I Read Lindy West's New Memoir About Her Marriage and... GIRL.

How about we don't repackage emotional abuse as empowerment?

“My experiences with men never taught me love; they taught me manipulation and how to survive on the bare minimum.” —Lindy West at the beginning of her new memoir, seemingly unaware that this will be the theme of the entire damn book.

Last week, 2010’s power feminist Lindy West gave an interview to the New York Times Modern Love column about how she found her way to Polyamory. The article was, and I’m using this term technically: a shit show, and the internet lost its mind. For once it was hard to blame the collective groundswell of “what the fuck is this actually?” because well, what the fuck WAS that actually?

West was promoting her new memoir Adult Braces. And I immediately I wanted to read the book and talk about it, since it’s about some of my favorite topics: love, sex, marriage, attempting to have egalitarian relationships, feminism, and recovery from being prominent on the 2010’s internet.

In case you did not spend your 2010’s like I did, trussed up in feminist blogger culture, let me catch you up. Lindy West got her start writing for Dan Savage’s weekly The Stranger in Seattle. She wrote for the pop-feminist publication, Jezebel (RIP), The Guardian, The New York Times, and was generally a big deal online feminist. She started #ShoutYourAbortion. She’s a prominent fat liberation activist. She wrote the memoir Shrill that got made into a Hulu series.

Also, back when I ran A Practical Wedding, I published her wedding.

Now Lindy West is back, with a flashy memoir and press tour. The book chronicles the deterioration of her marriage, her cross country road trip to find herself, and her transition into polyamory.

The Modern Love article made it clear that Lindy’s story was supposed to be empowering. If Lily Allen’s West End Girl introduced us to the nightmares of open relationships (and you will pry that album from my cold dead hands), Adult Braces was going to be a success story. And while none of the details presented in the New York Times article felt uplifting, I figured maybe the book would tell a more nuanced story? Maybe? Hopefully?

But, two days and 300 pages later, I can to inform you that the book is an even hotter mess.

I’m reporting for duty to give you the highlights (and uh, lowlights) of the book. It feels important to counter the very damaging narrative that West presents, and point out the issue isn’t polyamory, it’s disfunction.

Let’s Trauma Dump

First, let me lead by saying: I know a lot of polyamorous people, and I have since I was a kid growing up in California’s counterculture. That means I’ve seen a lot of messed up polyamory and fair amount of boring polyamory. Plus, I have one friend who has perfected polyamory—she essentially has a husband and a lover, very chic, very French, lots of sex. (Bless you Ash, for basically co-reading this book with me on WhatsApp). And while I’m not particularly tempted by The Lifestyle, I understand that it works well for some people. TL;DR: I am not going into this morally objecting to Ethical Non Monogamy.

The problem is that for the vast majority of the book, West’s relationship isn’t polyamory, by any definition. Polyamory involves consent of all parties, and West is clear that she’s not a consenting party. What plays out is in fact just textbook emotional abuse.

As an author, and a long time personal essayist, I have a lot of issues with the fact that this was published. West bleeds all over the page and is so self unaware, that it’s hard to understand how the people surrounding her let this book happen. She’s writing from such an unhealed and unprocessed place that she should have been advised to take a step back, even if that meant everyone in her orbit was going to make less money. I’m sad that didn’t happen. Offering this mess to the world seems like self harm.

But since West is presenting a very public argument that her relationship model is empowering, it does mean that it’s our job to push back and say, “No, actually it isn’t.”

A Road Trip to Healing? A Road Trip to Hell?

If you started this book knowing nothing about it, within twenty pages you would assume that West is going to go on this roadtrip, realize her husband is trash, and triumphantly leave him because she deserves better. (You deserve better, Lindy. We all deserve better.)

But alas, West doesn’t leave him, and we have to continue to suffer him page by page. I’m not big on trigger warnings, but I had an emotionally abusive relationship in college, and reading this horror show presented as empowerment was painful as fuck. YMMV.

The Timeline

If this story is going to make any modicum of sense, we need to start with the basics of what happened. Lindy seems to intentionally obfuscate the timeline. In fact, midway through the book, and deep into my seething hatred for her husband, she writes:

There’s part of my marriage story that I haven’t talked about, because it’s harder to forgive.

When I tell you I nearly threw the book across the room.

HOW COULD THE STORY POSSIBLY BE WORST THAN SHE’D PORTRAYED IT THUS FAR?

But when I dug through the book and put the timeline on the page, I realized just how horrific the story really was. So for you, my sweet babies, we’ll just run through what happened, sequentially, as well as I can figure it out.

West/ Oluo’s Relationship Timeline (To The Best of My Ability)

2011: West meets and falls for her husband Aham Oluo, immediately after he’s* been divorced the second time. (At this point Oluo is 29 and twice divorced with two kids. And now he’s on his way to mess with some more women! Great!) West and Oluo rapidly relocate to another state, and a month after they move in together—as West’s dad is dying—Oluo dumps her. I know, what a gem already.

2012: West’s dad dies, Oluo shows up to help, he says that they can get back together on the condition that they are non monogamous, something West doesn’t want and is heartbroken about. But she wants her boyfriend back so she agrees. They never set terms for what Ethnical Non Monogamy (ENM) will look like for them, because again, West doesn’t want to do it. (Reasonable minds might wonder if ENM can be ethical if your partner doesn’t want to do it. Luckily that question has been very well litigated, and the answer is no.)

2015: West and Oluo marry.

2016: West’s memoir Shrill is released to huge commercial success.

2018-2019: West is writing and producing the Hulu show Shrill based on her memoir, which is both a huge professional highlight and an emotional struggle for her.

2019: While West is out of town shooting Shrill (As far as we can tell? Who knows, maybe it started before?) Oluo starts secretly dating Roya Amirsoleymani, who is both queer and poly, and who will go on to become his partner. In a fun, late revealed twist (see above), he’s also cheating on West with a monogamous cute blond woman who lives in their neighborhood. He’s not just cheating on his wife, he’s cheating on her two times over! West finds out what’s going down WHEN A FAN DM’S HER AND SAYS THAT SHE’S SEEN WESTS HUSBAND KISSING A RANDOM WOMAN IN A BAR. (Honestly, horrifying.) West is heartbroken, but Oluo just says “well you knew I was poly,” like that is an excuse.

2020: COVID arrives, along with shut-down. West and Oluo’s relationship seems to get somewhat better when Oluo can’t sleep with anything that moves? They also they go to virtual therapy. But Oluo’s relationship with Amirsoleymani continues against West’s wishes. He blames her for it. She blames herself for it. Fun!

2021 (I guess?): Shut down ends enough that Oluo can start actively dating Amirsoleymani again, which West is still not ok with.

2021: Oluo announces he’ll be spending a weekend in Portland with Amirsoleymani each month, like it or not. (West does not like it.) West is quite understandably a mess, and decides to go on the roadtrip described in the book to, you know, deal with her trauma. Keeping it 100, Oluo and Amirsoleymani seem to more or less move in together while she’s gone.

2021: West comes back from her trip feeling a smidge less co-dependent. Oluo talks West into sleeping with Amirsoleymani, and then they form a throuple.

Sadly we don’t actually know much about the big empowering ending to this story, because even through suffering through 300 goddamn pages of this memoir, the conclusion about them becoming a polyamorous family wraps up in A SCANT SEVEN PAGES. Most of those pages are West assuring us that even though this looks like a dumpster-fire wrapped in a nuclear explosion, it’s actually fine and totally healing, and to question that is to disrespect her wishes. Which might be fine if she hadn’t just written a 300 page memoir and published it, hence getting us emotionally involved.

*Side note: Apparently since the book was written Oluo has started using they/ them pronouns, but the book is written with he/ him pronouns so i’m going to stick to that for consistency.

This Fucking Guy.

I don’t want to act like all abusive relationships are men’s fault, since plenty of women are abusive as well. And disfunction is something that develops between two people (Or three! Or fuck, four, if you throw in the poor blond girl down the street!)

But. But. THIS FUCKING GUY. From the very top he is manipulative, shaming, a liar, everything bad. But you’re here for details, so let’s make his awful behavior a little more granular, why don’t we?

A lot has been said (at least on X) about this passage early in the book, where race and racism is brought into the discussion of open relationships. And it is, in fact, as fucked up as promised:

“The day Aham and I got back together in early 2012, we talked for hours. I cried for most of it. In broaching non monogamy, Aham said that he wasn’t seeing anyone else, and this wasn’t about me—it was just a fundamental part of his ethos. He believed that monogamy was, at its root, a system of ownership. I had to admit that perhaps I didn’t feel it as keenly, as a white person. Aham loved me more than anyone else he had ever met in his life, I was the most special person in the world and the first best friend he’d ever had, but this was not negotiable. He would not lie to me or anyone else about it, and he was prepared to break his own heart now rather than watch is decay and collapse later. I stood at this crossroads: spend the rest of my life without Aham (impossible), or agree to a polyamorous relationship (also impossible).”

Honestly, I don’t even know which part to focus on—the part that he convinced her (or she convinced herself with some nudging) that not agreeing to his demands would make her RACIST. Or the part where he push/ pulls her: you’re the best person alive… but not good enough that I won’t leave you if you don’t give me what you want. Manipulation!

So did they agree to polyamory? In theory, kinda. He wanted it, she didn’t, they didn’t talk about it, they didn’t set rules, and, West explains:

“Still raw from grief, I needed my home back, and Aham was my home. People are allowed to want what they want.”

And it’s true, they are. But people are not allowed to manipulate their desperate grieving partners to agree to something that breaks their heart, because if they don’t agree, you’re going to abandon them. Because that is what fucking monsters do.

West continues to give us details that she seems to think are… normal? humanizing?… and are in fact horrific.

“When things did crack open, He’d get angry and I’d grovel. He’d walk out to clear his head, and I’d follow him down the street barefoot, begging him to come back and tell me everything was fine.”

FAN-FUCKING-TASIC. By all means, do whatever it takes to keep this relationship alive.

While the chronicling of interpersonal disaster is nearly endless, and if you want all the details you’ll read the book, there is one specific incident can’t be left un-recounted.

West describes that at some point in the relationship, she’s deeply depressed and struggling to function. Oluo seems to be doing fuck all nothing to help her, and West seems to think his behavior is reasonable, when in fact he’s failing at his most basic function as a spouse: taking care of the people he loves.

So when she asks for help—maybe he can assist her in picking up the pieces of her own life? Perhaps he can participate in SIMPLE FUCKING TASKS in their marriage like washing the dishes? He agrees! (Wonder of wonders.) But only after he tells her that now they are in a dominant/ submissive relationship and she’s the sub. West explains:

“A ton of people are in de facto Dom/sub relationships anyway—they just don’t know it, and it’s not consensual, healthy, or customized for her pleasure. I told Aham the kind of person I wanted to be and the kind of life I wanted to live, and he set up guardrails so that I could not fail. He chopped wood and did the dishes without me having to ask.”

What she just described, friends? That’s called MARRIAGE. It does not, I cannot emphasize this enough, make her a sub. Let alone a sub in all aspects of her life with him, as opposed to just in the bedroom.

But who’s surprised? This man uses words like they mean nothing. We’re already throwing “polyamory” around like a nonsense word. So why not just decide “dominance” means occasionally contributing to your household without your wife having to nag you about it? I’m going to go drink a glass of this cool clear ATOM BOMB. Words mean whatever you want! Fantastic!

(Side note: if you’re young and reading this book, please don’t view it as informative. Nothing described in this book is supposed to work like this. Not a single thing. From arguments, to sex, to Ethical Non Monogamy, to dishes.)

And look, If I were going to give you a play by play of the disfunction, we’d be here all day, and even as it is, I can’t keep the word-count of this article to a responsible length. But it goes on like this. Forever, and ever, and ever.

And then! Of course! Because where else could we possibly be going? Oluo tries to manipulate his wife into having sex with his girlfriend.