Excerpt from Adult Braces by Lindy West, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

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 left cheek, and I couldn't remember the last time I'd woken up not worrying about someone else, not staring down the barrel of a bunch of shit that I had to deal with. For one day, I wanted to know what it felt like to open my eyes in the morning with an oasis in my chest and do whatever I wanted. Even as a child, I was a worrier. Even when I was a teenager, my mind dragged heavy with dread. Now I was so tired and abraded and twisted up, I wanted to disappear. Or, barring the constraints of space-time, the next best thing: I wanted to run away.

"I wish I could get in the car and drive all the way to Kokomo," I told the dog, who gazed back at me with an expression that said, unmistakably, "I have no idea what's going on. Where are my nuts???"

Then I thought: Wait, where are MY nuts? Why can't I drive to Kokomo?

People hate the Beach Boys' "Kokomo" because it's "stupid" and "bad" and songwriter Mike Love is "a MAGA asshole" who "kicked Brian Wilson out of the Beach Boys" and allegedly maybe according to the National Enquirer "refused to pay for his own daughter's cancer treatment and then she died." However, counterpoint: "Kokomo" is good!!!!!! I don't have to think that Mike Love's personality is good to think that "Kokomo" is a funky little number that gets me groovin'!

As a fictional-map fetishist (1) I am HELPLESS before a list of magical islands where people are falling in love and defying a little bit of gravity. Someone wants to take me to Aruba AND Jamaica AND Bermuda AND Bahama AND they think I'm a pretty mama??? Now we're cookin' with gas! I first heard "Kokomo" in 1993, when I was eleven years old, courtesy of the Muppets, and it imprinted on me for life. I don't want to get too deep into high-level neuroscience, but let's just say the spider librarian who indexes my brain spun a gossamer thread from "Kokomo" straight to the concept of adventure itself. For me, "Kokomo" always held a powerful—how do you say—Montserrat mystique? "Kokomo" represented everything exciting, beautiful, and mysterious that might happen to me in the vast unknown future.

So there I was, at a crisis point, clinically fed up, singing to the dog, and the song seemed to offer a prescription for just that moment: If you need to get away from it all, you simply MUST get down to Kokomo immediately, baby girl!

This idea—driving to Kokomo—stuck in my craw and all the Waterpiks in the world (I had three) couldn't dislodge it. You know that moment when you're driving to work and you see your exit coming up and you look at the horizon and you think, What if I just kept driving? I wanted to do it, to swim in that feeling, to take my body into my own hands and move it as far away from home as I could, physically, mile by mile, alone. For the first time in a long time, I was hungry to see what was out there. I wanted to steer. I wanted to be free. I wanted to catch a glimpse!

Excerpted from Adult Braces by Lindy West. Copyright © 2026 by Lindy West. Excerpted by permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.