Confessional
No, I’m not going to read Adult Braces, the new Lindy West memoir about her road trip and throuple-dom. I’ve always been an agnostic about Lindy- a non-fan by the way of no strong feelings.
But I’m fascinated by the way how many takes I’ve seen saying this memoir is a throw back to the 2010’s, when internet magazines were directing traffic to advertisers by way of confessional memoir pieces. Websites will still pay for that schtick- 750 words on how perimenopause changed your view of your mom or why you and your ex-husband are nesting in the same house. The end of the 750 has to wrap up like a 90’s sitcom- a lesson has been learned. Our fool steps off on a journey, enter a brief underworld, comes back slightly rearranged with a bit of useful wisdom for us the readers.
So the implication is you are moving towards some form of less mixed up in your personal journey. Which is an absurd proposition if you’ve ever met someone over 35. Life doesn’t lend itself to a steadily growing clarity and integration, we get more nuts as life beats us down with absurd limitations.
I’m fascinated by the betrayal women have voiced in the face of Lindy’s unmasking as fragile, mixed up, in denial, justifying, vulnerable. Not vulnerable in the way we like- at the lit mic laying claim to individual justice. Truly vulnerable- hungry enough for belonging she’ll accept shifting goalposts from a person we don’t trust. We’re betrayed because she used to write about making personal choices that inspired them, and now she’s making and writing about personal choices that may not be what she is worth.
My theory: we’re all looking for moms in feminism. We all want a mom who teaches us how to take on this big bad hates women world. For a season Lindy West was a lot of women’s feminist mom. For some women it really was a big deal to get told you could throw a fat positive pool party and feel the sun on your skin and have a good time, and that you deserved those small moments of forgetting the world hates you and requires you work diligently to hate yourself.
Get Carey Callahan’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
It’s striking that that’s not enough for the audience. Being the mom of feminism for a season, setting a good example, blowing women’s minds by briefly cracking the matrix of self hate. I think we require the season of good role modeling to be a life long sentence, even though we rationally know a human person couldn’t pull that off, because we want our mommies. We want a woman we can always look to, a cheerleader executing a feminist handstand flawlessly, who loves us and loves herself and gives us some assurance we don’t have to be as scared as we are.
Of all the feminist crimes, I’m not sure being a pushover of a romantic partner is the worst. Now, I am biased because I’m one of those, chronically. I’m also biased because I have at points felt an audience’s pressure to be a role model. There’s nothing the audience actually gives you for giving them that. They feel like they’re giving you a lot because maybe they reposted an article of yours or in Lindy’s case bought her book. They feel their strongly positive parasocial feelings are a real GIFT. But being a feminist role model for real doesn’t pay off in terms of financial security or having people to cuddle with, and the audience gets resentful when you remind them you navigate the same logistics of life that they do.
If you make your romantic choices the basis of a memoir, people are going to have opinions about your romantic choices, for both men and women. But the intensity will be different if you’re a woman. The entitlement, the feelings of betrayal, it’s a different beast. I think it’s an old old pain. I think when mom reveals she can’t keep herself safe we’re angry at her- why did you even HAVE us MOM if you were going to be such a MESS?
I think we have to go easy on Mom. I think Mom is in a little bit of a tough spot, living on Bainbridge Island in a throuple, trying to figure out what she’s supposed to write about in 2026. I think we don’t actually need Mom to leave her partners, I don’t think we need Mom to do anything at all, I think we have to do the most feminist thing there possible could be to do, which is go easy on a woman. Women’s rights, women’s wrong, women’s mess- we don’t have to date the people she chooses to date.
I do believe women talking about the specifics of their lives is always revolutionary. I mean that always. But it’s not so we can scout for perfection, and it’s not so we can find a mom who shows us the path forward. It’s to look at the limitations, look at the failures, look at the totalizing matrix that foils us all. There is not a single woman who has ever found her way out and it’s childlike that we want there to be. If Lindy inspired you to put on a bikini, that was a beautiful moment she helped you with, and now she gets to do her dishes with whoever she wants for whatever reasons she has.
And yes, that one partner is a real liability and needs to work on their self. That can be true and we could lower our expectations for women in the public sphere so that them disappointing us is a much lower stakes situation. Mom has got her own shit, let a bitch live.
