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Driving Myself Sane
by Lindy West
Book Reviewed by:In New York Times bestselling author Lindy West's ambitious memoir, she brings readers along on an uproarious cross-country road trip as she unpacks her last few tumultuous years, rediscovers herself, and reinvents her marriage in the process.
Through Shrill—the book and then the Hulu series—Lindy West became an inspiration. To this day she is stopped on the street and hailed as a beacon of empowerment by women who felt badly for not conforming to a narrow set of societal norms—thin, straight, compliant. But behind the scenes, Lindy never felt like she was the self-actualized woman fans made her out to be. When she found herself in the throes of a deep depression, with her marriage and sense of self-worth hanging in the balance, she knew she needed to make a change.
In Adult Braces, Lindy shares the story of her rock bottom, and of the journey she took to claw her way out of it. With her trademark candor and sense of humor, she examines her post-Shrill emotional implosion, her shifting feelings about traditional marriage, and her search for her long-lost self. She also tracks the highs and lows of her journey, from eye-opening natural wonders and kitschy roadside attractions to lackluster tourist traps and campground epiphanies.
The result is an engaging and laugh-out-loud narrative of becoming as Lindy transforms from a passenger into the active navigator of her own life.
A Vroom of One's Own
I was holding my dog's face in my hands and singing the Beach
Boys' "Kokomo" to comfort him after his neuter surgery, when I
felt the stirrings of a mutiny. It's not fair, I thought. Women don't
get to just go to Kokomo and live in a hammock and leave their
worries behind and drink mai tais and become leathery beach
men. Women don't get to have midlife crises. We get "nervous
breakdowns" and it's not sexy and we can't even go lie down,
because the countertops are sticky, and if we don't wipe them,
then what will happen—some teenager comes along and does it
with a PAPER TOWEL?! Not in my casa, hermano!
I was in the autumn of my own yet-undiagnosed midlife crisis,
and I was so tired. It had been a hard couple of years. COVID,
other stuff. On this particular morning, I'd woken up worrying
about the dog, and the money, and my husband's upcoming trip,
and whether my mom was mad at me, and the fact that my braces
had worn a hole in my ...
This is an earnest autobiography, one that does not shy away from the complex, contradictory feelings that make the human experience worth spiraling about. She writes with a candor that can be startling, like a stranger confessing a real mid-life crisis when asked, "How are you?" That self-disclosure has a way of winning you over, though, and West's anxieties are endlessly relatable. She writes Adult Braces "the same way I write about everything else: like a dork who's trying to say something funny and real."..continued
Full Review
(796 words)
(Reviewed by Margaret Belford).
Samantha Irby, New York Times bestselling author of Quietly Hostile
Lindy is doing the kind of naked self-examination that most people are too chickenshit to do even under the guidance of a trained therapist, and somehow also manages to make it hilarious? All killer, no filler. Suleika Jaouad, author of The Book of Alchemy and Between Two Kingdoms
Lindy West's funniest, fiercest, tenderest excavation yet—a road trip through rock bottom, revelation, and the wild relief of reimagining what a life can hold. Every chapter is a gut punch wrapped in a cackle. I didn't read this book so much as inhale it, and by the end I felt braced, bolstered, cracked open, and stitched back together.
If Bo Burnham's Inside captured the feeling of pandemic-induced isolation in 2020, Lindy West's memoir Adult Braces taps into the one that possessed many Americans the year after: the urge to get out of the house.
As she describes herself setting out on a cross-country odyssey in 2021, West explains her need to escape—a need that many across the country were also feeling at that time, if for different reasons. The National Parks Service reported record visitor counts at Yellowstone, Arches National Park, and other well-known sites, with corresponding business booms in gateway communities around the parks. On Michigan's gorgeous Upper Peninsula, which West decides to skip on her own trip, the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore ...
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The highly anticipated new memoir by bestselling author Glennon Doyle Melton tells the story of her journey of self-discovery after the implosion of her marriage.
A 2016 Oprah Bookclub Selection
When men are not regretting that life is so short, they are doing something to kill time.
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