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It takes one cross-country plane, a train, a ferry, then another hour or so by car to reach the writer Lindy West. I had read plenty about how remote her home is, but only by sitting shotgun with West in her girlfriend’s maroon Hyundai Elantra did I understand just how far she was from even a gas station. When I had asked, weeks before my arrival, if I could take an Uber to her house on Bainbridge Island, Washington, from Seattle’s Amtrak station, she laughed at me.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this cabin in the woods since I read her new memoir, Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane, which came out this week. It is the homestead for West’s polyamorous relationship, the news of which went modestly viral in 2022. Today just West is at home—well, she and her dog, Barold “Barry” Saxophone.
It feels as if I already know Barry: I read West’s new memoir, as well as her three other books, and I follow her on Instagram along with 132,000 other people, and on her Substack, Butt News, with 34,000 more. She has written about her dog and the rest of her family so much that it’s easy to feel as if they’re all people I know personally. A lot of West’s readers feel the same way.
When I step off the ferry, West waves at me from the driver’s seat. The titular orthodontics of the memoir are long gone, and with blond bangs and round tortoise-shell glasses framing her bright, straight smile, she waves me over. The West who published the bestselling memoir Shrill a decade ago didn’t have the tattoos she has now: a spread of butterflies on her chest, a pink elephant on one part of her arm, and a tiger encircled by red ribbons on another, among other Technicolors.
“Do you hate dogs?” West asks me as ottoman-sized Barry leans his entire weight into my groin. “He really likes everyone.”
There’s a lot of West driving in Adult Braces, a travelogue in which she makes her way solo from the Pacific Northwest toward Florida, in search of the Beach Boys’ Kokomo, a place she discovers doesn’t exist immediately upon embarking on a grand tour of America and her own psyche. Through her drive, she explores and finds words for her relationship with her husband, musician and writer Ahamefule J. Oluo, as the looming threat of his desire for polyamory becomes fully realized.
The book, written in short chapters, tracks West as initially hostile to even talking about sex with her own husband to seeking her own sexual, romantic, and familial agency. This all against the backdrop of her road trip, where West ties her confusion in her marriage with our collective disillusionment with the great hope of America. It’s an analog journey for West, who has spent most of her career sharing herself online, and a narrative that demands both radical self-acceptance from the writer herself and maximum empathy from her fans. All memoirs ask this of their readers, but with Adult Braces, West is requesting that her readership do something even tougher: She wants them to find some empathy for someone who has hurt her.
West’s relationship(s) has long been a lightning rod for discussion online, and an often dehumanizing one. In 2022, when West, Oluo, and their partner, curator and creative producer Roya Amirsoleymani, announced their throuple in a YouTube video, the response was familiar to West, who has spent several chapters of her life defined by internet attention cycles. Much of Adult Braces reads like a divorce memoir for the elder millennials raised on Jezebel and the golden age of Twitter, something an Elizabeth Gilbert or a Roxane Gay might release to light up group chats everywhere. In the end, West doesn’t get a divorce. Instead, she opens her marriage up to something she previously feared: By the book’s end, she has fallen in love with one of her husband’s two “secret girlfriends,” and the three move in together.
What West has signed up for with Adult Braces is a horror show, an exercise that sometimes feels like public humiliation.
Inevitably, there will be a subsection of West’s devoted audience who will never forgive Oluo for his trespasses. West has been a public figure for the past 15 years, so naturally it was one of her fans who spotted him kissing someone in a bar and told her. (In the book, West clarifies that the couple had a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about dating other people.) Adult Braces isn’t necessarily recommending polyamory to the masses; West’s entry into it was too chaotic and often unfair to her, so it’s no how-to manual. It’s just the choice she arrives at for herself by the end of her road trip, at a middling resort hotel at the farthest reaches of Key West. “Should I get a divorce because other people want me to?” West says to me while she drives us through freezing rain. “I feel like I got the benefits of divorce without leaving. I get to stay, have the marriage, and then also be free.”
This messy self-examination is what makes Adult Braces unlike any of West’s previous books. Shrill was a treatise on living loudly by an outrageous woman, The Witches Are Coming was a polemic on sexism following #MeToo, and Shit, Actually was an essay collection on beloved movies. Adult Braces is West’s purest memoir, the least saddled by political context or societal noise, and ultimately, because it’s the most human, it is also the most brutal to bear witness to.
It’s all personal, and it’s what West has done for years. It’s her work, and it’s mine too. We both write essay collections that demand paramount honesty toward a reader who doesn’t always like you. West and I have both written about our relationships at length; at the end of my book, I leave my ex-husband, but at the end of hers, she doubles down. So I know firsthand that what West has signed up for with Adult Braces is a horror show, an exercise that sometimes feels like public humiliation. West tells me how much she hopes people pay attention to the art in the book: “I worked harder on this than anything I’ve ever written or made,” she tells me. I know intimately that her efforts may not matter—the story of her polyamory will perhaps eclipse discussion of her craft.
“You are predisposed to sympathize with me. This is my book, and you’re reading it,” West writes in Adult Braces. “All nonfiction is actually fiction.” The story that West is selling is that though her entry into polyamory was rocky, it has led her to a life that’s right for her right now. No one knows if that’s true except for her. Conjecture is inevitable, but let’s say it’s all exactly as she says it is: Why perform this kind of intimacy for such a cruel audience?
West is solo in the cabin this week as she prepares for her 14-city book tour; Oluo and Amirsoleymani are away, working in Boston on a shared project. The cabin was originally her dad’s property. West moved there from Seattle in 2023, mostly to escape rising rental prices in the city. The space still feels like her dad’s, a comfort to her now that he’s gone: There are photos of West’s ancestors, Paul West’s handmade bat puppets hanging from a bookcase, and handwritten notes from him wherever you look. (“Bats live in the garage,” on a door reminding you to keep it closed.) It is also, of course, an internet conservative’s wet dream of how a socialist hippie lives. “HERE ENTER NOT, vile bigots, hypocrites, Externally devoted Apes, base snites,” warns a fading print of a François Rabelais passage at the entrance to her cabin. “Fomenters of division and debates, elsewhere, not here, make sale your deceits.” West offers me a cup of tea and directs me to pick a mug from her cabinet. I pick the one with Jane Fonda’s mug shot.
West knows plenty about the fomenting of division and debate. Her name used to be shorthand for arguing on the internet with mouth-breathing incels, back when plenty of us were wasting our time trying to argue our way toward some kind of respect on the internet. She got her start in 2009 working as the film editor for the Stranger, and by 2012, she was a staff writer at Jezebel, focusing on all the topics that make men yell at you online: feminism, fatphobia, abortion, and whether rape jokes are ever funny.
She rose to stratospheric heights with 2016’s Shrill, a hit memoir that was turned into a hit streaming TV show on Hulu featuring Aidy Bryant and Patti Harrison. Adult Braces peels back the layers of what it’s like to get a show, complete with a few delicious morsels of television gossip. “Navigating the opaque machinery of Hollywood made me anxious and paranoid,” she writes. “I became a quivering freak, vacillating between prickly defensiveness and desperate people-pleasing.”
The television production of Shrill and the changes in her marriage were working in tandem to destroy who West thought she was: a high-achieving funny girl who excelled at writing and had a nice marriage to a good guy. Instead, she struggled to connect with her colleagues in the writers room, the protagonist was changed from “Lindy” to “Annie,” her love interest morphed from a Black colleague to a white guy, and, slowly, the show became foreign to West. The sucker punch at the end of her passage about Shrill came when she was given a photo book of memories of the production after the series’ third-season cancellation, except she wasn’t in any of the photos. Also, it was addressed to “Linda West.”
Lindy West has already heard the worst thing you can say to her, and she’s already repeated it to herself a thousand times in the mirror. What’s a few peeved Reddit posters with big feelings about her identity and marriage?
The show solidified West as the de facto representation of fat women in culture. She got some of the cash and the prizes, but not enough to retire from public life and become a wealthy writer who lives in the woods. (In Adult Braces, she has to borrow money from her sister-in-law to book a hotel while on the road.) In exchange for this on-paper success, she has carried the weight of public expectations. That dubious honor took a heavy toll, one that her friend Sam Irby, an author and writer on Shrill’s first season, saw firsthand. “Hollywood does not want to uplift a fat bitch. Watching her learn that lesson, while I was learning it alongside her, was fucking tough,” Irby told me over the phone ahead of my visit to West. “I hated bearing witness to the slow decimation of her self-esteem.”
Her crisis of self wasn’t just about a TV show or even her marriage, then; it was about how often she wasn’t seen at all, despite being one of the most visible writers in the country. “I wanted to reestablish my identity,” she tells me.
Maybe if West had become one of those wealthy writers in the woods, she wouldn’t have felt compelled to broach such an emotionally risky project. “I need this book to be a success because everything’s so scary,” she says. “This has to float us for the next few years. I feel a pressure to take care of my family, and so on this very cynical surface level, I would love for the book to be a success.” But there’s also an emotional register: West had been feeling misunderstood privately, then publicly. She could correct it.
West famously left Twitter in 2017, before it was cool to do so, and confronted one of her worst trolls on This American Life. She’s already heard the worst thing you can say to her, and she’s already repeated it to herself a thousand times in the mirror. What’s a few peeved Reddit posters with big feelings about her identity and marriage? “Do you know how many times strange men on the internet have joked that Aham must have to throw a handful of flour at my grotesque puzzle of a body to find the wet spot?” she asks in Adult Braces. “More times than any real man I’ve actually fucked has told me I’m pretty!”
West is happy to answer specific questions you may have about her romantic arrangement. She has one bedroom, and Amirsoleymani occupies the other; Oluo bops between them because, of course, he hates sleeping alone. Their families are mostly supportive. Oluo’s children from his previous marriage, all now adults, do not give a shit.
More interesting is the space West has made for herself in the cabin’s attic, a Pee-wee’s Playhouse of girly kitsch. There’s a small table with an in-progress puzzle next to a life-size felt zebra (her dad’s), a few little cushioned nooks for reading and crafting, and a desk where West records her podcast, Text Me Back!, and writes her books. Hanging is a Christmas ornament: a pair of pink lips, smiling teeth with glittering braces on.
You need not worry if West finds enough space for herself in her relationships or in her home. All three of them are in every room of the house. “There’s just something about having three people,” she says. “I just suddenly felt totally surrounded by love.”
West’s explanation of her love affairs, like perhaps most things, is gentler and more explicable in person than it was online. In the famous YouTube video, the three seemed visibly uncomfortable as they sat on barstools together and slowly undressed while answering questions about their form of polyamory. Viewers parsed every detail of their body language and every word they spoke. “Smells like a narcissist man (Aham) abusing a codependent victim (Lindy),” wrote one spectator. Others suggested that West was being used for her money as the most famous and tangibly successful of the three creatives. “This guy is a sleazeball,” read another comment. “It would be much better to be single then to be abused like this.”
Their relationship had already been picked apart long before this video. For her husband to bring another person into their marriage seemed to affirm Oluo’s harshest critics. “It was always this idea that I shouldn’t have a tall, skinny husband,” West says. “I think people were primed to be suspicious.” West’s and Oluo’s public Instagrams were flooded with comments of faux-concern from strangers with parasocial interests.
“People made such huge analyses about our day-to-day life based on where I put my arm,” Oluo told me over Zoom before I met West in person. “I think even the last time Lindy made a post about my birthday, someone jumped in and was like, ‘You need to leave this person.’ ” Last week, the discourse started again: West did an interview with the New York Times, her first substantive interview of this press tour, kicking off a fresh round of chatter about her unconventional marriage.
In Adult Braces, West writes that Oluo always made clear to her that having an open relationship was a mandatory part of a marriage with him, but one that she thought would never come to pass. When she found out her husband had two other girlfriends, West had to decide whether she could live with it or thrive around it, or if it meant that her marriage was over. Even though she has clearly opted to stick it out, Oluo still gets the harshest read in the book. That’s fair: Even in West’s sympathetic retelling, he appears dishonest, and the boundaries are muddied.
In her writing, West is brutally candid about herself and her foibles, but she holds her cards close to her chest only when it comes to describing Oluo’s failures in any vivid color. “A lot of bad stuff happened during the months they were entangled,” she writes midway through the book, about Oluo and one of his girlfriends from the early years of their attempted polyamory. “But all you need to know for the purposes of this story is that Aham violated my trust badly, there was a period of utter chaos, and I had every right and reason to leave him.”
West attempts to address this in the book, that they never had a fallow period in their relationship, even during Oluo’s ostensible cheating. “We’ve never stopped being very close and loving each other really hard,” she says. “But he’d leave for hours. Then he would come back and he’d be drunk.” Often, West calls Oluo’s behavior “chaos,” while also admitting that she had acquiesced to his chaos before they even married. She was willing to initially look away while he dated around, resentful of having to keep it a secret in the first place. “I’m not trying to do Aham PR—or, I mean, I always am. But it was just like he couldn’t be relied upon. I didn’t know where he was, and then he was angry at me for asking,” she tells me now. “I was indignant. Like: I’m a really good wife. Why are you doing this?”
Amirsoleymani is the newest entrant to West’s public world, and the most private of all three of them. Her perspective on the parasocial intensity of West’s readership is more academic, maybe because she’s the only one with distance. “As much as a certain segment of Lindy’s fan base might think they’re coming from a place of care and support for her, that has been borderline possessive, even kind of abusive,” Amirsoleymani told me over the phone. “That has denied her a level of agency and autonomy in self-determining her existence and her relationships.”
For West, what is most upsetting is the implication—or sometimes outright judgment—that she’s a fool. “The thing that is the most painful for me is people telling me I’m stupid and pathetic and I can’t see what’s in front of me,” she says. “I’m really sensitive to being condescended to, especially when it’s people doing it with this veil of care.”
Meanwhile, Irby doesn’t have as much sympathy for Oluo despite being friends with him too. “I’m still finger-on-the-trigger as soon as she says the word. If she ever tells me it’s not cool, I will get on a plane and help dispose of a body,” she said. “It seems to be going well! But I am ready if she ever calls for me to come chop him into pieces.”
It’s a special discomfort to have written a memoir that you don’t really agree with anymore. In Adult Braces, West recounts having to record a chunk of her Witches Are Coming audiobook about her great relationship with her wonderful husband: “The day after I found out Aham had a secret girlfriend, I had to go back in the studio and record that chapter, make it permanent in my own voice,” she writes. “Only now, I could see it for what it was: an optical illusion, a conjurer’s trick, an inversion, a photo negative, a plaster cast for a life that didn’t exist.”
“It’s all just a manifestation of the fact that women are just desperately holding men back by the thinnest thread from being the worst people alive. Even the men that you love are so close to doing the most horrific thing.”
Been there, sister: I wrote my first memoir in my mid-20s, about my marriage, and my second in my mid-30s, about my divorce. If you feel as if you’ve offered the public an incomplete record of yourself, it’s natural to want to delve into what you think you know now. All the better, and more profitable, if those updated enlightenments orbit a hot-ticket theme like polyamory. But the sooner you jump back into the process of public self-excavation, the more you run the risk of broadcasting reflections you’re still figuring out in real time, with a book deadline looming, an advance at stake, and a bloodthirsty mob just waiting for another chance to make fun of the fat girl. “I had to take out a bunch of stuff that sounded like me begging the audience to give me permission to stay,” West says. “I was just trying to tell the truth.”
West is touring the U.S. by van (obviously), and it’s inevitable that she’ll meet many of the women who have loved her writing for 15 years but aren’t primed to forgive her husband. “It was a hard tightrope because every time I wrote something nice about Aham, I felt like I was falling into that apologia trap, where I’m trying to justify something,” she says. “Maybe I’m not a good enough writer, but I don’t know how to explain how and why I love a person.” The three of them have moved on from the conception of their threesome; now she’s bringing the public into it, but they’ve had less time to get their heads around it. West isn’t asking the audience to forgive Oluo as she has, but she is asking for them to read her in good faith.
In turning West’s husband into a supervillain, a reader (or critic) gets a bit of cover too. “They have to make him an absolutely demonic villain so that he’s not like their husband, who would never do this,” she says. “It’s all just a manifestation of the fact that women are just desperately holding men back by the thinnest thread from being the worst people alive. Even the men that you love are so close to doing the most horrific thing.” And in the grand scheme of husband-induced pain, is it so bad to want to ask your wife if you can also have a girlfriend?
It doesn’t particularly matter if West’s readership believes she’s happy. What matters is if she does. “Even if this falls apart later, it doesn’t make this book a lie,” she says, Barry at her feet, dutifully begging for her to go out into the dark of their backyard and find him a Frisbee. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I just know that I’m happy right now.”
So why write at all if not to convince us that this choice is the best choice? “I don’t know. That’s just my job. That’s just what I do,” she tells me. “I am evangelizing something, which is people being brave enough to imagine beyond what they’ve been taught to want. You could have a life that looks different, and that’s OK.” Some books exist not as an argument to the public but as an argument to yourself. There’s no obvious personal alert for when you’ve learned a life lesson valuable enough to impart it to others through memoir. You just email your agent and hope you’re right.
