American Book Review of Teeth: An Oral History

Here's the long and very-much-getting-it-thank-you-Anna review of Teeth in the American Book Review

Teeth: An Oral History 

John Patrick Higgins 

Sagging Meniscus Press 

134 pages;

 Print,

 $16.00 

Anna Rollins 

Finally, the pandemic gave John Patrick Higgins something to smile about. With a mask, he could grin without fearing the grimaces of others. In Teeth: An Oral History, Higgins provides a history of the mouth (his own and a handful of famous others) and invites the reader on a series of dental appointments to improve the quality and aesthetics of his own teeth. 

As he frames the beginning of the text: “Teeth, more than eyes, are the window to the soul.” The author clearly sees the world through the mouth. It is his prism for understanding the entire world. As Higgins establishes, teeth are not neutral parts of the body, in the way a hand or a foot or a lip may be. Teeth reveal character vices: a penchant for coffee or wine or sugar before bed, a smoking habit, an inconsistent relationship with a toothbrush. They are signs of lower socioeconomic class and poverty, of less- than- revered geography.

Higgins dispels the stereotype that his people, the Brits, have particularly bad teeth: “A study published in The British Medical Journal found the average number of missing teeth in British mouths was 6.97 as opposed to 7.31 in American mouths.” Still, the stereotype persists despite these facts— and it’s a stereotype with which I relate. I, as an Appalachian, have often been greeted by geographic outsiders with surprise that I, a West Virginian, happen to have all my teeth. Unlike Higgins, I have experienced higher social standing due to the state of my mouth. And like most people with privilege, I had not fully considered how my teeth contribute to my own upward mobility— until reading this memoir. 

One of the first things I noticed about Higgins’s tone was that, in the first half of the memoir, he deflects much of his own vulnerability through jokes or puns. At his first dental appointment to have seven bad teeth pulled, he names each tooth in the manner of Snow White’s seven dwarfs: “Achey, Splintery, Barely- Therey, Chippy, Stainy, Ghastly and Grizzled- Battle- Scarred- Castle- Collapsing- Into- the- Seay.” Despite his light tone, he is speaking about a serious subject— body shame. In some early moments in the narrative, I feel him pushing me away through the use of humor— perhaps for fear that I might smell his breath. But the beauty of Higgins’s biting wit is that he’s aware of it. In fact, he ac- knowledges cultivating his humorous persona precisely because of his bad teeth. At his fifth dental appointment, he notes that he “immediately go[es] into a comic spiel— my defensive posture. It’s been that way since I was a child— the bullies don’t beat up the funny kid. School is hell. Survival of the funniest.” With this admission, I realize that his mouthy tone stems from body shame— that speaking of this shame without deflection would make his narrative’s reflection less authentic and true. 

As the memoir (and cosmetic dentistry) progresses, we see the amount of pain Higgins suffers to “correct” his mouth. Upon fitting a pair of dentures, he describes bleeding gums and difficulty engaging in basic activities, like eating and speaking. “Dentures. I still can’t get my head around the idea that I’m going to have dentures,” he writes. “And a speech impediment— he’s promised me that. They just throw that in.” Again, as Higgins describes decreased function for the sake of aesthetics, he relays the situation with humor: “‘It’shh amazzhing,’” he says. “Ah, there it is. The speech impediment, as promised. It better not show up on my bill.” Upon the insertion of dentures, he describes his appearance as changed, arguably improved, but in a saccharine, superficial way: “I look like the actor playing me in a Hallmark movie of my life.”

 His identity, in his own conception, is connected closely to the state of his own mouth. But some of his friends do not see the mouth as having as much influence as he does. He writes, "My friend Shauna said, despite knowing I’d been having cosmetic dentistry for weeks, “I’ve never really looked at your teeth. I don’t think people really notice teeth.” But I notice my teeth. And maybe that’s the point here. This smile is for me. I may never use it, but I’d like to know it’s there, like life insurance or an erection.

In this moment, Higgins considers the role of the gaze. Even if others are not monitoring the appearance of his teeth, he is. By internalizing the idea of the gaze, his body modification is not for others. It becomes deeply personal, though his desire to change is driven by cultural stereotypes and the believed perception of others. By the end of the narrative, we learn that Higgins’s quest to correct his own teeth has less to do with appearances and more to do with his relationship to his own mortality. At the conclusion of his interventions, he comes to this realization: “I’d been carrying around those stained and broken teeth as a memento mori, the way the merchant’s skull slants through the painting by Holbein. Teeth are all you can see of your skeleton, a glimpse of bare skull. And my bones were rotting, mouldering as if already in the grave. In replacing them, I was replacing my youth. And you can’t.” In this moment, Higgins gets to the root of his obsession with the mouth. It is not simply that he is self- conscious of his teeth; he is uncomfortable with the fact of death. And he realizes, through significant pain and financial cost, that ultimately these interventions will only address the surface of his distress.

Still, his attempts are not all vanity. Though his friends may not notice teeth, he does. He began the narrative hesitant to smile, but he concludes his journey with not just a willingness to bare a grin, but an eagerness to do so: “I had a smile. It was white, it was clean, it was even. There was the sense of an overbite. These were the teeth of my young manhood. This is what my teeth used to be like. I had the smile of a 21- year- old. It looked perverse surrounded by the grey, jowly face of a middle- aged man. I watch myself smiling into the Nurse’s mirror. I have apple cheeks. Rosy, red, perfectly round cheeks and perfect white teeth. I look like a jolly cartoon beaver.”

It becomes clear that, despite the complications of cosmetic dentistry, a clean, straight smile has improved his mood. And that’s not nothing. His partner, Susan, notices his teeth, too. “But Susan likes the teeth,” he writes. “Several times a day she’ll stop me and ask me to smile, like I was a woman in the street just trying to live her life. When I smile, she smiles back at me, and her smile is my favorite smile. Mine is now my second favorite. So, it has all been worthwhile.”

Susan’s adoration is not dependent upon his appearance. She has remained a steadfast partner throughout the entire narrative, through good teeth and bad. Still, it is clear that these interventions have also improved his relationship too. And by these accounts, his efforts (and pain) have been made worthwhile. 

Anna Rollins’s memoir, Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl (2025), examines the rhyming scripts of purity and diet culture. Her work has appeared in outlets such as the New York Times, Slate, Salon, and Electric Literature