Say It with Me Now: Open Marriages Never Work

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.”

More on those specifications in a moment—but the fact that West felt compelled to give this interview reminds me of nothing so much as my own behavior at a recent dinner party where I was painfully aware that I’d badly oversalted the beef Wellington, a fact for which I began preemptively joke-apologizing a full hour before it came out of the oven. (Any mean thing someone wanted to say about my beef Wellington, I had already said to me about my beef Wellington, etc., etc.) Whatever your project, be it a pastry-wrapped filet or a marriage memoir, it does not bode well if you are managing people’s expectations before they’ve even had a chance to taste it.

Even so, the unpalatability of Adult Braces still manages to shock. There’s one especially eye-popping moment early on, when West suggests that as a white woman married to a black man, her desire for monogamy could be reasonably construed as a desire to own him—as in, like a slave—and surely, I thought, this was just memoir craftsmanship, the kind where an author makes categorically insane assertions on purpose in order to set up some down-the-line payoff in which she realizes the error of her ways. By page 177, when West asks the reader, “Is it possible that the ongoing project of global white supremacist imperialism and white people not being able to dance are symptoms of the same thing?” I had long since stopped scanning the horizon for signs of rescue.

Adult Braces is structured around a monthlong road trip that takes West across the country, the rare travelogue in which the author is utterly, belligerently incurious about the people she encounters. Her judgments are reflexive, contemptuous, and not infrequently racist. The tourists around her in the Florida Keys are all white (as is she, of course, but whatever), because “what white people really want is to vacation in white-majority places where the other people being served are white and the government is white.” The Wyoming men in pro–Second Amendment gear from whom she buys a jar of homemade honey are “absolutely certainly virulent racists” who “probably [have] really bad views on abortion.” A chat with the guard at the border of a Sioux reservation prompts her to fantasize “that white people in RVs had been evil to him all day.”

You’d be forgiven for wondering why West bothered to drive all the way across the country just to sneer at every suspected Trump voter she sees, a thing she could have just as easily done from the comfort of her own home—except that if she had been at home, she would have been interrupting her husband’s polyamorous honeymoon period with his new girlfriend, a woman named Roya.

Which is, of course, the only thing this book is really about.

We’re told that this is a great thing. Sure, West was heartbroken at first—not to mention humiliated at having learned about Aham’s dalliances from a friend who saw him kissing another woman in public. Sure, Aham has a major medical emergency and ends up hospitalized less than 48 hours after West has begun her road trip, resulting in a bizarre situation where Roya steps in as his primary caregiver while West keeps driving east, putting more and more distance between herself and her marriage. Sure, the day before West comes home, her husband briefly decamps to another city—to meet his girlfriend’s parents.

But it’s great!

West is adamant about this: You mustn’t see this story as a tragedy, nor its author as a victim. Paradoxically, this only makes you feel worse for her—or at least, it only made me feel worse. It’s not just the frankly offensive notion that monogamy is boring and immoral and maybe even somehow slavery-adjacent, or the frantic insistence that all of this, every anguished bit, is actually a radical act of self-care (West has dedicated this book to herself and thanks herself first in the acknowledgments). It’s the way it begs the reader to be complicit in the story West is determined to tell, the way the narrative requires external validation not to collapse under the weight of its own sadness, like a child who has begun to discern the truth about Santa Claus pleading to be reassured that he’s real.

As for the aforementioned specifications of her relationship, the end of the memoir finds West living with Aham and Roya, still a throuple, in a log cabin outside Seattle. The cabin has been in her family for many years, and holds many memories, including from her formative years. It’s blissful, she says: “Every day, I wake up and someone has made coffee and someone has done the dishes and two people are happy to see me instead of one.”

But waking up to discover the coffee already made and the chores already done is made possible only by the fact that West mostly sleeps alone in a guest room—“with my audiobook playing while hugging my stuffed cat, Esmerelda.” The stuffed cat is one of a rotating menagerie; the audiobook, a means of drowning out the sound of her husband and Roya having sex down the hall. Sometimes she joins them, or at least she used to; this book contains fewer explicit references to group sex than you might imagine, but there are a couple. One gets the sense, though, that these encounters aren’t happening lately. There are stated reasons for this, including that West has an even more complicated relationship with her carnal appetites than her culinary ones, and that she’s back on antidepressants with the usual libido-killing side effects. But there’s another reason, one rather uncomfortable, even unspeakable, but also blazingly obvious: that she has retreated not just from the role of wife, but from the responsibilities of being a grown-up.

Of her two partners, West writes: “I love sleeping in the guest room and crawling into bed with them in the morning. I love when they tuck me in and leave me to play on my phone as late as I want.”

She loves, in other words, 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. And do I think West is secretly miserable? No; I think it’s worse than that. I think she’s been drinking poison for so long that she’s started to believe she likes the taste.