[PREVIEW] Lindy West, Belle Burden, And The Stories Wives Tell

[PREVIEW] Lindy West, Belle Burden, And The Stories Wives Tell

From Rich Text by Emma Gray

April 10, 2026 · 13 min

About this episode

The episode explores the confessions of Lindy West and Belle Burden as they challenge traditional narratives of wifehood through their memoirs.

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live," Joan Didion famously wrote at the outset of her 1979 essay collection "The White Album." This was always descriptive, rather than self-congratulating. It's not that our souls are fed by art, but that we need to convince ourselves that our lives are more than random chaos. In order to continue on, in order to give meaning to lives filled with pain and drudgery and confusion, we must edit and construct. We must, as the girlies say, romanticize our lives. And wives are asked to endure a great deal by romanticizing it. Perhaps that is one reason we are so gripped by their raw confessions. In two much-discussed recent memoirs, Lindy West and Belle Burden puncture the fairy tales of wifehood that they once bought into, reiterated, and sought to embody. In "Adult Braces," West's followup to her hit memoir "Shrill," she reconsiders the triumphant ending of her earlier book: her marriage. In "Adult Braces," she admits that her marriage was troubled from the start by her husband Aham's insistence that they embrace polyamory, a desire she hoped to dispel by becoming the perfect wife. She learns that Aham (who has since come out as nonbinary and…

People in this episode

Host: Emma Gray

Guests: Lindy West, Belle Burden

Topics covered

  • memoir
  • wifehood
  • polyamory
  • personal stories
  • marriage
  • confession

Keywords

  • Lindy West
  • Belle Burden
  • memoir
  • wifehood
  • polyamory
  • marriage
  • Joan Didion

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