I wish Lindy West had found herself on her road trip

Before this week, I did not recognize Lindy West’s name, but when someone mentioned she wrote Shrill, I briefly thought she was Aidy Bryant. I spent most of my time on the 2010s internet reading Christian Mommy Bloggers, not Jezebel, so I don’t have the longstanding parasocial attachments to her that have shaped so many conversations around her latest memoir, Adult Braces. However, I do have a newfound parasocial attachment to her — because although I found passages from Adult Braces horrifying, it wasn’t because I couldn’t relate. It was because I deeply could.

Lindy is about ten years my senior, but we are both millennial women who grew up in a very specific and brutal anti-fat era of misogyny. Lindy was a pioneer of the body positivity movement. She wrote one piece I haven’t stopped thinking about: “My Wedding Was Perfect — and I Was Fat as Hell the Whole Time.” In it, she talks about the pain of feeling like she would never get married, because marriage was for thin women.

“I’ve dated men who relished me in private but refused to be seen with me on the street, or who told me, explicitly, that we had no serious future because they were afraid their friends would laugh at them…I just wanted to be a person, and, if I was lucky, to fall in love with a person — neither in spite of my body nor because of it. Once I finally did, I wanted to crystallize that, make it solid, and broadcast it where younger versions of myself could find it.”

In another piece about her wedding, she writes something similar:

“Thin girls were chosen, treasured, treated like a prize. Fat girls were settled for at best, and we settled, in turn, for whomever would take us. I never thought I’d be able to marry my hot best friend and have fun and feel wanted every day of my life.”

Looking back, her wedding reads as the ultimate middle finger to everyone who said she would never be loved by who she wanted to love her. After years of extreme online trolling as a very public fat feminist — not to mention the near-total absence of media representation showing fat women being desired and happy — being chosen by Aham and marrying him was her magnum opus. The confidence that radiates from those pieces is quickly punctured in this newest memoir, because what if the truth was that her partner didn’t want just her, and only her, every day of their life?

In Adult Braces, Lindy describes her partner telling her he wants to be non-monogamous. He tells her that he finds monogamy to be a form of “ownership,” and suggests that maybe she doesn’t understand because she is white. Lindy is crushed — and instead of engaging, she avoids it. She avoids it and tries her damnedest to be the best wife who has ever wifed. Maybe if she never complains, lowers her expectations, takes on more…maybe he won’t leave. Maybe he’ll only want her.

Lindy has referenced this dynamic several times since the book came out — that she is not “poly under duress” because Aham told her right away. He never lied about what he wanted; it was her who refused to believe him, her who avoided it and cried every time it was brought up. And because monogamy versus non-monogamy is such a fraught subject, Lindy knows that framing alone makes readers more likely to be on “her” side — and she doesn’t want that. She wants us to understand where Aham is coming from, too.

My response to that is this: good partners don’t let you self-abandon.

She portrays Aham as someone who is simply asking for what he wants — someone who doesn’t struggle with the codependency that plagues her so heavily. In the book she writes, “He wanted me, but he needed to stay true to himself. It wasn’t healthy to put my needs ahead of his own.” She said recently in an Instagram Live, “You are allowed to ask for what you want in a relationship” — and she is correct. But if you are in a relationship with someone, you should be attuned to them. If you notice your partner constantly twisting themselves into knots to please you while you would not piss on them if they were on fire, you are exploiting them. And if you don’t notice that — why aren’t you paying attention to the person you purport to love?

The book unfolds as Lindy road trips across the country in a van, ostensibly doing the work. She’s trying to undo the belief that her husband not wanting monogamy means he isn’t committed to her — trying to accept that love is not finite. I have read The Ethical Slut, Mating in Captivity, and Sex at Dawn, and have heard every explanation and reframing for non-monogamy under the sun: the idea that one person can’t meet all of your needs, that polyamory is a more evolved way of moving through the world, that it dismantles patriarchal structures. I think all of this can be true. I think non-monogamy is a genuinely preferred setup for a portion of the population. And it’s okay to simply not want it. It should not be something you are trying to talk yourself into. It is not necessarily preferable to divorce. Wanting monogamy does not make you codependent.

While Lindy does all of this work, Aham does not appear to have done any. He does what he wants, because he wants to, because he is “true to himself.” He doesn’t meet her halfway. And that, to me, is the crux of the whole issue — the imbalance that surfaces in this book again and again. She is terrified of losing him. He does not seem to share her fear.

I wonder if her inability to simply say, “This is not the relationship I want,” comes from the fear that doing so would prove her detractors right. That she is not lovable. That she will always be replaced by someone younger, hotter, thinner. That she’d have to eat the embarrassment of publicly declaring that everyone could go fuck themselves, the fat girl got the hot guy — only to return a few years later and say, “So, about that...”

What kills me is that despite the negative commentary surrounding this book, Lindy is clearly beloved. She is brilliant and funny and talented. She deserves to be loved fully for who she is. And I wish she would notice that she is always the one compromising, always the one changing. Instead, she seems most focused on how her marriage is perceived rather than how it actually feels. Despite an outpouring from fans saying, “We love you, but we are concerned you are abandoning yourself,” she frames her critics as people who simply don’t believe she can be truly loved by Aham — because of her weight, or for bigoted reasons that seem to shift by the day.

Lindy is loyal to her fans and loyal to her partner, and she is struggling with those two loyalties failing to coalesce. I just wish she were loyal to herself first.

She devotes nearly 300 pages to how difficult all of this has been, and then wraps everything up in a measly seven pages to tell us she’s happy. Maybe she is. I hope she is. But happiness that costs this much — that requires this relentless renegotiation of your own needs, this constant shrinking in the name of keeping the peace — isn’t really the kind of happiness she spent her whole career fighting for. Lindy West built a following by telling fat women they didn’t have to earn their place in the world. She argued, brilliantly, that they were allowed to take up space. It’s painful to watch her apply that generosity so freely to everyone in her life except herself.

She is the one who has to live with her relationship decisions, not us. I just hope that one day, the version of her she’s fighting hardest to protect is her own.