LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: You might know our next guest from her hit Hulu series "Shrill," based on her collection of essays by the same name, which chronicled the life of a young journalist struggling with self-image, dating and her career.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "SHRILL")
AIDY BRYANT: (As Annie Easton) Let's see. I got my lotion and my gum and my shoelaces for my brown shoes. And could I also get the morning-after pill?
TOM WALTON: (As Lazy Pharmacist) Hey, Nick, do we sell the morning-after pill?
BRYANT: (As Annie Easton) Oh, oh, that's OK. We don't need to bother Nick. He's...
FADEL: Lindy West's latest book, "Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane," is a shift. She's in her 40s. She's in the throes of a deep depression. Her marriage is on the rocks, and her sense of self is, well, hanging on by a thread. So she decides something has to change. And she takes a solo cross-country road trip that becomes the foundation for this endearing and hilarious memoir.
LINDY WEST: I just think that if a woman has a midlife crisis, it inconveniences too many people (laughter).
FADEL: Yeah.
WEST: And so it's not sexy and it's not interesting. It's just kind of threatening to the social order or something. So I went to my husband and I said, I think I need to rent a van and go on a road trip and drive to Florida and go to Kokomo and lie down. Is that OK? To my surprise, my husband said, go, go, go. You got to go. Go do it. And so I did. And I drove all the way to Florida in a van.
FADEL: By yourself.
WEST: By myself.
FADEL: What was going on in your life where you were like, I need to do this thing for myself?
WEST: So the backstory is we finished shooting the second season of "Shrill," and then just a couple of days after I got home, I found out that my husband had a girlfriend or had been dating someone else. And we were technically not strictly monogamous. We had sort of a don't ask, don't tell policy. But (laughter) basically, this sort of non-monogamy, polyamory conversation that my husband had been trying to have with me for a decade - it came home to roost.
FADEL: Yeah.
WEST: And...
FADEL: You had to face it.
WEST: Yeah, I had to finally face it. It was something that we both wanted to fight for and try to figure out. And people find this hard to understand and they think that I must be rationalizing or trying to convince myself to do something that I don't actually want to do when I finally sort of acquiesce to polyamory. I don't want to say acquiesce 'cause that sounds (laughter)...
FADEL: And that's not how it comes off in the book...
WEST: Yeah.
FADEL: ...Is like...
WEST: But...
FADEL: ...'Cause in the beginning, you have this extreme resistance.
WEST: Yeah, definitely. But once we actually started to try it out and I let go a little bit of this hyper control, which is what I thought was going to make me happy. When you let go of control like that, and you just trust that this person does love you. It was the remedy to this sickness that I had been dealing with for my whole life. And in fact, we loved each other so much better because we didn't have the resentment anymore, and we didn't have the constant fear and anxiety and jealousy and self-doubt. So it - I know - this is not a prescription that I'm saying other people should go out...
FADEL: And you're not telling everyone to be polyamorous?
WEST: I'm really not. I'm really not. And people kind of act like I am, and I'm not.
FADEL: What did you do that allowed you to get to a place that made you happier than you were before?
WEST: It wasn't a process of letting go so much as turning towards something else, which was my own life and remembering that my life is something that's worth prioritizing. And, in fact, prioritizing my own life is the key to saving this relationship.
FADEL: Coming back from that, what is life like these days? 'Cause it does feel like you're, like, on the other side.
WEST: So now, five years later, actually, my husband and I have a third partner. We are the unfortunately named throuple, which I was not...
FADEL: You don't like that name?
WEST: It's not an elegant term. I wish there was (laughter)...
FADEL: Something else.
WEST: It's not what I would have picked. But you know what? You got to just embrace it.
FADEL: Yeah.
WEST: We live all three of us together in a log cabin in the woods in Washington, and we have a nice little life. And people can say, oh, my gosh, you're being, you know, mistreated by this evil, horny man or whatever, but that's not what my life looks like. I have a really beautiful, peaceful life that is full of love.
FADEL: You're no stranger to telling personal stories, being vulnerable, but I think there's, like, a particular vulnerability about this memoir.
WEST: Definitely.
FADEL: I just wonder what you're thinking as it goes out into the world and people are going to be reading this journey that you took to get to this place that makes you happy and that you want the world to understand.
WEST: I came to the realization that I do really want to be known. I think that the process of going through all this with my marriage made me realize that a lot of things that I had written about myself in previous books were, in fact, coming from this place of denial. So once I started to realize that, I thought, you know, I want to write something that is actually true. You know, I'm really candid in "Shrill," and that was true at the time. And I'm sure things in this book, "Adult Braces," will prove to be, you know, off the mark down the line. But I got addicted to that feeling of kind of pushing myself and seeing what it felt like to let go and be brave. And so I just wanted to try it, and I wanted to write something real that would let people know me in a way that was even truer than before.
FADEL: Lindy West's new memoir is "Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane." Thank you for speaking with us.
WEST: Thank you so much.
FADEL: And we should mention you did get adult braces.
WEST: I sure did. I had them...
FADEL: I didn't even talk about that part.
WEST: I know. I (laughter) - yes, I sure did.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PRETTY UGLY")
TIERRA WHACK: (Singing) Don't worry about me. I'm doing good. I'm doing great, all right? It's about to get ugly. Flow so mean. I just can't be polite. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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