Although I wrote a memoir, I have some reservations about the genre. There are many good memoirs to be read, absolutely, but it is a genre that very very easily goes wrong in my opinion. Memoirs are by their nature partial—about a period, a theme, a part of life. Which should give authors more leeway to work around stuff they don’t want to write about, either because of privacy concerns or because it’s boring or doesn’t suit the narrative or doesn’t suit their writing abilities or some other reason but I find myself reading a lot of pretty good memoirs with weird floppy patches, awkward silences or belligerent snarky yelling NUNYA BUSINESS. I leave it to your discretion which my own memoir contained… It’s just hard for folks—even creative folks—to hive off a little chunk of their own personal life and tell it as a self-contained story—there’s all this context that’s hard to explain! Human beings are defensive! And we like to have a zone of privacy and are not always able to be artful when we are afraid, whether the fear is of judgement or intrusion or of loved ones being mad of us. These are the three biggest things that I see going wrong with memoir (over/under contextualizing, defensiveness, and omissions for privacy done without regard for the reader’s experience/art/telling a story that makes sense).
I think Adult Braces contained all three problems, despite Lindy West being a pretty good writer. If you have not heard of this book, I am surprised. I felt like I was hearing about it everywhere, but such is the personalization of the algorithm. Lindy West is a writer who came to prominence in the late aughts writing angry funny essays about feminist issues include abortion rights and, especially, fat activism. Her first book Shrill is beloved and was made into a TV show starring Aidy Bryant. I long thought I should probably read something by West—she sounded interesting but was never quite in my orbit.
And now here we are, with Adult Braces is about how her husband pushed her into an open marriage and she was very upset but she didn’t want to lose the relationship so she stayed. A decade-ish later, once he actually started acting on the openness, when their marriage was at a nadir, she took a cross-country road trip and came around to thinking the open marriage was the right thing for both of them. Sounds WAY less my thing than her feminist humour, but so many people were talking about Adult Braces, including my beloved Scaatchi Koul, who wrote this nice enough profile of her and then got hate bombed by West, her husband, and (spoiler) their lover. I wanted to know what was going on.
Immediately, within the first few pages of the book, I thought that West is pretty funny and wildly messed up. The original title for this post was going to be Lindy West Is Not Ok (after a very good web series) but I thought that was too mean. She seemed to be profoundly depressed, in and out of the ability to shower and work without crying. A lot of this she blames on…being fat? Earlier cruelty about fatness at the hands of…someone? Some people? She never precisely explains but she says a lot of things about how “thin people” don’t want her to be happy, and in general acts and eventually describes herself (late in the book) as a person who is traumatized. (“The thin people would only slip in through the cracks with their skinny little knives…”) I felt like maybe this book was a sort of sequel to her earlier work and I was just supposed to know her whole deal, which I don’t. Or she was struggling with mental health concerns she couldn’t precisely articulate. Or both! I don’t know! I felt for her, as a person who was suffering, but I was also somewhat annoyed at the lack of context. The book was really confusing to me.
I don’t have any negative judgement towards non-monogamy—the great thing about other people’s marriages is that I don’t have to participate in them. But for most of the book West seemed to really hate the idea of non-monogamy, and for me a person hating a thing is enough to root for them not to have to do it. However! She spends most of the book psyching herself up to be more independent and spend more time alone while her husband has a second partner, and then decides that she will spend no time alone and instead they will be a throuple. Surprise! I thought, hey, wait, did they invite you? But her husband and the other lady are thrilled, and now they are a throuple. Obviously a LOT was left out: the part where they all started to mutually catch feelings (in the actual book, the new lady sends a few very pleasant texts, mainly about when the husband is in the hospital with severe constipation—not hot?), when they fall for each other, or how interaction and dialogue with them is like. There’s some great set pieces and dialogue at camp groups and (especially) on a boat in the Florida Keys in this book, so West can write well about humans and how they interact. She just doesn’t bring that type of force to writing about her relationships. [Note: other reviews don’t care about this so maybe its fine!! I cared though…]
Again, at the end, there seems to be extra material that I didn’t have, and I wasn’t in particular interested in going looking for—I expect books to be self-contained (Ok, Boomer!) Once everyone’s throupled up, there’s a brief section about how mad “people” were when the three of them came out of the closet as a throuple, but the coming out, and indeed the throuple, are not described. I know from Koul’s piece that there’s a video and some other stuff on the internet but again, I wanted it to be in the book. Also this, the dumbest thing in the book, “If you think I have been brainwashed and I am secretly miserable, I simply do not know what to tell you. Also, it shows me you haven’t met Roya.” I don’t think either of those things, and it’s weird to be accused by a stranger of having such a harsh opinion—I assume she is addressing people she’s had fights with on the internet, but I also go by “you.” And I most certainly have not met Roya—I assume most people reading, and most people anywhere, have not. The POINT of writing a book is to make vivid things and people and experiences to readers who will never know them in person. I thought we were clear on that.
This book is for a very specific audience, and that is not me.
I suppose that Lindy West, who writes almost no dialogue about her husband and lover, and never describes them doing anything besides fighting or going to couples counselling, would not like the way I wrote my memoir either. Perhaps we are not destined to be friends. Here is how I write about my partner:
Relevant context: Mark goes to bed 60-90 minutes earlier than me
RR (gets into bed)
MS (rolls over, huddles into RR)
RR: You ok?
MS (75% asleep) I’m cold. Help me.
RR: If you’re cold, why is the fan on? Do want me to turn it off?
MS: Yes, please.
RR: Ok, (gets out of bed, turns off fan, returns)
MS: Oh, thank you. That’s better.
RR: It’s 3 degrees outside, it’s not really fan weather. You were the only one here until just now. Why was it on?
MS: I was lonely. It just makes such a…soothing noise.
RR: The fan is a substitute wife?
MS: No, no. Just a nice sound.
RR: You don’t know how to turn on the white noise machine, do you?
MS: It’s not that I don’t know how to do it, it’s just that I haven’t learned yet.
