I’ve just started reading Lindy West’s “Adult Braces”.

(Disclaimer: I’m friends with Lindy, and I know her to be one of the kindest, warmest and funniest people a person could be so lucky to call a friend. I can’t help but feel personally annoyed at the way so many people are speaking about her, even - especially - self proclaimed “feminists” who should know better, but who appear to have either an axe to grind against her personally or are desperate to brag about how egalitarian and respectful they think their precious fucking husbands are. Seriously, American women in particular need to stop seeing marriage as a sign of their own value. More on that in a sec.)

I’m only up to page 33, and a lot of what I’ve seen picked over, regurgitated and condemned has already occurred in the narrative, which confirms what was already apparent in so much of the feverish commentary - and that is, that a not insignificant portion of people offering authoritative (often smug and rude) commentary on this book and Lindy herself have either not read it, or are weirdly determined to misread what this book seems to be about (which is only in part the complexity of marriage and mistakes made by people therein.)

From Lindy’s own early pages framing and the reflection she applies to herself, it seems pretty obvious to me that this is going to be a memoir about a much broader concept of love, self awareness and the limits one applies to oneself based on social conditioning and misogyny. It also seems to be about women’s labour, and how marriage under heteropatriarchy and entrenched ideas about the sacrificial care of women is inevitably suffocating.

Perhaps this is what has really agitated some of her critics - that she is pulling the veil back on the compromises women have to make to stay partnered with men they love (most of whom consistently prove themselves unworthy of that devotion) and that there are no easy answers to any of it. I suspect there is some deep anxiety in all of this for those readers who take such pride in having found “a good one” but are not quite so honest as to admit that even these men are often deeply flawed and extractive; that choosing to partner with men at all is a risk, and one that cannot help but involve diminishment of self of some kind.

Modern feminism has overbearingly concerned itself with the rehabilitation of men and proving that the romantic con of “everlasting love” is not only possible, but purposeful. That feminist women, with all our opinions and brashness and freedom, can also still be worthy of being loved by the same men whose systems of power we’re seeking to be liberated from.

But what if that’s not really true? What if we can’t wrench ourselves free of these dynamics, no matter how hard we try, how many sacrifices we make and how much we will ourselves to believe that we’ve been so magically “lucky” as to have secured the love of a man we desperately need the world to believe is “good”? There’s a grief in acknowledging that probability, and too few women are willing to even glance at the cliff edge.

However unappealing readers might find Lindy’s warts’n’all revelations about her marriage, it seems to me that at least part of the real agitation here comes from her willingness to stop sugarcoating it and start to be honest instead. I do not for a second believe the same of the women using their “critiques” to shoehorn in favourable comparisons of their own arrangements. Intimate partnerships (regardless of whether they’re monogamous or polyamorous) always involve compromise, and women involved with men inevitably bear an even greater burden of that. Ironically, Lindy’s acknowledgment of that is outlined pretty clearly even in those first 33 pages.

Marriage under patriarchy cannot be reimagined as feminist liberation, no matter how desperate women are to believe that. And so any woman who chooses to do it will always confront its limitations for their own personal freedom, growth and subjectivity. That is the reality, and I think that honesty should be applauded even as it also discomforts.

Oh, the book is also really fucking funny.