I Escaped Bluebeard's Castle. Lindy West Didn't.

When I was 22, my boyfriend Jason and I moved across the country from the suburbs of Chicago to Albuquerque, New Mexico, sight unseen, with the $8,000 I’d saved by teaching voice and piano lessons. We were moving to Albuquerque so I could write a novel.

We were also moving to Albuquerque to get away from everyone who thought I shouldn’t be with Jason.

Once we were in the Land of Enchantment, Jason refused to teach me how to drive stick, which meant I couldn’t drive our only car. I was confined to the apartment, and places I could walk to, but no one walks in Albuquerque. On Meetup, I found a writing group, and learned how to take the Route 66 bus there. I walked across the highway to my job as a waitress at a diner that served green chile cheeseburgers and chocolate malts; I could always get a teenage bus boy to give me a ride home at the end of the night, if Jason refused to come get me.

One of the other waitresses was in an abusive relationship; we worried constantly about her. She was tall, with beautiful skin and long, dark curly hair, like a princess in a fairy tale. I can still see the bruise of his grip on her upper arm, when she cuffed the sleeve of her t-shirt.

I thought we were so different.

Jason and I had met at an audition; he was 19 but already much more sexually experienced than I was. The night I happily lost the burden of my virginity to him, I went home and wrote in my diary that I’d lost it to the song “Heartbreak Hotel.”

Strangers used to stop us in public to ask what movie they recognized him from. I liked the way other women looked at me when we were together. I liked knowing I had something that they did not. I couldn’t think of anything I’d had before worth envying.

While I wrote my novel, he tried to pursue an acting career. Breaking Bad had just filmed its pilot. Jason worked a brief stint as a security guard on a film set. He rode his motorcycle to Santa Fe for auditions.

Then he got cast in a musical at UNM and came home flushed and manic. Everyone at UNM loved him. After dating me for “so long” (seven months), meeting new women was like “opening a present at Christmas,” he told me.

“What does that mean?” I said. “You want to fuck them?”

“They want to fuck me.”

I would never meet any of these UNM girls, but they loomed large in my imagination: the enemy.

“What are they?” I finally asked him, by which I meant, What are they that I am not?

They were dancers. They were my competition. I knew I would never look like them, but I was smart. I could calculate the price I would have to pay to keep Jason—have a threesome with someone from Craigslist (I actually suggested this), take up smoking, buy us another bottle of gin, change my hair color, change my body, become a different person. Anything but admit that I’d made a mistake by moving to the other side of the country with him.

By this point, four weeks into our life in New Mexico, the emotional abuse had turned physical.

One night, he told me he was going to a party with his new friends and I wasn’t allowed to join him. I knew this was it, the night I would be replaced. When I begged to come along, he pointed out that this was exactly why he didn’t want me there: I was boring, I was a nag, I was not sexy. I started to cry. He rolled me a joint and left.

I called my mom and packed a suitcase. I left Jason a note on the coffee table that said I was flying home to Chicago. There were no flights until the next morning, so I took a taxi to a hotel near the airport. I turned off my phone so he couldn’t call me in the middle of the night and persuade me to come home.

Love is as love does, my mom told me, and I wrote this down on a hotel notepad.

I was only at my parents’ house for twenty-four hours. Long enough to have made Jason sufficiently terrified of losing me, I thought. We struck a deal: if I came home, he agreed to teach me how to drive and promised not to sleep with other people. I had to agree to go back on anti-depressants for the first time since I was a teenager, so I would stop acting “crazy.”

Back I went to Bluebeard’s castle, where I tried to become his final girl. I took my medication, waited tables, and wrote my first novel. If I reacted emotionally to anything Jason said or did—like, for example, the fact that he couldn’t keep a job—that was further proof of my mental illness. One night I overheard him telling my mom, a psychologist, over the phone that I would always be sick. That he would have to take care of her sick daughter forever.

The sicker he said I was, the more it seemed to be true: I was the victim of something beyond my control, and I would be its victim forever, always dependent on others to help me live my life. To disprove this theory I would have had to leave him and forge ahead on my own. I couldn’t do that. He made me believe the story he told me about myself, and I stayed with him because if he was right then it meant he was the only one who truly saw me.

Image source: Flashbak.com

Jason died in a motorcycle accident in the summer of 2011, just six weeks after I saw him for the last time and finally decided to stop answering his phone calls, and eleven days after he stabbed another man in a fight in a gas station parking lot. When I wrote a memoir about our relationship, I pressed myself to understand why I was so desperate to be chosen by him—even when all the warning signs were flashing red:

“Someday I’m going to marry you,” Jason said.

“What do you mean ‘someday’?”

“I mean I’m young now, and I have to go and have other experiences. But just you wait.”

Actually, I didn’t want to wait. It wasn’t that I wanted to get married to him immediately, but I wanted to know how our story would end. I felt acute panic at the idea of him having “other experiences” without me, at the thought of being left behind. With Jason, I felt like I was standing under stage lights—it was too hot, maybe even uncomfortable, but everyone sitting in the dark could see me. With him, I was a bright young thing. And when I forced myself to imagine life without him, he got to stay onstage but I had to go back and sit in the shadows and watch.

Bruno Bettelheim argues that “Bluebeard” presents a disturbing counter-message to “Beauty and the Beast.” If the story of Belle and the beast is meant to assuage sexual anxiety, showing that love between a man and a woman “is the most satisfying of all emotions, and the only one which makes for permanent happiness,”¹ the story of Bluebeard confirms a child’s worst fears: that marriage is terrifying.

“Bluebeard” is the only fairy tale that warns us of marriage as a site of danger.

This fairy tale is the literary ancestor of Gothic romances from The Mysteries of Udolpho to Rebecca—to survive her violent husband, the young heroine must use her own curiosity and cunning. Scholar Maria Tatar tells us, “Her curiosity turns her into an energetic investigator, determined to acquire knowledge of the secrets hidden behind the door of the castle’s forbidden chamber,”² where Bluebeard keeps the corpses of his previous wives.

The heroine of “Bluebeard” has to engineer her own rescue.

Reading Lindy West’s memoir Adult Braces gave me the eerie sensation that I was back inside Bluebeard’s castle. I felt physically uncomfortable not only because of the behavior of her husband Aham—who was married twice before Lindy and can only “commit” to her if he can date other women—but because of the familiar horror of a woman talking herself out of her own instincts of self-preservation and going back for seconds at the self-abnegation buffet.

I read this memoir like The Shining. The creepy twin girls in the hotel hallway: one of them is Lindy and one of them is me. One of us made it out of the cursed hotel and one of us is still inside.

Lindy West is an icon of the body positivity movement; her 2016 feminist essay collection Shrill was made into a Hulu show starring Aidy Bryant. When she married Aham, she wrote an essay for The Guardian titled, “My wedding was perfect—and I was fat as hell the whole time.”

We were both extremely online millennial feminists in the 2010s. She would have been a dream keynote speaker at my feminist writing conference (c. 2014 – 2017).

Some of the most compelling passages in Adult Braces are about her tortured relationship with her body, because she is telling us the truth about the prison of her personal brand: to heal her relationship with food and her body, she would have to change, and if she changes, she risks losing the adoration of her fandom.

…as body-positivity went mainstream, that became my career: Loving myself where other people could see. Insisting that I was healed—that I no longer cared what anyone thought, no longer fought against my body, no longer wanted to lose weight, was no longer touched by shame and fear and unlovability. I knew that other fat people needed to see that this was possible, because I had needed to see it. So that’s what I became. People were so, so hungry for it. All we had ever had was nothing. Finally, there was something, and I got to be a part of it. Modeling defiance became a 24-7 project that I could not put down without betraying my people. I had to love my body unequivocally, forever, exactly as it was, or else. We couldn’t trust the wider world with any nuance. We couldn’t say, “Sometimes I feel bad in my body.” The thin people would only slip through the cracks with their skinny little knives and say, “See?”

She is less candid about her marriage.

On page one hundred and thirty of Adult Braces, West writes, “There’s a part of my marriage story that I haven’t talked about, because it’s harder to forgive. I’m scared of what you’ll think of me.”

Oh?

It turns out that her husband did not only have one girlfriend she did not know about—he had two girlfriends she did not know about.

“The second one was younger….She was tall and thin and blond and fun and wild and she knew people that we knew. She was the exact woman your husband leaves you for when you look like me.”

Image source: Flashbak.com

She was the exact woman your husband leaves you for when you look like me is a self-deprecating joke masking a profound lack of self-worth that underpins the book.

I am worthless if I lose Aham is an underlying belief that never gets challenged—by a therapist, by a friend, by her editor, or by the author herself.

Who is Lindy without those public wedding photos? Who was I if I didn’t have Jason?

“A lot of bad stuff happened during the months they were entangled,” West continues, in the chapter about her husband’s second secret girlfriend. “They were certainly the worst months of my life. But all you need to know for the purposes of this story is that Aham violated my trust badly, there was a period of utter chaos, and I had every right and reason to leave him.”

West gives us a more evocative description of a disappointing order of avocado toast in Key West than the “worst months of [her] life.” She is desperate to keep the reader from turning on Aham—if the reader turns on Aham, that makes her his victim. As a feminist, she searches for ideological frameworks that can override her despair at his infidelity and justify why her husband should totally bring girlfriend #1 into their marriage: first, monogamy is slavery³; second, monogamy is valued by conservatives, the people she despises throughout her road trip across America.

To quote Herman Hesse, “If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.” Lindy hates how much she wanted her husband to be faithful to her. To keep him, she has to destroy the part of herself who once wanted that.

In this passage, I got the creepy sensation that Aham is reading over her shoulder as she types:

You are predisposed to sympathize with me. This is my book, and you’re reading it. Presumably, you like me. At the very least, you’re stuck in my head, and I control the aperture. In many ways, my side of the story is easier to understand than Aham’s—mine hews to cultural norms about heterosexual love and relationships while his challenges them. Also, he was a big asshole and put me through hell. I could write this book in a way that would make you hate Aham’s guts and pity me for staying with him. Or I could write it in a way that makes him sound tortured yet wise and makes me sound like a codependent freak. It’s all true. All nonfiction is actually fiction.

All nonfiction is only “fiction” if you’re not telling the truth.

“Good writing has two characteristics,” a writing teacher once told Vivian Gornick. “It’s alive on the page and the reader is persuaded that the writer is on a voyage of discovery.”⁴

In Adult Braces, the narrator rents a van and goes on a road trip. By the end of her voyage, she has talked herself into wanting more of this:

A selfie of Aham and Roya at the hotel bar, right at that moment, in each other’s arms, faces pressed together, no longer just an idea but two bodies, hot and tipsy and red and sweaty and in love and together and I was alone in Kentucky and I was his wife and I was his wife and I was his wife and he was supposed to love me and she was so beautiful and she was so small and I wasn’t ready.

“It wasn’t lost on me that, at the turning point of this mission, the thing that my ‘true self’ discovered she wanted looked an awful lot like what Aham had been angling for from the beginning,” Lindy writes.

Before she goes home to him and Roya, she gets a tattoo that says good girl.

This is a 300-page voyage of zero discoveries. It’s an addiction memoir that doesn’t end in sobriety. It’s a cult memoir that ends with a spirited defense of the cult leader.

The narrator lacks the transgressive curiosity to open the door to the forbidden chamber and fully behold the horror inside.

In Land of Enchantment, I wrote, “What’s hard to understand, but what I know to have been true, is that I was more afraid that someone would successfully convince me to leave Jason, than I was of staying with him.” I knew what they would tell me: that I deserved better than this. But I wasn’t yet ready to face that my entire self-worth was attached to him wanting me. I didn’t have the self-respect to leave him in New Mexico. I was addicted to the highs and lows of our relationship.

I wonder if Lindy shares my old fear.

“I need this book to be a success because everything’s so scary⁵,” she told Scaachi Koul, in a profile for Slate. “This has to float us for the next few years. I feel a pressure to take care of my family.”

West is currently running crisis comms for her marriage, insisting that the romance is alive and well, despite what we’ve just read in Adult Braces: the memoir ends with her relationship to food and her body still unhealed. It ends with her taking medication for clinical depression. It ends with her husband and her husband’s girlfriend putting her to bed in a separate bedroom, like an adult baby.

Bluebeard is not taking the public reaction to his wife’s memoir very well. He sent a nasty email to Scaachi Koul, after the Slate profile ran. In an interview for the ICYMI podcast, Scaachi reads the email aloud (minute 33). “Do you know who taught me to read a shitty email that some guy sent me that hurt my feelings on the internet?” Scaachi asks the host. “That was Lindy West.”

If Jason had lived, if I had persuaded him to marry me by promising to accommodate whatever he wanted, if we lived in a remote, isolated location, far away from anyone who judged my decision to stay with him, and I continued supporting his dreams, year after year after year, by working hard enough for both of us; if money was tight and I had to publish, this is the terrifying book I might have written to keep him in my life.

Ultimately, Adult Braces discomfited me in its familiarity. That’s the definition of uncanny: the familiar, made frightening.

This essay is dedicated to K.

Special thank you to my friend Rafael Frumkin for giving me extremely helpful feedback on an early draft of this essay. I highly recommend her Substack Cosmic Cheeto.

Further reading & listening

• I spoke about Adult Braces on the Feminine Chaos podcast

• You can buy my memoir Land of Enchantment here

• You can buy my gothic novel If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You here

• If you enjoyed this essay, you might also enjoy my essay on Wuthering Heights, Sylvia Plath, and Ted Hughes

• I’ve also written about my disillusionment with 2010s internet feminism

• In 2016, The New York Times Book Review published an essay I wrote in defense of young memoirists

1. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment (Knopf, 1977)

2. Maria Tatar, editor, The Classic Fairy Tales (Norton, 1999)

3. “He believed that monogamy was at its root, a system of ownership. I had to admit that perhaps I didn’t feel it as keenly, as a white person.”

4. Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story (FSG, 2001)

5. On page 40, the reader learns that Lindy has a $500 credit limit. During her road trip, Lindy’s lack of credit causes a problem when she can’t pay for her own hotel room: her sister-in-law has to wire money to her checking account. I was shocked by these details. Lindy is a New York Times bestselling author. According to Bookscan, Shrill has sold 69,000 copies in hardcover and paperback. It was on Hulu for three seasons. By any measure, she is a commercially successful writer who has been earning income by writing for YEARS. Where has all her money gone? On her Substack, Lindy has responded to questions of whether she is financially supporting Aham and his girlfriend Roya by calling these “deranged, racist” questions.