Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | March 23, 2026
The chances are, if you know about the Lindy West drama, you’ve already formed your opinion on it. The writer of Shrill who helped to shape the 21st century internet with her sardonic feminist rants and anti-fatphobia activism, is currently promoting her new memoir, Adult Braces. In it, she details the road trip she took to clear her head after her husband, musician Ahamefule J. Oluo (who uses he/they pronouns), demanded that they make their marriage polyamorous. West is candid about the pain this caused her at first, but is now part of a throuple with Oluo and Roya Amirsoleymani. Yet, despite being one of the prime figures in the 2010s era of confessional journalism and responding to internet trolls, West has seemed surprised by the negative response to her book.
Some of her fans have been shocked by her portrayal of Oluo’s callousness and coercion, which included telling West, as a white woman, could not demand monogamy of them as a Black person because of master/slave dynamics. West has grown more and more defensive online over people’s reactions, some of which are very unfair (why do TERFs keep getting commissioned to review this book?) but others seem rooted in a place of real concern. Things reached a nadir when Slate writer Scaachi Koul wrote a very balanced and fair profile about West, only for Oluo to write her a wildly sexist email in response that called her ‘bitter’ and ‘untalented.’ West, for her troubles, has also claimed that people shouldn’t be critical of Amirsoleymani, who also sent Koul a weird email, because she’s Iranian and there’s a war going on.
Everybody got that?
This entire story has felt like an extended Portlandia skit, and it’s been both baffling and disheartening to watch unfold, especially as someone who has liked West’s work for years. It seems that she has fallen into one of the biggest traps of the internet: don’t keep responding to critics because you’ll eventually Streisand Effect the situation into something far messier. But this is also West’s business. She is a personal essayist who has long mined her life for content, often stunningly so. West is a hilarious writer with a self-deprecating edge who has no qualms about getting confrontational or going against the grain. She called out sh*tty rape jokes when it was deeply uncool to do so. She fought fatphobia from her own boss on a national scale. I still cite her comments on abortion access as the most concise explanation on the issue. Why wouldn’t she continue to use her experiences for profit now?
Reading all things Adult Braces, I couldn’t help but be reminded (like everyone else on the internet) of Elizabeth Gilbert. The woman behind Eat Pray Love found herself back in the spotlight with her latest memoir, All the Way to the River, wherein she detailed her love affair with a terminally ill woman, artist Rayya Elias, and their mutual descent into drug use. This book is bananas, as I noted in my review of it. Gilbert channels her most woo-woo tendencies into an aggravating document of her partner’s suffering that mostly serves as another platform for Gilbert to portray herself as an ‘honest’ guide in the world of self-improvement.
As I said in my review, it was ‘hard to escape the sense that this book probably shouldn’t have been written’ (Gilbert claimed Elias’s ghost gave her permission to do so, so don’t worry.) Gilbert talking about planning to murder her dying partner was portrayed as a moment of necessary candour from her marketing team, but the world saw it as a horrifying confession of pure ego. Indeed, the whole book reads like the justifications of a woman who has no idea how not to make her life into an inspirational mood board for the masses. But clearly it worked for many. Oprah Winfrey, one of Gilbert’s biggest supporters, chose All the Way to the River for her book club and helped to push it up the New York Times bestseller list. Would that West had the same guardian angel in her corner.
Both Gilbert and West are old pros at this kind of high-concept verbal vomit, but they’re also relics of a very recent time when personal essays were the bedrock of internet discourse. West was a writer for Jezebel at the peak of its fizz, hot-take creating powers. Gilbert is a seasoned journalist who knew how to craft non-fiction catnip for her specific audience at that moment in time. They were stalwarts of a period where xoJane had people admitting the most embarrassing details of their lives for a solid freelance fee. There was a big demographic of women who sought out these stories. Some of it was pure schadenfreude, but a lot of it was reflective, a real desire for a teachable moment. When West talked about how cruel the world is to fat women, a hell of a lot of people listened because it felt like nobody had been able to say it so forcefully before.
Neither seemed ready for 2026, where TikTok discourse has taken over their old beats. Once upon a time, you could make a decent living with personal essays. Now, the fees are rock bottom but the cost has only increased. It’s not that the internet was ever kind or proportionate with these essays, but the immediacy with which people can respond to them now, and the viciousness that has proven to be so profitable, is different. You have to bring a far more extravagant narrative to the table to be considered for publication, but people will respond with greater vitriol at even the slightest error in your perspective. As Scaachi Koul put it in her excellent profile of West, ‘Why perform this kind of intimacy for such a cruel audience?’
West and Gilbert are asking readers for sympathy. Where Gilbert wants it for herself, West is seeking her readers’ approval of Oluo, who, even in her bent-over-backwards justification of his actions reads as dishonest and manipulative. Gilbert is savvier with her recent work, if only because she is at least raw in her depictions of her own cruelty and stupidity amid a slide into mutual destruction with Elias. She’s also a writer used to making lemonade out of her own bitter lemons, finding the opportunity for profit amid the crisis. Eat Pray Love is fascinating in its cynicism, with Gilbert openly detailing how she pitched the book and earned a hefty advance to pay for that extended holiday within its pages. Perhaps she didn’t know it would become as major a hit as it did, but she was savvy enough to know what sold and how to sell it.
I’m not sure West has that knack, especially not with a story this personally crushing. I’ve no idea what her relationships are like now. She talks about being happier than ever and believing in the healing power of polyamory. Good for her. None of my business. But her business is also her product, and in this current form, she cannot separate the two. There’s no distance between the work and her life and that’s by design, but with that comes the unbearable weight of Discourse. Oluo’s astonishingly sour email to Koul (wherein he doesn’t mention West once, by the way) shows the collateral damage none of them seemed prepared for. The book was designed not simply to share West’s life but to have her audience side with people who have so dearly hurt her, and those readers are largely rejecting that desire. Sometimes, you have to choose between content creation and PR maintenance, much to Oluo’s chagrin.
Personal essays are often meant to be life lessons for the masses. See, isn’t it nice to learn something helpful from this person’s pain? Don’t we feel so much better for it? Gilbert has milked this for years. It’s what the Oprah brand was largely built upon, and decades of self-help books. But not everything can function that way. I thought a lot about Christina Applegate’s searing memoir, wherein she pushes back against the notion that her illnesses and suffering have been emotionally healing in some manner. Really, she writes, they’ve just made her life worse and for no damn reason. I was so struck by her book, which I reviewed here, because we so seldom hear this kind of red-raw honesty in the mainstream. We want to be comforted by these narratives, by these vivisections of personal essay trauma that demand so much for so little. Or maybe we just want an excuse to gawk that isn’t pure morbid curiosity.
Koul ends her West profile with this quote: ‘Some books exist not as an argument to the public but as an argument to yourself. There’s no obvious personal alert for when you’ve learned a life lesson valuable enough to impart it to others through memoir. You just email your agent and hope you’re right.’ Such is the inevitability of putting a price on your pain. I truly wonder if it’s ever worth it. Maybe it will be if Adult Braces is a bestseller.
