What to Know
Author Lindy West’s new memoir, Adult Braces, has sparked some pretty intense conversations about polyamory. In many of the articles discussing Lindy’s book, she sounds reluctant and unsure when it comes to embracing non-monogamy—something that her husband, musician Ahamefule Oluo, felt that he needed.
When Lindy and her husband first had a conversation about this, Lindy was actually “devastated,” she told The New York Times. She described avoiding a lot of difficult conversations about it, and when she found out that her husband had started dating someone else, she had “technically agreed” to it. Though Lindy is happily in a throuple or “triad” with her husband and their girlfriend, Roya Amirsoleymani, now, some people are worried that maybe she didn’t actually want that for herself. (In her book, she writes, “If you think I have been brainwashed and I am secretly miserable, I simply do not know what to tell you.”)
The comments she’s made during interviews have gotten a lot of attention.
When speaking to The New York Times, Lindy explained that she and Ahamefule broke up in 2011 but then got back together. When they did, the conversations about polyamory started. “Part of that was Aham was like, ‘I’ve been divorced twice by age 27, and I feel like possessiveness and jealousy had a lot to do with both of those relationships collapsing. I don’t think that monogamy is healthy for me,'” Lindy recalled.
She said this “made intellectual sense” to her, but it was still hard for her to accept at first, especially because she felt that she didn’t “have the self-esteem to cope with it.”
However, it wasn’t treated as an immediate change to the relationship. “It wasn’t him saying, ‘I’m going to go out and date people,'” she clarified. Rather, it was something that they “were going to deal with eventually,” which made her feel OK about it. Still, she found herself “dreading” this moment, she said.
Then, in 2019, she found out her husband was seeing someone else.
And this part of the story also bothers a lot of people. She told the publication that someone saw him kissing someone else at a bar. After she found out, she spoke to her husband about it. “At this point he had sort of come to the conclusion that we couldn’t resolve this, which is why he went ahead and started dating this person,” she said. “Because I had been gone. I had refused to talk to him about it. And I had technically agreed to be non-monogamous.”
In a feature for Slate, writer Scaachi Koul describes this journey as “chaotic and often unfair” for Lindy, though she eventually ended up in a place that works for her. “The story that West is selling is that though her entry into polyamory was rocky, it has led her to a life that’s right for her right now,” Scaachi wrote. “No one knows if that’s true except for her.” Given these details and the fact that polyamory is already controversial to begin with, people have had lots to say about Lindy’s marriage.
The way Lindy’s husband reacted to the coverage isn’t helping.
He seemed particularly upset about the following line in Scaachi’s article: “West is solo in the cabin this week as she prepares for her 14-city book tour; Oluo and Amirsoleymani are away, working in Boston on a shared project.” Ahamefule emailed the writer to share his thoughts on the article, writing, “You intentionally skewed this story to fit your own bitter narrative, you wasted my time and all of our time to write an article that was gonna be the same no matter what we said.”
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He continued, “You absolutely dehumanized me and intentionally diminished my personhood and career. Roya and I were on a ‘shared project’ in Boston? Or however you worded it? I was performing four shows at the Paramount, and Roya is my producer.”
He accused her of writing “rage bait” and called her “a bitter, untalented, mean girl.”
“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 s–t because you are mad about your life,” he wrote in part. “…you should be absolutely ashamed of yourself. You f—ing suck.”
People are not impressed.
As you might imagine, the controversy has only escalated after that email was published. One critic on Reddit called his email “gross and unhinged,” especially because the Slate article seemed “gentle.” Someone else said, “The profile was actually completely inoffensive and the only negative things about him in it are explanations of what Lindy wrote in her book.”
Some people who originally defended their marriage seemed less sure about it after seeing that email. “I used to be a big fan of hers, but this book and all of the press surrounding it has just left me feeling really sorry for her. It’s not feminist and it’s not empowering,” another person added.
