Big Love
On Lindy West’s new memoir, monogamy vs polyamory, show vs tell, and whether women can ever get free
UPDATED TO ADD:
It’s Sunday afternoon, and the Lindy West discourse rolls on, with the topic shifting from polyamory, comma, advisability of, to men, comma, why?
On Saturday, Scaachi Koul, who wrote a long and even-handed profile of Lindy West for Slate before Adult Braces was published, dropped a podcast during which she shared that all three members of the throuple – Lindy, her husband, Aham, and their girlfriend, Roya – emailed her to object to what she’d written.
Koul read Aham’s email, which read: “This was such a shitty thing to do, Scaachi. You intentionally skewed the story to fit your own bitter narrative. You wasted my time and all of our time to write an article that was going to be the same no matter what we said. You absolutely dehumanized me and intentionally diminished my personhood and career. Roya and I were on a shared project in Boston. However you worded it, I was performing four shows at the Paramount, and Roya is my producer. I am a person with a life and a great career and a complicated life, and you boiled me down to a cheater who was on a school project making a diorama or some shit because you are mad about your life. You barely wrote about the book, you just wrote rage bait articles specifically designed to direct hate toward me. You are a shitty fucking person, you’re a bitter, untalented mean girl, and you should be absolutely ashamed of yourself. You fucking suck.”
When the podcast producers reached out to request comment, his reply was “Yes, my email was a typo, what I meant to say was Free Palestine.”
Koul said that West’s email was polite but unhappy with Ahamfule’s portrayal, while Roya Amirsoleymi, the third member of the triad, sent an email that was “extremely long and in parts polite and in parts, you know, suggested I needed therapy and that I was anti-black.” And that no one reads Slate anyhow.
Whew.
The podcast sent people back to the original article, wondering what Koul had written about Oluo that had gotten him upset.
The answer: very little.
There’s a single sentence where she writes about how Lindy’s alone in the marital household during her visit, because Oluo and Roya Amirsoleymani were working on a project in Boston, and quotes from a Zoom interview Koul conducted with Oluo in which he describes the scrutiny around their relationship.
But, for the most part, the story keeps its focus on Lindy West. (More on that soon).
People had a lot of feelings about Oluo’s response, most of which can be summarized as If he thinks this behavior’s going to help him beat the allegations of being a bad husband, he is wrong.
On the podcast, Koul said, “I think what we have are two women who are continuously being asked to justify the behavior of a third party.”
On Threads, Roxane Gay wrote “I was trying to hard to be open but husbands just be out here doing embarrassing and unacceptable things sometimes.”
(To which someone replied, basically, if Roxane Gay got on the internet to say that my husband was a jerk, I would yeet both of us into the sun).
The novelist Ella Dawson wrote “Aham’s email…tells me everything I need to know about his character. FWIW, Roya seems like a jerk too. This crashout is wildly unprofessional and bitter and defensive.”
The writer Lyz Lenz wrote “I released a whole book about why I left my husband and he never said a word about it to me or our kids or the internet and I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately…if a man is sending emails like that to professional journalists imagine what he says behind closed doors.”
I will say it again: I want to believe that Lindy West is happy, and loved and desired by her partners; that she’s being uplifted and celebrated, not gaslit and undermined.
To that end, there is part of me that really wants to think that this is four-dimensional-chess, expert-level trolling from a woman who was once numbered among social media’s leading practitioners, and that Lindy, Aham and Roya are playing games with the media to keep Lindy’s book trending and her sales robust.
I want to believe.
But believing would mean ignoring the many, many women who see something familiar in Oluo’s email: to wit, a husband who seems threatened by his wife’s success and unhappy with his role as a supporting character in her story and who is, consciously or unconsciously, is trying to bring his wife down.
There’s this latest outburst.
And there’s the history. Readers point out that Aham kissed that woman in the bar, and hard-launched his two secret girlfriends at the height of Lindy’s success. She had a book, and she had a TV show, and in the middle of all that he disrupted their marriage by violating the boundaries she’d put in place.
Lindy’s addressed this already, saying that she was the one forcing Aham into an uncomfortable marital configuration, that she made him keep secrets and lie, that she’s not poly under duress but that Aham was, for a time, monogamous under duress. Not everyone seems convinced.
The podcast imbroglio opens up a different conversation about another way West and Oluo’s marriage is unconventional: not because it includes a third person but because it’s West who is, by far, the most well-known and successful of the trio; the one who is, I assume, making the bulk of the money.
Maybe that’s the part of Koul’s piece that angered Oluo: not what Koul wrote, but, rather, what West herself said about her book and their family’s finances.
“I need this book to be a success because everything’s so scary,” Koul quotes West as saying. “This has to float us for the next few years. I feel a pressure to take care of my family, and so on this very cynical surface level, I would love for the book to be a success.”
To many women, the latest act in this drama feels unhappily familiar.
On Saturday, on Threads, Olivia Howell posted “I think it’s time we talk about how many men consciously and actively try to sabotage their wives’ careers and successes.”
The comments poured in, from bestselling authors, from doctors and lawyers and every flavor of professional woman, all offering variations on the same sad theme.
Every interview day, every exam, every day that I had to be alert and refreshed, a fight was started so I’d go in jangling.
Was flown first-class to LA for my first five-figure speaking engagement. Against my better judgment, my ex-husband accompanied me. He literally cut his hand with razor to stop me from going to the speakers mixer without him…I got an Uber to get there a little late and he came running out of the hotel banging on the window telling me to get out and wait on him.
7 phone calls about bath tile we purchased, in person, together the day before. It was my first day of a new job with on-site training at HQ. There was a fridge full of food and he was off that entire week. SMFH.
My ex mysteriously disappeared the night before my NCLEX exam. During finals week he was busy with his “personal” life couldn’t help to bother change a diaper or watch a kid so I could study.
I had a job I hated that required me to leave my house by 5 am. So of course that man required me to stay up with him until after midnight almost every night. Every single lunch break was spent sleeping in my car.
My ex husband used to intentionally start fights the night before big interviews or meetings so I would be exhausted.
Stephanie Land, author of MAID, chimed in with this jaw-dropper:
Nicole Walters wrote: “It’s manipulative abuse knitting a ‘success sweater’ every day for them to ‘unravel it secretly’ at night.
And there were repeated references to David Harbour’s note to Lily Allen,
This is a dynamic which many successful women are going to find familiar, because they’ve seen it, or because they’ve live it.
I watched husbands who were happy to support their aspiring writer-wives when they were riding the struggle bus, in the query trenches become considerably less supportive when those wives found agents, landed publishing deals and hit the bestseller list.
Men are socialized to provide; to be the breadwinners. Being a man married to a woman who’s more famous and successful must be profoundly destabilizing. It’s a rare man strong enough to hold his wife’s handbag on the red carpet, or not feel unmanned by her achievements, a man who can celebrate wholeheartedly and not feel envious, or overshadowed.
I want to believe Lindy West has a partner like that, because she deserves one. Every funny, smart, hard-working, high-achieving woman does! I want to believe that Lindy is loved and desired and respected by the people with whom she has chosen to share her life.
All of this is making me think otherwise.
And the hardest part about it? All the women saying You know who taught me I didn’t have to let men speak to me like this? You know who taught me I didn’t have to believe it if a man said I was ugly or bitter or untalented? You know who made me think that I deserved better?
Lindy West.
***
I am not on Twitter anymore, but I am on Threads.
And Threads, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to feed me the posts of a fellow Gen-X woman who is at full-out war with her body.
Like me, this woman is a writer (unlike me, she’s self-published, currently in the query trenches).
Like me, she runs and bikes and does triathlons. Like me, she is married and a mom.
But there’s one important way in which we differ.
I am plus size. I have spent pretty much my entire adult life somewhere in the size 16/18 range.
My impression of the Threads lady is that she’s always been thin. And now, menopause has left her with twenty extra pounds, weight that she is desperately, frantically, with great determination and considerable resources, trying to shed.
Sometimes, she posts about her books – a promising rejection letter she received, a conference she attended, a book club she visited.
Mostly, though, it’s bodies bodies bodies. She is back on her diet! She’s seeing a nutritionist! She’s weighing and measuring, and she’s beating herself up for eating nachos at a bar, but she’s back on the wagon today! She’s only eating whole foods! She’s mixing chia seeds into her yogurt! She made a mousse out of whipped dates and avocadoes and it wasn’t half-bad!
Sometimes, other members of the menopausal weight-gain brigade will chime in with their own tips and tricks. Has she tried celery juice? No? How about tapes with subliminal messages? (Not kidding). Intermittent fasting? Keto? 75 Hard?
As far as I can tell, my Threads nemesis has two modes: on her diet or off the wagon. She is never at a place of self-acceptance, or even self-tolerance, let alone self-love. She’s in self-loathe, at all-out war with a body that seems perfectly functional, a body that has carried children and is strong and fit enough to carry her through trail races and triathlons. Even though logic would suggest, Hey, maybe you’re not supposed to weigh what you did twenty years ago, she can’t accept that.
She hates her new body. She will do anything to change it. Even though she has a full-time job, her real occupation – the labor that occupies the majority of her time and mental energy – is weight loss. Just like, in the “Barbie” movie, Ken’s job is “beach,” this woman’s job is “thin.”
And no matter how desperately she seems to want to land an agent and get a traditional publishing deal, I believe that, if she could switch lives with me, if someone told her, you can have an agent and a multi-book contract and your books can be bestsellers, but you’ll have to spend the rest of your life forty pounds heavier than you are now – I bet she’d say no.
It makes me angry. It makes me sad. It makes me think that women my age are pretty much doomed.
We will never be free. We’ll go to our graves with a food scale in one hand and an avocado-based dessert in the other, saying, with our very last breath, not, I love you or I was so lucky, but Make sure that’s only four ounces of chicken breast.
Younger women are the ones who are going to have to figure it out…and Lindy West has always been one of the women who gave me hope that someday, women were going to find a way out of the diet culture trap. In her essays and books and social media posts, West presented herself like someone with bulletproof self-confidence, a woman who wore an Iron Man-style suit of self-love. She was the cool younger sister who’d looked at the systems and structures that keep women down, shrugged and said, Nah, not buying it.
When Lindy got married, she wrote about refusing the pressure brides face to make themselves their smallest on the biggest day of their lives. “I have never in my life been fatter than I was on my wedding day,” she wrote in the Guardian. “I have never shown my body in such an uncompromising way, and I have never felt more at home in that body. I was fully myself, and I was happy. We are happy. This life is yours, fat girls. Eat it up.”
Her wedding dress – a form-fitting mermaid-style confection ornamented with a riot of colorful silk flowers -- was gorgeous, and the opposite of ‘flattering,’ insofar as flattering, as it applies to fat women, just means ‘diminishing,” or ‘using every piece of sartorial trickery to make your body look smaller.’ Instead of minimizing her, this dress maximized her. It shouted, Look at me. It said, I did not need to scrounge for crumbs of love just because the world told me they were all fat women deserved. It said, I found a partner who will love and cherish me, just as I am, while making it clear that finding a partner was a happy side effect, not her main quest. “Male approval isn’t where my self-worth comes from – and that realization was a huge part of what made my current relationship healthy and fulfilling,” West wrote at the time.
Her words, her dress, her wedding, her presumably happy marriage were all rebukes to every troll who ever posted, in the dim light of his mother’s basement, lolcow or landwhale or a gif of Jabba the Hutt.
They were clapbacks to every man who ever crept into a fat women’s bed in the wee small hours of the morning while refusing to acknowledge her, or his own desires, in the daytime. They were a stiff middle finger to every diet profiteer and every doctor who ever began an appointment with a fat woman by asking What are we going to do about your weight? whether she’d come in with an ear infection or a broken arm.
To every salesgirl who ever smirked, We don’t carry that in your size, to every boss or professor or coach who ever told a larger woman: lose weight or else you can’t have the job, can’t be on the team, can’t get the promotion or the honors or the praise, Lindy West rose up and said, You are wrong. To everyone who ever told a fat girl, Men won’t want you. The world doesn’t want you, she said, they do and it does.
Ever since her wedding made the news, I have been able to picture Lindy’s dress just as clearly as I can see that little red wagon of lard that Oprah Winfrey towed across the stage, all those years ago. When my own self-confidence would wobble and the negative self-talk got loud, I would think about Lindy in that dress, and I’d feel like Moses from the Old Testament. Maybe I’ll never live to enter the Promised Land, I would think, but at least I can die happy, knowing that some women, someday, are going to get there.
All of which is to say, Lindy West’s new memoir is hitting me hard.
