BookBrowse Reviews Adult Braces by Lindy West

BookBrowse:

Lindy West goes East in this coast-to-coast romp of a memoir that explores the complexity of love, the pain of being a role model, and the hilarity of roadside America.

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When a fan tells Lindy West about her husband kissing another woman, she's already not at her best. Shrill—the television show she's working on based on her 2016 smash-hit memoir—looks less like Lindy in its third season, with a writers' room getting skinnier by the episode. Her people-pleasing tendencies have eroded her sense of self. The pressure of being a public body-positivity icon, while feeling more body-negative by the day, is making her panic. In short, she writes of this time working on Shrill in New York: "It was the realization of every wild dream I've ever had, and it was the worst fucking month of my life."

What can she do but take a garishly-painted camper van on an epic road-trip from Seattle to Florida? She's in search of Kokomo, she says, the Caribbean locale that the Beach Boys famously sang about—and, granted, her discovery that Kokomo is made-up puts a minor wrench in her plans to self-actualize. But the intent is there. On her odyssey, West connects with old friends, new experiences, and her sense of her own worth.

You could fill a library with memoirs about people going on a cross-country journey in response to personal crisis. Few of them, however, manage to combine the generous humor and specificity of feeling that Lindy West packs into Adult Braces. 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." Emphasis on the funny; it's hard to be the cool and mysterious person reading in public when you're cracking up at every page.

She writes in a way that makes you laugh, of course, but that laughter gets your guard down, which prepares you to hear emotional truth. Cracking up cracks you open. She'll remark on the hilariously embarrassing process of getting adult braces in one moment, and hit you with this revelation of a paragraph the next:

"For many years, I thought my life was fixed in place, painful, but immovable. I felt as though I had turned to stone, still and helpless, both physically and emotionally, slowly cracking while the world glided on without me. I took pride in my ability to weather any amount of discomfort to preserve the familiar and avoid humiliation. But I am not stone. I deserve more than endurance. I deserve pleasure and the good and the new. Not perfect teeth but teeth free enough to move."

The flow of events between chapters can sometimes be unclear, especially in the first half—like a series of non-sequitur stories or interrelated diary entries. But once West catches you up on the contributing factors to her crisis, the memoir settles into a rhythm—a more cohesive set of directions to the next rest stop and roadside attraction.

And if choppy chapter transitions is the price to pay for West's clarity and lack of artifice, it's a bargain. I deeply appreciate the way she offers real coping strategies for her depression and anxiety, not therapy-speak platitudes. Her big sister tells her to keep a small picture of Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High in her wallet as a reminder to not worry about other people's opinions. When the energy to get up and shower feels unreachable, she focuses on the physical step-by-step: hair, soap, skin.

That lack of performative perfection might make Adult Braces unsuitable for certain audiences. West's exploration of her marriage is not the black-and-white, cheating-victim story that the opening anecdote initially implies. The other woman is not "the other woman" at all—but I'll leave that story for West herself to tell. She dives into her complicated feelings about sex, romance, and nonmonogamy in detail, refusing simple narratives of victimhood and sacrifice. That might not be to all's taste, about which West doesn't mince words: "If you think I have been brainwashed and I am secretly miserable, I simply do not know what to tell you."

But for readers seeking an escape from perfection—from curated social media, from self-loathing, from editors that would immediately axe a no-holds-barred sentence like "JUDITH was FIRED as soon as I found the emergency exit from my Crystal Cave of Wonders!!"—Adult Braces provides the roadtrip of a lifetime. From Seattle, Washington to Malta, Montana, from self-consciousness to self-liberation; don't be weird and parasocial about it, but this book feels like a best friend. Who wouldn't cheer for that happy ending?

This review first ran in the May 6, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.