Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane by Lindy West

I don't often choose to pick up nonfiction, but I used to read Lindy's work when she wrote for the website Jezebel, and the release of this book came with a bit of drama that had the internet buzzing for a bit. The upside of that drama is that it made me want to read it myself and form my own opinions, but the downside is that I definitely started reading it with an opinion already half-formed, so let's dig into it!

Adult Braces recounts Lindy's solo road trip across the continental United States in 2021, from her home in Seattle, WA to Key West, FL, and back again. It's a trip outside of her comfort zone, coming in the midst of a deep depression and the realization that when her husband, Aham, told her that they were polyamorous and that they intended to remain so after marrying her, they really meant it. And that's where the source of the drama came from - as Lindy did publicity for the release of Adult Braces, and people started to read the book, folks began to wonder if Lindy had been pressured into a polyamorous relationship (she, Aham, and their third partner, Roya, had come out as a throuple a few years ago), or if this was something she actually wanted.

After reading the book myself, I have to say that I'm unsure. My take on memoirs is that they are, on some level, a conversation between the author and the reader. The author is attempting to not only memorialize something about their life, but to also invite the reader into that life, and asking them to consider how they would react. Lindy also makes that point midway through Adult Braces, when she reveals that Aham was dating not just Roya, but another woman who violated the few guidelines Lindy had put in place when she and Aham had discussed his polyamory:

I could write this book in a way that would make you hate Aham's guts and pity me for staying with him. Or I could write it in a way that makes him sound tortured yet wise and makes me sound like a codependent freak. It's all true. All nonfiction is actually fiction.

Much of Adult Braces is stressful to read, if only because we're in Lindy's head with her. The bits she includes about Aham do make you hate his guts, even if that wasn't her intention, but she also takes her typical self-deprecating humor so far that she manages to come off like a codependent freak. Many of the chapters that don't directly recount her road trip instead focus on her mental health, as she goes through therapy, struggles with her self-esteem, and more. Peppered throughout are moments where Aham pops up, and what she chooses to share, doesn't shine that great of a light on him. From this, it's easy to understand why readers/commentators/social media posters would feel like Lindy was pressured into polyamory, and that Aham would only be into polyamory for all of the wrong reasons. Still, it's also funny in places, which provides some balance against Lindy's overwhelming poor sense of self.

If you're looking for a travelogue, then this isn't the book for you. While Adult Braces is structured around Lindy's road trip, the focus really isn't on the places she visits, though she does recount stories about people she meets along the way, hikes she takes, and so forth. Most of her trip is pretty formulaic - she camps in her ridiculously painted rental camper van or spends the night with friends or family, as she travels southeast to Key West. She doesn't have some huge revelation as she makes her way across the country and back, other than that with distance, she finds that she can think about opening her relationship with Aham to include Roya without feeling an all-consuming panic like she did while she was at home. As she travels alone, she begins to realize that because of her mental health, she was suffocating in a box of her own making, too afraid to try something new, and that fear includes being willing or not willing to take a risk in her relationship to make her partner happy:

Maybe the lesson isn't that I finally learned whether or not I wanted Aham, or Roya, or polyamory, or monogamy, it's that, for once, I ran toward the thing that scared me the most and leapt into an unknown that caught me and made me feel alive again, taught me to trust my instincts again, showed me that what I desire is to feel desire, to feel unafraid, to feel more everything, to be hungry. Maybe that's its own accomplishment, worth celebrating, or at least worth granting some space to breathe, and maybe it's all I can do to take one step at a time deeper and deeper into life.

Now onto what's really important, which is my opinion about the central theme of this memoir: Lindy's attempt to explain why she was finally willing to accept polyamory. My experience is very limited when it comes to romantic relationships, and I don't think I could ever be in an open relationship, but like a lot of other folks on the internet, I feel like there are a lot of red flags here that Lindy is willing to ignore in order to stay with Aham. It doesn't help that by focusing on her internal struggles and avoiding a full recounting of their relationship (admittedly, something we are not owed as readers, but also something that undermines the whole point of committing this to paper), we are left with what little crumbs she gives us, and those crumbs are moldy. There's a point in the story where she shares that she and Aham developed a routine where they would lay in bed together after waking up in the morning and only talk about good things. It's a cute idea, until Lindy explains that this was a routine they only started doing because she would wake up, begin worrying about a bill or task that needed to be done, share that with Aham, and that would cause him to panic, get upset, and then act distant towards her the rest of the day. I thought of that anecdote as I got to the end of the book, when Lindy shares that Roya is so good at taking care of mundane tasks, like paying bills the moment they arrive, or labeling leftovers in the fridge. I couldn't help but to wonder: were they actually building a more stable relationship by adding a third partner that they both share, or did Lindy just get an unpaid personal assistant that Aham has permission to bang with her knowledge (and sometimes her participation)? Perhaps I'm being too reductive by focusing on that.

In conclusion, Adult Braces is at times infuriating and humorous. I'm not sure if I could recommend it as a general recommendation, but if you also caught wind of the drama and are curious to read it and form your own opinions, please do.

P.S. I should note that the next book I read after this one was a monster romance where a wolfman couldn't stop wagging his tail any time he was around the curvy baker, and to be honest, that's the kind of love that we all deserve.

Winter Storm Reads: Our Winter Monster by Dennis Mahoney & Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

Since the winter storm is keeping us indoors another day, I thought I'd share two books about snow I've read this month. 

Published a year ago this week, Our Winter Monster by Dennis Mahoney is about a couple whose relationship is on the rocks being terrorized by a swirling mass of snow. Really! 

The story alternates between Brian and Holly present and Brian and Holly a year ago before a traumatic, bloody event that left them both, separately and together, changed. In the present narrative, they take a spontaneous vacation to a ski village but are derailed en route by a snow storm that has the power to yank someone out through a car window.  

We also get chapters from the village sheriff's perspective. Up until recently, Kendra felt confident and content, but then her girlfriend left her, two tourists went missing, and now she feels like a failure, stranded in an interior blizzard. 

Kendra, Brian, and Holly will encounter an unexplainable phenomenon before the night is through. 

This is an enjoyable, non-literary, old-fashioned horror story: It is a fun read that is also about the ways we avoid dealing with traumatic events; it isn't a book about TRAUMA dressed in the loose-fitting garb of a "horror" story. It's well-written but not in a way that distracts from the plot. It's got a sizeable cast of characters and they don't all make it, but at the heart of it is Brian and Holly: Will they survive, and if so, will their relationship make it? 

And now for something completely different! The other wintery book I read was Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata, translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker. Originally published in three parts over the course of ten years, the final version emerged as a whole in 1947. Snow Country is a melancholy winter poem in short novel form, frank and unromantic. 

"Snow country" refers to the mountainous region on the western coast of Japan known for its heavy snowfall, where pleasure-seekers go to ski, enjoy the hot springs, drink sake, and enjoy the company of geishas. Over the course of three visits to a hot spring resort in a remote mountain village, a married Tokyo idler (Shimamura) becomes intimate with a young geisha, Komako. There is no pretense that theirs will be a lasting love affair. Hot spring geishas aren't known for being particularly well-trained in music, dance, or song. 

The writing is absorbing, occasionally transcendently beautiful, lovely and sad. So much reflection on "wasted effort:" beauty and talent existing in a snowbound, uncultured village. When Shimamura is with Komako, he is reminded of his own futile enjoyments (hiking mountains; an intended self-published book on ballet, an art he's never seen nor wants to). In snow country, it is clear that time just passes, with nothing to show for us having been there but perhaps a series of diaries read over only by their writer, or a fine cotton cloth that will long outlive its anonymous creator. 

I hope everyone is safe and warm, cozy with their pets or other loved ones. 

-Michael G. 

The Most by Jessica Anthony

 

This 2024 novel is a quickly and easily read fiction piece that might be considered a novella. There is nothing excessive in this 133-page, richly told story. Every informative word seems carefully chosen and assembled with an almost poetic quality. I was drawn by its cover descriptions including: "The Most charges the air like a thunderclap," and "a novel of ruthless beauty." The title refers to a tennis maneuver, the relevance of which is a key part of the story. 

It's set in the mid-century. Virgil and Kathleen Beckett are just out of a New England university and newly married (a commitment perhaps made too soon). There is solid affection between them but each has secrets, each makes mistakes, and neither is emotionally mature enough to resist committing numerous indiscretions in the early years of their marriage, that each keeps hidden from the other. Virgil married for love; Kathleen more for convenience. Therefore she has the upper hand in some ways. But like so many women of that era, she did not get from marriage what she thought she had bargained for. 

As a character, Kathleen could have been drafted from  the societal issues explored in Betty Friedan's 1963 classic The Feminine Mystique: A woman driven slightly mad on occasion by the social and professional limitations of her life. Her disturbance is expressed now and then by just-so-slightly erratic behavior. The author connects the dots of Kathleen's life to explain an episodic behavioral deviance that sometimes embarrasses and exasperates the seemingly conventional husband who otherwise adores and deeply admires her. 

Oddly, in an era of post-war prosperity in the United States, these two university-educated people seem held back from achieving the economic promise of their time. In their mid-30s, they don't have much to show for their comparatively privileged positions in the world. Former college tennis champion Kathleen has a more ambitious, driven character than her laid-back husband, but in the cultural and economic milieu of that era there is little she can do to improve the sometimes depressingly dingy conditions in which she, Virgil, and their two young sons live. 

This is the intriguing part: within this story's framework there is something sinister lurking between the lines. This marriage feels like a sham. Neither Kathleen nor Virgil has completely shaken off the reverberations of their past indiscretions. It feels all along as if the chickens of husband and wife are going to come home to roost in some terrible way that destroys everybody. And yet, at the end, the tables turn. The chickens do come home - all of them, yet the conclusion is not the explosion you expect, but something else entirely. It leaves you hanging a little bit, wanting to know more, and to learn the next chapter for this conventional-appearing, complicated couple.          

The Most is now in the FMPL collection. 

- Marianne W.

Bluebeard's Castle by Anna Biller

 

All senses are alive in Anna Biller's retelling of the French folktale Bluebeard. You can hear the soundtrack, visualize the variously form-fitting and filmy gowns, smell the cognac, feel the purring body of her white Persian cat--Oh, and thrill to la passion!

Biller is a filmmaker, and she effortlessly translates her cinematic language into beautiful prose. Hitchcock and the leading ladies of the forties and fifties lend style and glamor and the giallo genre adds a splash of color and sex. Biller loves describing the way the characters dress (their "costumes") and she's gifted at it. See below for an image from her feature film The Love Witch. 

Judith is a successful Gothic Romance novelist who is swept off her feet (figuratively and literally) by a handsome stranger. After a weekend of passion they are swiftly married and honeymoon in Paris before buying a crumbling castle in the country. Her new husband, Gavin, is passionate and adoring but...not always. Judith is enraptured with him but increasingly afraid of his brooding secrecy and explosive temper. If this sounds like Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre, that is intentional. As Biller writes on her blog: 

"Although I’m once again working in a defunct genre and style (my most recent stylistic reference is Rebecca, written in 1938), for some reason the text doesn’t read as stylistically outdated the way my films do, even though I was equally inspired by Gothic fiction written in the 1790s as in the 1930s. I think this is because we all still enjoy language and stories from many different time periods, whereas most people who watch movies are over-saturated with the style of the current time."

And while Bluebeard's Castle is nearly breathless with romance and desire, it also punctures that with sly, dark humor, as in this line of the first chapter:

"She remembered the day they met, and the way he had looked at her, and how it had filled her with a mad ecstasy, which in retrospect had been a nervous breakdown." 

Or this similarly structured sentence from much later:

"But aside from the demon in her head, and her frequent nightmares, and her excessive drinking, and her insomnia, she was happy and productive."

There is this tension throughout: How much will Biller adhere Judith's story with the ones she loves to read, watch, and tell? Is the sexy/scary Gavin a flawed but ultimately romantic hero? Or is he actually just abusive and dangerous? And how much ambiguity can Judith take? She vacillates often throughout the novel, driving everyone around her batty, but it's this uncertainty, the tension between desire and fear, that make this a fascinating page turner and ultimately, a timely and harrowing examination of what it means to be a woman in love with a dangerous man. 

And it's worth mentioning: It's an absolutely gorgeous book! The cover is a great homage to the Gothic pulp novels and the front and back flaps include stunning photographs.  

Samantha Robinson as the titular Love Witch (2016), which Biller wrote, produced, and directed, as well as designed the production and costumes. 

- Michael G. 

The Husbands by Holly Gramazio

Lauren has an interesting problem.

After coming home to her London flat from her best friend's bachelorette party, still a little drunk, she discovers that she has a husband. Except he definitely wasn't there when she left for the evening, and she definitely doesn't remember marrying him, despite what the wedding photos on her mantel and saved in her phone might suggest. Then, just as suddenly, this husband goes up into the attic to change a lightbulb, and a new husband appears on his way back down.

And so begins one of the strangest years of Lauren's life.

Equipped with a seemingly magic attic and a never ending supply of husbands, Lauren cycles through different versions of herself, based on the husband that emerges from her attic. Sometimes they barely have time to settle in before she sends them back up to try another. Sometimes she sticks with them for a little, trying them on to see if they fit (if you're getting dating app vibes from this, you're not wrong). Each new husband resets her life - oftentimes, it's cosmetic, like different paint colors and decorations in her flat, but sometimes it results in more seismic changes, like her sister suddenly single with no children, or a different job that she has no idea how to do. While her life resets with each new husband, time continues to move forward and Lauren begins to wrestle with some hard questions. Chief among them is this - how do you know you're making the right decision when the possibility of something better is just a short trip into the attic away?

I thoroughly enjoyed this book! The author, Holly Gramazio, is a game designer, and I think her skills in writing games lent themselves well in how this story plays out (pun absolutely intended). Like a game, we're dropped into the action right away, as we meet Lauren just minutes before she meets her first husband. As the story continues, more information is teased out. Sometimes it's small things, like Lauren figuring out that switching husbands wipes out any bad decision-making (which she absolutely takes advantage of), and sometimes it's big things, like when she figures out that her attic isn't just creating husbands. One of things that struck me about this story has to do with the fact that Lauren always gains a husband, and never just a long-term relationship, or fiancé (though once, the husband is someone she is about to divorce). There's something interesting about the idea of skipping out on all of those early relationship struggles, but now having to suddenly deal with the struggles of being married, and Lauren realizes that too, to a certain extent. In true magical realism form, not everything is explained - the magic attic just is, and there isn't an explanation as to why this is happening to Lauren. That didn't bother me, but I know that could be a turnoff for others. Lauren also has to sometimes go to extremes to get the husband back into the attic, and some of the decisions she makes in those moments will either be funny or shocking, depending on how you feel. I did find Lauren to be relatable and sympathetic, but we also don't get a full sense of who she is outside of this particular moment in time. Ultimately, I thought this was a fun read, and it has stuck with me since I finished it a few weeks ago, so I highly recommend it!

- Amy R.

P.S. Holly Gramazio designed her very own husbands generator and published it online, in case anyone wants their own taste of the magic attic: https://www.hollygramazio.com/husbandsgenerator/row.html#96113. I think I'll stick with this one for awhile: