RaveThe New RepublicThe novel weaves between these events, a reconstruction of Bering’s story, and the family’s deeper history. Along the way there is much talk, hyperliterate in its references but often bluntly cruel in its motivations, performing the language of self-awareness without displaying much of it ... This is the novel’s central political and philosophical dilemma: It’s the story of the well-to-do who possess enough of a conscience (or enough neurosis, depending on one’s perspective) to doubt their right to their own suffering ... The most powerful section of the novel comes midway, when these stories are paused as a range of characters recount the events leading to and directly after Bering’s death.
Jason McBride
PositiveThe New Republic... sympathetic and carefully rendered ... Acker had a deep and lasting impact on those who encountered her and her work, as McBride demonstrates.
Michelle Tea
RaveThe New Republic... [Tea] takes readers along with her with the same wit and humor she’s brought to different worlds throughout her prolific writing life ... Strikingly, this irreverence and humor reads less as a demystification of pregnancy and more like a re-enchantment of it ... It surely says something about the state of affairs, or at least of cultural production, that the most punk thing about Knocking Myself Up is that Tea never stops having fun. A memoir of trying to conceive, her book belongs to a subgenre within parenting memoirs with its own set of struggles, for understandable reasons. But as her subtitle suggests, the line between fertility and infertility is a slippery one ... Tea tells the story with the delight of being lost in an unfamiliar but enchanted forest ... Tea reminds us what any biologist will tell you: The wonder is not that our bodies fail but how much goes right all the time without us stopping to marvel at it ... Years of living in and writing about queer and bohemian subcultures, of hard living and also of hard-won sobriety, give her an equanimity and self-knowledge not found in many accounts by authors who seem to be experiencing for the first time a body at odds with their sense of mastery, control, and self-perception ... The book also pays tribute to her wide-ranging chosen queer family, which offers the support so many mothers lack ... Tea’s account showcases the fluidity of contemporary identity and family bonds, but also of time and narrative. This overlapping of new romance and pregnancy, miscarriage and marriage, of triumph and vulnerability, of birth and death—and, we could add, of private joy amidst political despair—is a different kind of adventure. It’s not so much that one can move instantly from delight to despair, but that experience both together, all the time.
Melissa Febos
MixedThe New York Times Book Review\"Some of the most enjoyable parts of Abandon Me come when Febos explores her histories, weaving in tidbits like the popularity among Nantucket sea wives of the ?‘he’s-at-home,’ an early ceramic dildo\' ... Less successful are the sections given over to Febos’s obsessive affair with a married woman named Amaia. As she recounts Amaia’s increasingly possessive behavior, we feel her pain but don’t see more than the familiar outlines of someone who loves a person she knows is bad for her, tries and repeatedly fails to leave before she finally does. Her digressions into texts ranging from Homer and Jung to Peter Jackson’s early film Heavenly Creatures are often fascinating, but they come to feel like attempts to make the affair stand in for more than what it wants to be, or to provide relief from its ultimate hollowness.\
Michelle Tea
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewIn Tea’s hands, sobriety, love and something like happiness are stranger and more unsettling than bohemian decadence could ever hope to be ... Black Wave retains the off-kilter realism of the best apocalyptic writing: The nightmare is like our world, only a little more so.
