ADULT BRACES

When in doubt, hit the road.

The author of a memoir (Shrill, 2016) and two essay collections (The Witches Are Coming, 2019, and Shit, Actually, 2020), West tackles big subjects here. The first to arrive are the consequences of polyamory, an unusual arrangement proposed by her husband and now coming home to roost in the form of a second partner—and more besides. Beset by spiraling self-esteem, to say nothing of having to wear the corrective dental apparatus of the title, West has a gift for making metaphors of her situation: “Our teeth are floating, each loose and alone in tissue,” she writes, and alas, so are we, too, capable of being pushed together “if we’re willing to move through the pain of it.” A second issue is that West is “fat”—her word—in a society that worships slenderness, revealing that “here’s the truth: Sometimes I feel bad in my body.” For all that, West manages to extract humor in the many odd moments she finds herself in while taking a restorative drive from Seattle to Key West, Florida, and back again: She lampoons the stereotype of her Washington home as being half granola types and half “agitating to become part of Idaho so they can legally shoot the mayor if he tries to enforce seat belt laws.” She goofs on the fundamentalists who travel to a creationist destination in Nebraska: “Do the locals go to the Boneyard Creation Museum again and again to bask in the pleasure of knowing that Jesus might have cured a diplodocus of leprosy?” And, memorably, she writes that a campground bathhouse “looked like a serial killer’s toy box.” Amid the humor, though, are moments of great insight, many clearly born of keeping a careful eye out while passing through “this ludicrously large country,” others born of heartache, as when she sighs, “Lust is too much like hunger, and I am not allowed to be hungry.”

A well-realized, candid memoir that reveals an unconventional approach to life.