Lindy West is the most successful feminist writer of her (and my) generation. In her pomp at Jezebel, she mastered both viral takedowns—sorry, Love Actually—and confessional writing. She embraced adjectives that were meant to demean her: loud, fat, shrill. When Lindy shouted, women listened.
That background is what makes the publication of her new memoir, Adult Braces, such a cultural moment. Adult Braces is many things: a paean to the varied landscapes of America, an advert for #vanlife, a reminder to be grateful that your partner hasn’t talked you into a throuple with a much thinner woman. It is also the tombstone for Millennial Feminism—that swirling brew of Media Twitter, blog snark, the Great Awokening, whaling on Lena Dunham, fat positivity, and boring straight people identifying as queer through accounting tricks. To read Lindy West is to gaze backwards in time, to an era when it was acceptable to write “welp!” in copy.
West lived the Millennial writer’s dream. She rose from blogging for the Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger to a similar job at the new-media darling Jezebel, and went on to write columns for legacy outlets such as The Guardian. On the side, she published a New York Times best-selling memoir, Shrill, and turned it into a television show that ran for three seasons. She left Twitter after being bombarded with abuse but remained unbowed. Sure, #MeToo was a witch-hunt, she wrote in the Times: “I’m a Witch and I’m Hunting You.” There was even a fairy-tale ending, with a handsome musician named Ahamefule Oluo who loved her just as she was. “My wedding was perfect,” she wrote in 2015, “and I was fat as hell the whole time.” Can women have it all? It looked like Lindy West could.
