Toothless

I finished my Invisalign treatment yesterday. It’s been a long journey – I got my first set of aligners in November 2023 – but my case was a little more complicated than most because I lost a tooth that year due to… well, I go into more detail about that in my memoir so I won’t spoil the story here.

The gaping hole in my back molars took an agonisingly long time to close, millimetre by millimetre, month by month. “You’re making such good progress,” my orthodontist said at every check-up, “you’re obviously very diligent about wearing your aligners!” Yes, I wanted to reply, I am. This shit is too expensive for me not to be. My sister had braces as a teenager, and she never wore her retainer afterwards. This was a story oft-repeated to me by friends who also wore train tracks at school – I never wore my retainer! I kept losing my retainer! My teeth are crooked again because I stopped using my retainer! I want to tell them that if they had to pay for their own orthodontic work, they would have worn that retainer every night for the rest of their life.

But it’s worth it, right? I smile wider and wider, desperate to show off the fruits of my labour. Tell me it’s worth it.

***

Anyway, I lost a tooth. I still have it, the root and all, in a tiny box in a drawer next to my writing desk. I take it out sometimes, to look at it. To remember that day when I heard it crack as it came loose in my gums. “There’s no saving it,” the dentist said, and I had wanted to cry right there and then. Some things are past saving, I guess.

For all of the dates I went on in the first half of 2024, I used to make sure they were sitting on the other side of my mouth, so self-conscious was I of this gap in my smile. One man asked me about it and when I explained, he said he too wanted to get Invisalign. He pointed at a snaggle tooth and said, “it’s bad isn’t it?” The strange thing was this - I had noticed it, but I’d found it quite hot. There was something sexy about the imperfection; I’d rather a snaggle tooth than a terrifying block of china-white veneers. Whenever I watch old clips from shows like Dawson’s Creek and The OC, it is striking to see the difference between now and then. The characters have straight teeth, of course, they probably had orthodontic work of their own when they were teenagers. But still, their smiles are a little imperfect, as everything made in nature is. That’s where it’s beauty lies.

In Whatever Happened to Madeline Stone?, Chelsea Stone was the star of the biggest teen drama of the early 00s, a show called Vigilante Queens. (It’s basically The OC X One Tree Hill by way of Charlie’s Angels.) In the present day, there’s a twenty-year reunion show being planned, and as Chelsea watches re-runs of earlier episodes, she thinks, were she, Kelly and Nya the last generation of women allowed on screen with their real teeth?

There’s something uncanny about watching celebrities on the red carpet these days, plastic surgery rendering their beauty almost otherworldly, as if generated by AI. Tiny bodies and a mane of thick hair and a flash of a smile, perfectly white teeth, perfectly straight. Perfect.

My teeth are not perfect, even after two and a half years of wearing my aligners diligently. That’s okay, I tell myself. They’re real. They’re mine.

You can pre-order Whatever Happened to Madeline Stone? here. Pre-orders really help authors!

Come to my Dublin launch party - details here.

I’ll be in Cork and in Galway

Ps - I really do recommend Invisalign lol. If you’re in Cork, I went to Dr Caroline O’Dwyer. I paid full price, she didn’t ask me to give her a shout out. I just want to mention her because she was excellent x