There are no happy endings on the internet
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Head over here to subscribe to ICYMI wherever you listen to podcasts 🫶 The first year I moved to New York, I went to see Lindy West read from her debut memoir Shrill in the cramped basement of a Brooklyn bookstore. I know it was my first year in New York because my memory of trying to find the store in a place called “Greenpoint” is tinged with the abject terror that accompanied almost all of my experiences that year. No matter where I was—be it my own apartment or a public event—I was always waiting for someone to come up and tell me I shouldn’t be there. But even though I didn’t know anyone else in attendance, and even though it wasn’t immediately clear where the event even was, I powered through. I needed to see Lindy West. I had long been a writer, but it was West who taught me how to write for the internet. I was doing a poor man’s imitation of her throughout my tenure on my college’s blog and then again as I forced my foot into the door of digital media by writing confessional essays of my own. She taught me that I already had stories worth sharing, that there was value in even just one woman finding solace in them, even though, if you showed me those essays of mine now, I’d rather have my retinas burned out by a blowtorch than read them again.  If I had shown that version of myself an Instagram dump of what went down this past week, she’d be horrified (though thrilled to learn you can post more than one photo on Instagram now). But the takeaway I’d want her to have isn’t about the discourse or the questionable emails or that I don’t think Lindy West will ever be my friend thanks to a podcast. It’d be this: There are no happy endings on the internet. (Continued below.)
To start your own free trial on Squarespace, head over to this link and use the code “embedded” for 10% your first purchase of a website or domain!An unspoken rule of the Personal Essay Boom was that at the end of every trauma-dump the writer revealed themselves to be healed. That was what made the essays inspiring: You, too, could overcome memories of your teenage sexual assault with the help of a Taylor Swift lyric. No one wants to read that someone who was sad is still sad. So you wrote yourself a happy ending, even if you didn’t mean it. Did I really, according to an essay that can no longer be found online, “learn to put away the padding and love my small boobs”? Or did I, a few years later, happen to achieve an adult woman’s weight and now—sorry haters—have the perfect boobs I no longer need to pretend I didn’t want this whole time? But enough about my perfect boobs. Stop bringing them up! Lindy and I were both in the business of selling happy endings, even if we didn’t believe them. Lindy’s happy ending in Shrill was marrying Aham after a lifetime of being told she was unlovable. But sharing your happy ending with the internet, all wrapped up in a bow, is kind of like saying goodbye to someone only to realize you’re both walking the same way. Unless you quite literally die or refuse to ever show your face online again, the story continues, and things won’t stay the same. Lindy and Aham did get married, but not quite how she originally told us. Her new memoir, Adult Braces, reveals that a stipulation of that marriage was that Aham could have relationships with other women. That might still be a happy ending for some people, but in Lindy’s own words, it was not for her. In fact, the new memoir reveals that much of the confidence and peace she wrote about finding in Shrill did not actually take. So you’ll forgive my and other people’s skepticism when Adult Braces ends in an eerily familiar way: A romantic relationship, this time shared between three people instead of just two. A very much spoken rule of the Confessional Memoir Boom is that the book needs to be “prescriptive.” It’s the word I heard over and over in my first few attempts to sell a nonfiction book of my own. I didn’t have the answers to what I was writing about, but publishers only wanted books that did. It wouldn’t surprise me if Lindy’s publisher didn’t want her dedicating 300 pages to coming to terms with her changing relationship only for the final page to read, “And I still haven’t!” I don’t think readers would have been pleased with that, either. Because we’re also the ones demanding happy endings. We don’t want to hear that life can be nuanced and that people change and that everyone’s entitled to make morally ambiguous choices. No: We want people who fall in love to live happily ever after. We want husbands who do bad things to get dumped. We want to believe we can combat society’s treatment of women’s bodies by accessing a previously undiscovered self-confidence somewhere in the pages of a memoir. Lindy can’t give us that because no one can. Her only crime was being someone who tried.
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