Two years ago, Megan Agnew, a writer for The Sunday Times, in London, set the internet alight with her deft, disturbing profile of Hannah Neeleman, a former ballerina who moved to a Utah farm with her husband, had — at the time — eight children, and became a wildly successful tradwife influencer. The piece was fascinating because of the dissonance between the story Neeleman and her husband were trying to tell — wholesome fulfillment through the embrace of tradition — and the details that hinted at a darker reality.
“Daniel wanted to live in the great Western wilds, so they did; he wanted to farm, so they do; he likes date nights once a week, so they go,” wrote Agnew. “He didn’t want nannies in the house, so there aren’t any.” Hannah lowered her voice when confessing that during one of her births, when Daniel couldn’t be there, she got an epidural. She spoke wistfully of the dance career she gave up. Daniel mentioned to Agnew that sometimes Hannah is so exhausted she’s bedridden for a week. On Instagram, commenters asked Hannah to blink twice if she needs help.
Lindy West’s much-discussed memoir “Adult Braces” evokes a similar sort of gothic unease, but with the politics reversed. West had been a brassy star of aughts-era internet feminism and an icon of fat positivity; her previous memoir, “Shrill,” was adapted into a TV series. But behind that facade, her new book reveals, she was in extraordinary pain, with warped relationships to both her body and her husband. And though she now claims to have found peace and empowerment after acceding to her husband’s demand for a polyamorous marriage, she’s not entirely convincing.
Not surprisingly, some are reading “Adult Braces” as an indictment of West’s leftist beliefs. An Atlantic essay about the book was headlined, “The Death of Millennial Feminism.” The Wall Street Journal declared, “Progressivism Destroys Its Most Loyal Servants.” But I interpreted West’s book as a cautionary tale about female self-abnegation. That tendency is often celebrated on the right but has always existed on the left as well. Almost every ideology, it turns out, can be wielded to make women feel that they’re failing.
In earlier writing, West presented her union with the musician Ahamefule Oluo, who goes by Aham, as a kind of feminist fairy-tale ending. “My Wedding Was Perfect — and I Was Fat as Hell the Whole Time,” said the headline of a 2015 column she wrote in The Guardian. But if the wedding was idyllic, West reveals in “Adult Braces,” the marriage was not. Almost from the beginning, she writes, Aham conditioned their relationship on his being able to sleep with other women. She gave in because she was desperate to keep him, but his dalliances made her intolerably insecure.
Because West lived in a left-wing milieu in which nonmonogamy is common, she felt an extra layer of shame over her inability to accept Aham’s extramarital sex life. (“At the time, being cool about polyamory felt like a growing imperative in progressive circles,” she writes.) Her anguish was exacerbated by an excruciating degree of bodily self-hatred, which, as she knows, contradicts the persona she’s built her career on. “Do you think I have ever felt like I deserved to demand anything from men?” she asks.
To many readers, me included, it seemed that Aham took advantage of West’s devastating lack of entitlement. He used her politics against her; West reports that Aham, who is half-Nigerian, “believed that monogamy was, at its root, a system of ownership.” This is, of course, far from the first time that a left-wing man employed the language of liberation to chip away at a woman’s boundaries. In the immediate aftermath of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, Ellen Willis wrote about how men of the counterculture “intensified women’s sexual anxieties by equating repression with the desire for love and commitment, and exalting sex without emotion or attachment as the ideal.” Then and now, it’s an ideal that many women feel a perverse pressure to live up to.
But West — or at least the version of West narrating “Adult Braces” — can’t see through Aham’s apparent manipulation. Instead, the book, which unfolds over the course of a long road trip, describes West learning to embrace polyamory and coming to love Aham’s girlfriend, Roya, with whom she’s now in a three-way partnership.
By the end of “Adult Braces,” Aham, Roya and West are living together in a cabin that once belonged to her parents. She declares herself happy, though with a defensive huff: “If you think I have been brainwashed and I am secretly miserable, I simply do not know what to tell you.” But even if you take her satisfaction at face value, there’s an unsettling undercurrent to the setup, one that would be screamingly obvious if the book were a novel instead of a memoir.
Throughout “Adult Braces,” West, now 44, gestures toward her difficulties with adulthood, often in a deliberately childish voice. “I’m just a soft baby angel who everyone loves!” she writes at one point. She describes how, after moving out on her own, she had trouble taking care of herself: “When you’re 25, no one gets mad at you if you don’t clean your room.” Her car was repossessed because she forgot to make the payments. When she was depressed, Aham had to make her shower and brush her hair. She wonders if she’s a “woman who could discern her own feelings or a baby who needed to be told when to get a divorce.” On one of the best days of her road trip, she gets a tattoo that says, “good girl.”
West seems to long for the care and simplicity of childhood, and by the end of the book, she’s found an approximation of it. As a little kid, she writes, she wanted to live in the cabin full time, and now she does. Roya pays bills punctually so they don’t go to collection agents and has sex with Aham when West doesn’t want to. “I love sleeping in the guest room and crawling into bed with them in the morning,” West writes. “I love when they tuck me in and leave me to play on my phone as late as I want.” She sleeps with a stuffed cat. It’s as if, feeling brutalized, she’s decided to regress.
After Agnew’s article came out, Neeleman made a video saying that she was shocked to be portrayed “as oppressed with my husband being the culprit,” and spoke about how much she adores him and their life together. I think it’s possible to believe her while also believing that she trimmed and shaped her desires to fit her husband’s, as women are encouraged to do. It’s not the fault of millennial feminism or social liberalism if West did the same. Politics can’t always save us from the self-annihilating need for love, on whatever terms it’s offered.
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