ADULT BRACES (Excerpt)
The pain was on both sides—an electric stab if I bit down on certain molars. Chewing had become a series of jump scares. Is this fun-size Milky Way going to send a bolt of lightning straight to my bunghole? What about this one? In the summer of 2020, reduced to nibbling in the front like a little weasel, I ran to my cool Gen X rock and roll dentist, Dr. Nikole, and begged for help.
I never used to have dental anxiety. My childhood dentist was lanky and twinkly eyed with a soft-spoken Scandinavian Zen that reminded me of my family in the old country. The dentist’s spitfire wife ran the office and would give me little toys and gossip with my mom. I remember my dad always reassuring me, as an endorsement of this dentist’s gentleness, “He has never hurt me.” It wasn’t that reassuring! Did some dentists HURT YOU? What the fuck?! But I did trust my dentist, and it was true, he never hurt me at all. I also never had a cavity (until my early twenties, when I suddenly had a bunch1), and my dentist said I had the most “perfect teeth” he had ever seen. He said it all the time. Perfect teeth. Wow, such beautiful, perfect teeth.
He probably said that to lots of kids, to be nice, but at the time, I imagined that it really made my dentist’s day when he saw these chompers on the agenda. Like when a piano player gets to play the finest Steinway concert grand.
I wasn’t the kind of girl who heard “perfect” a lot as an assessment of her body, so I clung to it. Not just good teeth but perfect ones. No braces needed for this perfect tooth model. No retainer, no headgear, not me! They just came out like this! Must have something to do with my perfect skull and beautiful soul! PLEASE KISS ME, JUST ANY BOY PLEASE PLEASE KISS ME I AM BEGGING YOU.
My dentist retired when I was in my twenties and he was in his eighties. I looked up his obituary while writing this and discovered he only just died in 2024, at age 107. Another patient in the comments on his memorial page called him an “iconic dentist.” Amen, brother!
Extremely uniconically, some random fucking guy took over his practice. Not having the first clue how to pick out a new dentist, as my family had been dentisted upon by the same man since the Nixon administration, I stayed. The first time I had to get a filling from the new guy, Dr. Glover, he drilled my tooth without fully anesthetizing it, didn’t believe me when I gasped that it wasn’t numb, and then told me I was being “hysterical” (literally!) when I started sobbing. He drilled my sensate pulp while I struggled to keep my panic attack as still as possible. He drilled until he was done.
A few months later, Aham and I were stopped at a light downtown near our dental office, and a dirty and disheveled man crossed the street in front of us talking to himself and swearing and arguing with no one. In our family, we call that “having a hard time.” And this guy having a hard time? OUR FUCKING DENTIST. Not some dentist we once knew, but our present-day, actively practicing dentist. Not who you hope to see having a hard time in Westlake Park! (Also, later, when I first went to see Dr. Nikole, she looked at that guy’s treatment plan and said he seemed to have marked teeth for drilling where there were no cavities! I was rudely being dental-tortured by a demon2 befouling Dr. Childhood Dentist’s sacred space!!!)
So anyway, I didn’t used to have dental trauma and anxiety, but now I do, and that’s why I sought out Dr. Nikole. She listens to me (!!!!!) and gives me gases and lets me play my little audiobooks and prescribes me Ativan for bigger procedures, and if you’re still being drilled by a man, have you considered a woman? It’s 2026! Fire all men from all jobs!
When I told her my teeth were hurting, Dr. Nikole looked at my x-rays and discovered that my molars had a bunch of big cracks in them. I was like, “Great! Sounds like an easy fix! Gorilla-glue those bad boys up so I can be on my milky way!” And she said no—that’s actually not how cracked teeth work. You just kind of have to have them until they get so bad that you need a crown or your tooth crumbles into dust and blows away. Sorry!
The reason my teeth were all cracked, she explained, was that I had developed what’s called a crossbite. That’s where your jaw shifts (from, say, stress-clenching and misery-grinding in one’s sleep) and your molars no longer fit together snugly like LEGO bricks; they clack together violently like twelve otters smashing twelve clams on twelve rocks. The only solution for this, she said, was orthodonture.
Adult braces.
Me???????? But I literally have the greatest natural mouth of all time! Check those x-rays again, lady! You must have gotten them mixed up with A DOG.
But of course, the problem was real, and of course, I was going to fix it, seeing as the alternative was a not-particularly-appealing two-phase plan consisting of Phase One: Operation Pain and Phase Two: Operation No Teeth Anymore. I made an appointment with the orthodontist she recommended.
Orthodontists are the plastic surgeons of dentists, and I don’t mean in terms of what they do—although I suppose there is a parallel—I mean in terms of vibes. My orthodontists, a married couple straight outta Melrose Place, run a braces empire stretching across the greater Seattle area. Their office is spangled with framed glossy magazine covers (from, idk, Mouth Magazine??) in which they pose like TOOTH ROYALTY, shiny hair and shark bites and power suits and erotic chemistry and $$$$$$$ energy. My braces cost around $7,000 with a minimum of $1,500 down. The place is always packed, with the barreling, angry efficiency of a trading floor. You feel not so much like a customer as a product on an assembly line.
I arrived and was swept into a chair, where one of their assistants assessed my situation at breakneck speed without saying hi or hello, ma’am or how are you or don’t worry this won’t hurt a bit. He was, weirdly, French, and my fatty alarm told me instantly that this guy did not j’adore fat people. He strode over to the 360-degree x-ray machine—me jogging to keep up—and, without saying a word or even making eye contact, stuck a plastic bit in my mouth to position my head like a cart horse. He then switched on the machine, which went WHIIIIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR and started attacking me!
Excusez-moi! Excusez-moi! Hold vos chevaux, monsieur!!!!!! ARRÊTÉ! CREVÈ!!!
This machine is like a huge gyroscope where you stand in the middle, and metal arms whirl around your head and shoulders and pump you full of beams so they can make a copy of your head. I don’t know how to convey the magnitude, but it’s scary! It is an industrial machine. It is inexorable. You cannot stop it. It could easily break your bones if you stuck an arm out at the wrong time. And this Frenchman had just tossed me in there without a fair warning or, as far as I could tell, recalibrating the machine that was used all day every day on the bodies of little, tiny kids. And I am a big, large woman!
The machine began its business and whacked me about the shoulders with its metal arms. I was paying $7,000 to be attacked by a robot. I said, “This is hitting my shoulders!” and he said, “Hold still, please,” and I said, “PLEASE, MONSIEUR, IT’S HITTING MY BODY,” and he said, “[EXASPERATED SIGH] Drop your shoulders.” The shoulders—at least in les États-Unis—are attached to the body in a frustratingly permanent way. These bad boys were already as low as they could go. But François didn’t care—he ran the machine till it was done and let it whack me over and over and luckily it didn’t hurt too much or permanently disfigure me and I guess that’s the best fat people can expect from the French!
Then we STEEPLECHASED back to the chair and François glued my brackets on with the reckless abandon of a Double Dare contestant, adding: “You will want to stick to soft foods for ze first few weeks. Like . . . [looking me up and down] per’aps salades.” Famously, the softest of all foods!
And then he was gone. They drop-kicked me out the door to make room for the next 150 kids they had lined up that day (150 x $7,000 = $1,050,000???????). And then I had adult braces.
I’ve always had a shaky relationship with self-confidence, and in my callow twenties, I was a real bitch about adult braces. Not like I publicly bullied people who had them or anything, but I remember thinking that I absolutely, under no circumstances, could ever subject myself to anything that humiliating. Which is so condescending! Filing someone else’s state under “humiliating” implies that they have something to be humiliated about, whether they feel humiliated by it or not. It’s exactly what people do to me for being fat. This is no excuse, but every accusation is a confession, and at the time, I felt very much like an overgrown, sexless child that everyone was laughing at. I’m sorry!
So maybe it was karmically appropriate—a real Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle moment—that, rounding the corner into forty, I wound up getting braces myself. And not an elegant, gossamer Invisalign tray, either. Full metal train tracks, welded on. Because if there’s one thing I’m even more certain of than my own ugliness, it’s my incompetence and low moral fiber. There was no fucking chance in Leopold II of Belgium’s red hell that I was going to keep an Invisalign tray in twenty- three hours a day, because unfortunately, I loooooooove low-stakes cheating. I love to treat myself to the indulgent thing instead of powering through the hard thing. And it’s not like Invisalign is cheaper than the metal guys! I’d still be out $7,000, and my teeth would still be fucked. No thanks! Strap ’em on me, John Henry!
This was early COVID, so we were deep in Mask Culture. There wasn’t even a vaccine yet. Everyone told me the same thing: It wasn’t a bad time to get adult braces, as times to get adult braces go. But society didn’t seem to understand that there was no good time for Lindy West to get adult braces. I was hanging on to sanity by a thread and these thirty-two little STRAIGHT WHITE MEN (all teeth are boys) had conspired to take away the one thing that wasn’t wrong with me—my “perfect teeth.” I hated it and I cried.
Now, “I’m embawassed to get adult bwaces” is America’s #1 Next Top Champagne Problem to be sure. The actually bad version of this story would be me not being able to afford adult braces and all my teeth cracking in half and falling out. I am indescribably fortunate to have been able to save my teeth, and I have to acknowledge that many people literally cannot do the things necessary to break out of harmful cycles, because they have to work and they have to take care of kids and they are just so tired, not to mention structurally held back by our “free” country. Unfortunately, I don’t exactly have an answer to the evils of capitalism. I’m sorry again as usual!
It would take a year before I had enough perspective to see the metaphor. We think of our teeth as something fixed in place, a part of the skull, crooked or straight, but they’re not. Our teeth are floating, each loose and alone in tissue, and we can shift and change them if we want to, bring them closer together or push them apart, if we’re willing to move through the pain of it, if we’re willing to be a little vulnerable, to look a little childish.
For many years, I thought my life was fixed in place, painful but immovable. I felt as though I had turned to stone, still and helpless, both physically and emotionally, slowly cracking while the world glided on without me. I took pride in my ability to weather any amount of discomfort to preserve the familiar and avoid humiliation. But I am not stone. I deserve more than endurance. I deserve pleasure and the good and the new.
Not perfect teeth but teeth free enough to move.
_____
- I read that kissing a new person can trigger cavities because their mouth
biome corrupts your mouth biome, and come to think of it, this was around
the time I started kissing regularly! Should have saved myself for marriage! ↩︎ - Dr. Glover . . . DRGOVEL . . . RG DEVOL . . . RAGE DEVIL!!!!!!!!!!! ↩︎
Excerpted from ADULT BRACES. Copyright © 2026 Lindy West published by Grand Central Publishing, a Hachette Book Group company. All rights reserved.
Through Shrill—the book and then the Hulu series—Lindy West became an inspiration. To this day she is stopped on the street and hailed as a beacon of empowerment by women who felt badly for not conforming to a narrow set of societal norms—thin, straight, compliant. But behind the scenes, Lindy never felt like she was the self-actualized woman fans made her out to be. When she found herself in the throes of a deep depression, with her marriage and sense of self-worth hanging in the balance, she knew she needed to make a change.
In Adult Braces, Lindy shares the story of her rock bottom, and of the journey she took to claw her way out of it. With her trademark candor and sense of humor, she examines her post-Shrill emotional implosion, her shifting feelings about traditional marriage, and her search for her long-lost self. She also tracks the highs and lows of her journey, from eye-opening natural wonders and kitschy roadside attractions to lackluster tourist traps and campground epiphanies.
The result is an engaging and laugh-out-loud narrative of becoming as Lindy transforms from a passenger into the active navigator of her own life.