, her Hulu show, and (ideally) her old Jezebel posts. The fandom ran deep. During the Q&A, one woman shared how she knows a minor, recurring yet unnamed figure from West’s podcast, Text Me Back!, in real life—and that they’re great and lovely. Branum was annoyed at the lack of a question, but everyone else, including West, was delighted.

Two weeks later, the reaction to West’s memoir has reached such a fever pitch that Jezebel was, somehow, accused of killing Roe v. Wade. I’ve wondered if I hallucinated that entire evening sipping canned rosé and going slightly deaf from the pockets of loud, performative (sorry!) laughter behind me. Were people really losing their minds over a book Branum affectionately described as a “budget Eat, Pray, Love”?

At this point, it’s impossible to talk about the book without talking about the backlash—starting with the internet’s unhinged reaction to the polyamory of it all, which only makes up maybe a fifth of the book. But things got worse when West’s husband emailed Scaachi Koul, who profiled West for Slate, and called her a “shitty fucking person” and a “bitter, untalented mean girl.” Ironically, in doing so, he centered himself in the press tour for a book his wife wrote about trying to decenter him.

A few days before the event with Branum (I’ll stop mentioning timelines after this, I swear), I spoke with West on the phone and told her I thought the memoir was phenomenal. I still do. If you’re a fan of her work, you’ll love Adult Braces. It’s funny, insightful, and impressively vulnerable—even for someone who’s built a career on being vulnerable online. 

Here’s the gist: In June 2021, West is emerging from the bowels of covid and cycling through toxic patterns with her husband of six years, Ahamefule J. Oluo (Aham), with whom she’s in a non-monogamous marriage, which is mostly making her feel insane. She knows he has two girlfriends. She knows he’s never believed in monogamy. She doesn’t know how she feels about any of it. So she rents a van to drive from Seattle to Florida and back to reconnect with herself outside of the relationship. Spoiler alert: The road trip concludes with her deciding to enter into a polyamorous relationship with her husband and his girlfriend. She also had to get braces during this time because of a crossbite. 

But this memoir wasn’t the first reveal of West’s throuple. In 2022, the three appeared in a video to answer questions about their relationship, and it went kind of viral. West then answered questions on her Substack, Butt News. Commenters on both were pretty brutal, so I wasn’t surprised by the unhinged internet responses to her memoir, but I was somewhat surprised by the throuple’s reaction to it, since they’d weathered attention like this already. 

On Monday, Matthew Yglesias (I know, I know) wrote on Twitter: “Shouldn’t someone have to write the ‘Lindy West is good and actually right about everything take’ in order to justify the volume of takedowns I am seeing?” I don’t know if this is that take, but here’s what I’ll say: I can’t, nor do I want to, defend Aham, but in terms of the content of the book, a few passages make him look shitty, and a few passages make him look less shitty. I know plenty of shitty relationships, plenty of good relationships, plenty of bad relationships that grew into good ones, and good ones that turned into horrible ones. I appreciate anyone willing to open up about their own.

A lot of the internet’s response to the memoir centers on the claim that West is being manipulated or coerced. She made complicated decisions, but the decisions were fully her own (and, yes, took a budget Eat, Pray, Love trip to arrive at). Some of the worst things people have said online are ones she already anticipated and wrote about in the book. But the underlying assumption of these criticisms is that relationships are a final destination, rather than something that evolves—or ends. And look, I hope West’s throuple does work out. But it might not! And that wouldn’t be a moral failure. That’s just life! 

As I mentioned, this conversation took place before any of the discourse of the past two weeks. We talked about how the book came together, the stories that got cut, that we’re both Virgo moons, and how any commenter who’s ever thought they were defending her by calling her the “fat one” wasn’t actually on her side. It was a conversation about writing a memoir at a crossroads moment in your life. Neither of us said the name Aham once.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

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JEZEBEL: In your newsletter, you said this was pitched as a self-help book, but a lot of that got cut. It’s not self-help in the way of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, but given the pacing of Adult Braces, I felt like I was there alongside you, figuring out these anxieties and insecurities in real-time. 

LINDY WEST: That was kind of exactly my thinking, because I was like, I don’t know what to tell people. Once I sat down and started writing, I was like, I don’t know, “Take a shower.” Also, the real answer is like, go to therapy. No [laughs] that’s not true.

There are some things that did carry over from when I tried to brainstorm, like, “OK, what did I actually do that improved my life?” But, I think I started to feel guilty about writing anything that was even remotely prescriptive, because I think that that’s kind of dishonest and kind of a scam. Not that I’m calling all self-help authors scammers, but it’s kind of setting people up for disappointment and guilt to say, “Well, here, if you just follow these steps, then your life will get better.” Because that’s not how people’s lives work, and I don’t know all these people individually who might read my book, and I feel like there’s this sort of economy, of false promises. I guess that’s all of commerce and advertising, but false promises, and then shame if your life doesn’t improve, then it’s your fault, because you didn’t do a good enough job following these steps, when this author doesn’t know you and the specifics of your life.

I also think I fell in love with the story a little bit as I started writing—originally the road trip was just supposed to be one chapter, like “Oh yeah, part of my journey is I went on this road trip,” and it kind of revealed itself as I was working on it. I started to think, “Oh, this is the book, actually,” which was intimidating because I’ve never written a book that had a narrative throughline before. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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One of the sentences from the book that I wrote down was, “How easy and healing it was to connect with people if you’re brave enough to let them know you.” I was just like, “Oh yeah, you just have to talk to people.”

Huge if true. 

Huge. But that was the construct of the book; you would end a passage or end a chapter with a lovely little revelation.

If there’s stuff in there that you relate to that resonates with you, then you can have it; if not, then you’re just reading someone’s memoir about their experience. And I like that. 

I also really admired how you approached people and politics in this. You gave these characters you met the grace of their surroundings and how they were raised, but you also so plainly stated how backwards and hypocritical they were. One passage that stuck out was when you were at the Precious Moments chapel in Catharge, Missouri, a woman was crying over an exhibit of Precious Moments children waiting to get to heaven. You write in the book that there were 35 school shootings in the U.S. that year, ending with, “Perhaps later, we’ll all be strong enough to reach for something beyond comfort.”

It was 2021, so we weren’t into Trump part 2 yet, and we were all still in shock from covid a little bit, so I think I was feeling a little bit more gentle than I feel now. But I don’t disagree with my own takes on people in red states with bad ideas. It was interesting to go to those places and feel things that I related to—love of your community, love of your physical place, the landscape around you—because it feels like people who are MAGA or MAGA-adjacent are doing everything they can to destroy anything beautiful. It’s precarious, because I don’t want to be like, “Yeah, we have to like reach out to these people and connect with them,” because that’s what everyone will say—I mean, not me, that’s the kind of thing I was screaming about in 2016, when everyone was saying, “Oh, the disgruntled white man has been left behind, the white working class, we need to coddle them.” I’m not that person, and I don’t want to be that person. 

But it sort of forced me to think about it in a different way because I’m going into these people’s communities and I’m a guest there and even just for my safety, I had to think about them as not just adversaries, but people. I was curious about them. I was born and raised in Seattle, both of my parents grew up in Seattle, I didn’t know what was going on in Arkansas, or in far northeast Montana near the Canadian border, where they’ve never seen a liberal in 100 years.

So I had a lot of curiosity, and I just let myself follow that curiosity when I was talking to people, without compromising my values. I didn’t lie to anyone about what I believed, I didn’t refrain from pushing back politically if I got in a real conversation with someone.

But, here’s what I’m always doing: Lindy’s charm offensive. A lot of this got cut from the book; there was a whole chapter where I talked to this guy at a diner in Montana on my way home in the middle of nowhere, and I walked in, there was nobody in there, there was one elderly man eating eggs. And then, I don’t know if he was the owner or the manager or just the server, but this guy came out from the back, and he looked at me and said, “You don’t have to wear a mask in here.” And I said, “I’m not wearing a mask,” because I wasn’t. And he was like, “Well, yeah, but you don’t have to, we don’t believe in that here.” But it was just so obvious to him that I was not from that place; he just clocked me instantly. Then he was like, “Are you from Minneapolis?” and I said, “No, it’s worse, I’m from Seattle.” And he was like, “Oh my god!” But we ended up having kind of a fascinating conversation where I won the charm offensive, and I even got him to admit that there used to be snow on the mountains in summer and now there’s not. 

Wow. 

Again, I don’t think it’s prescriptive, and I don’t want to tell people that what you need to do is go coddle the fascists in your neighborhood, and just hear them out, because that’s not correct. But there was something kind of illuminating for me about talking to people and connecting on this tiny level that I had at my disposal. And then, I don’t know, this is so embarrassing actually to admit, and very narcissistic, and absolutely did not happen, but some part of me, after I left, thought about like, maybe that guy at the diner, at some point is going to think to himself, “I have a leftist friend.”

No, that’s what I hope for every time I leave an interaction with someone on the other side.

Right? At least he found out that I wasn’t scary, I made him laugh, we had some things in common. 

You weren’t drinking child’s blood. 

I wasn’t drinking child’s blood. And I held my ground on, for instance, believing that covid was real, which he was not on board with, even though he knew multiple people who died from it. But he just was like, it was the flu, and they lied, and said they made up a fake disease called covid to get us all to wear masks, I guess, for the purpose of … question mark? 

I don’t know how to talk about this because I don’t think we should be catering to people who are selling us into techno-fascism. But on the other hand, it was so interesting to go out and actually connect with individual real people and think about, who are you actually, and what’s driving you, and what’s going on in your life, what does your life look like and feel like. I don’t think that’s a bad thing for anyone to learn. 

What was the most fun part of writing this, apart from traveling the country? 

You know, my favorite parts to write were the parts where I really made myself laugh. I laughed a lot writing the chapter about getting my braces on, when an evil French man tortured me and called me fat. The parts I liked writing the least were the sad, stressful parts [laughs].

One of my favorite jokes is from the chapter where you wrote about feeling like a beautiful woman on the inside, but feeling like you haven’t been able to translate that to the public: “I feel like everyone who sees me wants to laugh. Nice try, meatball! Get back in the spaghetti!” I’m going to start saying that to people. 

Oh, good, let’s do it. You know, a piece of feedback I keep getting from people is, “Oh my god, you’re so hard on yourself in this book,” and I’m like, “Yeah, but don’t you like ‘nice try, meatball, get back in the spaghetti’?”

So, I’m also a Virgo moon, so maybe it’s because we’re both Virgo moons, but reading this made me feel more sane about how self-critical I am. 

That’s what I was hoping for. I was genuinely confused getting that feedback, because I was like, wait, everyone is not having this exact inner monologue at all times?

Obviously, you look at other people and think, “Yeah, you should not have a single bad thing to say about yourself, ever,” but reading this, I was like, “OK, I’m not crazy for just constantly thinking, ‘What needs fixing, what’s wrong, why does everybody hate me?'”

Totally. And to me it was really cathartic to write it all down, and it didn’t feel like I was beating myself up; I wasn’t hurting my own feelings, it was like I was doing an exorcism, kind of, by getting it all down on paper and then I could look at it and kind of access, what’s true and what’s not and what should I feel bad about—I found it theraputic. I think it’s interesting the way that people react to that, and I think it probably says something about how other people’s brains are wired. 

How did it feel writing about sex, couples therapy, your relationship, and the anxieties around that, which obviously involves people that you love and their vulnerabilities, as opposed to your past work, which is just your personal insecurities and anxieties? 

It’s making me nervous. Again, all of this is pretty far in the rearview and has been very processed at this point, and I feel protective of my husband, and I feel like I don’t want people to be mean to him. People are going to have a parasocial relationship with your work, no matter what, and that’s fine, I can’t control it. But it is scary, especially when other people in my life weren’t raised in the trenches of, frankly, Jezebel 2013. People who work online in the work that we do, you have your tactics for processing the whole internet being mean to you at the same time, but not my sweet loved ones who have normal jobs. So it makes me nervous. But luckily, I think trolls don’t actually read books.

They definitely don’t. 

Although it’s not even trolls. People have such powerful, negative reactions to any deviation from monogamy; people find it very threatening—so actually, the backlash that we’ve gotten so far, a lot of it is from, not trolls, but from my fans, or people who are ostensibly defending me. So all of that is really hard because, maybe I’m just not a good enough writer to do it, but actually translating your relationship on the page is really hard. I can’t guarantee that I will make anyone actually understand how I feel, so that’s scary. But also, it was fun to stretch a little bit beyond what I’m comfortable with, which is kind of meta, because that’s kind of what the book is about.

Obviously, this book is pro-couples therapy, and I am pro-couples therapy, but when you wrote about the therapist not letting you be sarcastic or roll your eyes, I was like, name them. Who is this therapist?? This cannot be the way to fix a relationship. 

You’re telling me. I’m not allowed to be mean to my husband in couples therapy? Come on. 

Are you less sarcastic with him now after that?

Mm, no. It was only under adult supervision. No, I think it was probably the right choice when we were actually having a serious discussion to not derail it by being mean, but as soon as things calmed down and felt like not a crisis, I am immediately roasting him. 

You mentioned how some of the criticism to polyamory has come from your fans. Has that been online, or have fans come up to you? Do your parasocial relationships extend to the real world?

No, no one has come up to me and been weird about it. Because I don’t think it’s my actual real fans, I think it’s people who kind of stumbled upon me and then they were like, “polamory, ew.” And people love to populate it with their own narrative that makes sense to them, so we just had a lot of online strangers, who weren’t trolls, they were regular people, who were like, “Oh, I see what’s going on here, he doesn’t like the fat one, because she’s too fat, so he had to get a hot, thin one.” Which is like, you don’t know us at all, you freak, what are you talking about? Also, this is not nice. You’re not actually defending me. 

So I would say my actual fans have been adorable and sweet, like 99 percent, and then the ones who were weird, I was pretty aggressive about blocking. Because it’s like, this is my life, you don’t get unfettered access to be shitty about my life and people that I love.

So now it’s pretty quiet, but the thing is, when the book comes out, then maybe, hopefully, there will be a whole new audience who will come tell me what they think. 

As long as they buy the book.

Yeah, please buy the book, and you know what, you can say whatever you want to me, I might block you, but you’ll have fun for a day.

If you had one lesson to impart from this book, what would it be?

Umm, there’s so many lessons—what’s my favorite lesson? I think that I just want people to be brave. I just think you only get one life, so you should do what you wanna do. I met so many people on my road trip, so many women, who were like, “Oh, I could never do that.”

That bums me out.

Yeah, you can go through your life thinking that, and then your life is done, and you don’t have a chance to ever do it. This process of reaquaniting myself with myself and my own desires and what makes me happy and learning how to spend time alone and listen to my instincts and what sounds fun and what sounds exciting, and also pushing myself a little bit beyond comfort—it was really scary, and it was not in my nature. I really had to force myself to do it, and it was the most worth-it thing.

I want people to be brave and curious about their lives, and if there’s something you wanna do, you should do it and don’t be scared. Look, I can’t guarantee you won’t get murdered, but I didn’t get murdered.

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