Lindy West — Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane
Lindy West discusses her road trip memoir on depression, reinvention, and driving herself sane, in conversation at Politics and Prose.
Why we picked this
West writes about hard things (online harassment, grief, depression) with a comedian's precision. Her live events tend to be sharper and more honest than even her essays suggest.
Lindy West built her reputation writing about subjects that most publications didn’t know how to handle: body politics, fat acceptance, internet harassment, and the moral logic of comedy. Her memoir Shrill (and its Hulu adaptation) established her as one of the more fearless cultural voices of the past decade.
Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane shifts the register inward. It’s a road trip memoir that covers a period of personal unraveling: depression, marriage, and the particular strangeness of trying to rebuild yourself while in motion. West brings the same unflinching honesty she’s always had, but the target has shifted from culture to self. The result is a book that uses humor not as deflection but as a tool for getting at things that are otherwise too uncomfortable to say plainly.
This is a free, livestreamed event at Politics and Prose on Connecticut Avenue.