🎭 Culture Sep 8, 2026 · Joshua Bodwell

My Two Front Teeth

The American Scholar
American Scholar magazine
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In photographs from my childhood I am often sporting wide, toothy smiles. Guileless grins. It seems I was—despite the complications of divorce, alcoholism, and mental illness in my family—a happy kid. But by my teens I began to develop a sort of tight-lipped, toothless grin. I could feel myself consciously pulling my upper lip tight against my teeth, my tongue poking at the back of my fake, discolored front tooth.

When I attended summer camp in the early 1980s, there was no long journey north f

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