...the best essay collection I’ve read in years ... Tea’s reporting from Camp Trans is the opposite of the broad and ignorant way that gender nonconformity is written about in mainstream news outlets. It is done from a position of deep understanding, of detail ... Tea honors the HAGS gang because it’s personal, because it’s important, and because the bad, hard, beautiful life of poor queers doesn’t make it into history. Her writing about butch-femme romance extends one hand back to the history of punk lesbian publishing and another forward, into the future. She writes the lives of the SM dykes, the trans women excluded by normative lesbians, the poor butches who are for some reason never, ever on television. Swagger is a way of walking away from, or through, the tough conditions of a heteronormative world. If Tea over-romanticizes that walk for a moment, it’s a small price for so much truth.
Against Memoir is a thoughtfully curated showcase of Tea’s writing about queer politics, relationships, history, and the self ... what strikes me about her work here is how connective her first person is, how strongly she binds the personal to the communities and contexts that have shaped it, whether her family and her working-class community in Chelsea, Massachusetts, or the dyke punk subculture of 1990s San Francisco ... 'Reading this made me feel happy and alive,' she says of Eileen Myles’s Chelsea Girls. These essays do the same for me.
In previous memoirs Michelle Tea brilliantly captured the seething desires of adolescence and the growing pains of reluctant maturity. Her new book is just as raw, just as honest, just as gorgeously punk-rock rebellious ... Tea does this with many of the dark and dangerous moments in this book—she doesn’t exactly make light of them, but she describes them with a clear-eyed honesty that allows her sense of humor to cut through the pain ... Tea is at her best in this book when she uses her own experiences as a lens through which to see a piece of art or a cultural shift ... Michelle Tea may settle into a sobriety from alcohol, a sobriety of family, a sobriety of intellectual thought, but her writing will always be wild with sex and desire and music and art, always reaching to discover a new 'difficult beauty,' and leaving her readers high—on writing and life.
Tea epically captures that perfect feeling of fandom, when you’re so in love with this one thing at a particular moment in time and nothing can possibly shake the feeling ... Tea’s approach to writing articles and reviews is probably what I found most refreshing about Against Memoir. Her book review 'On Chelsea Girls' blew my mind because I’ve never considered injecting my own perspective into a review about a book I loved to the extent that she does ... 'HAGS in Your Face,' which details an '80s punk lesbian gang in the Bay Area, is the book’s finest and most heartbreaking essay ... Against Memoir is a must-read for hopeless romantics and anyone passionate about life.
Reading Tea’s work, you get the sense that she is painting a large and beautiful but terrifying mural on the wall—all pinks and purples, fairytale turrets and monsters—and when the thing inevitably becomes enchanted, she will walk into it and decide to live there instead. As she writes in this new collection of essays, though, that might not be the healthiest impulse ... Though this book shows how Tea’s work has developed from straightforward memoir to a more nuanced form of self-reflexive cultural critique, memoir makes up about a third of it ... When Tea seems less sure of herself, she can lean too heavily on a tossed-off charm to gloss over her discomfort ... But on the whole, this book, like all of her best writing, bristles with life and a fierce intellect. Her voice is as distinct as ever.
Reading the first of Tea’s fine essays feels like opening a bag of chips: you know it’s impossible to eat just one ... Tea proves that words can heal. An essential work, especially for LGBT collections.
...eclectic and wide-ranging ... swift, immediate prose ... A palpable pain animates many of these essays, as well as a raucous joy and bright curiosity. Her wild youth is now long enough ago that the period is shrouded for her in myth. An essay about the HAGS, young punk lesbians, many of them junkies, who lived and died...is haunting. But she’s equally memorable on what it’s like to be a young woman in the city, confronted daily with indecent exposure.
... one of the strangest features is that several of these articles have been unsubtly amended to be more representative of the contemporary Tea than the one who originally wrote them. The effect is disconcerting. You can be rattling along under the spell of, say, 2003 Tea (and she is an intoxicating writer, a mix of swagger and bathos, delivering sentences that land with the snap and force of a punch); then suddenly a voice cuts in from the present, and the whole vehicle shudders on its wheels ... in the text of a speech called How Not to Be a Queer Douchebag, she commands her audience to'“Stop policing each other like little queer police officers' (unless the people they’re policing are lesbians born before Tea, who hold unacceptable beliefs, I guess). This is the whiplash way of Tea: passionate attachments, lightly worn ... As a collection, this book suffers from the bittiness that afflicts many writers who work for multiple outlets primarily on the internet. One thing Tea hasn’t tried to fix for republication is the jolt of moving from smartmouthed xoJane-style blogging to the frank and fierce pieces about her own pregnancies or her family’s poverty. But the jaggedness is also the point. Against Memoir chronicles a spectacularly fraught couple of decades for feminism and lesbianism, sometimes dramatising those stresses in the clash of voices between then-Michelle and now-Michelle. Times change and people change and new information comes to light, but Tea crashes on in the thrilling project of continually inventing herself.
The pieces brought together in Against Memoir navigate the difficult balance of the personal and the communal, and the dynamics of discussing fraught issues within a community (especially queer communities), versus discussing those same issues with those outside of that community. The breadth of topics covered in this volume is impressive—no doubt there is something here for everyone. Tea writes as insightfully and incisively about pop art as she does about punk music and pigeons ... Against Memoir is a celebration of queer life, love, art, politics, history, pain, and joy. Tea’s writing continues to make the world worth living in.
Tea has an insatiable curiosity about people who go largely ignored in the mainstream ... In the same way Tea’s feminism lacks candy coating, so does her writing style. It’s clear and direct; it is without fluff and doesn’t bother with poetry. Her writing is unabashedly colloquial and makes radical feminism accessible without compromising its steadfastness ... Against Memoir is about representation: who has it, who needs it, and who deserves more of it. The groups where Tea found herself and her feminism, the groups about which she writes, and the community she’s helped foster in these fringes fit comfortably in the last slot. And that’s what makes Michelle Tea’s work essential––in a time when 'feminist' is a buzzword, her words are a bellwether.
...an awesome compendium of her greatest hits from the past two decades ... If you haven't heard of the HAGs, Tea is precisely the person you want to tell you about them ... The newer parts of Against Memoir demonstrate that she still wants to push herself and explore different avenues in her work. There's a weird three pages on pigeons that reminds us she is still very much a poet. This book is divided into three sections—art and music, love and queerness, writing and life—and yet obviously, everything Tea publishes is infused with all six of these concepts. She knows herself.
Michelle Tea is a child of the punk universe, working class culture, and an American original. Accept her challenge and read her if you dare. You’ll find her furious and funny ... Against Memoir will transport you into a strange and wonderful world that’s worth exploring.
Her tone is often unapologetic and abrasive; as a result, she is highly effective in communicating the difficulties and wonders of queer communities ... Tea’s authentic voice, infused with punk aesthetics, creates a literary environment that magnetizes and keeps readers spellbound to her line of inquiry ... With a textual presence evocative of Kathy Acker, Tea continues to lead the conversation in queer studies, though her approach is by telling the stories she knows are true: her own. An entrancing collection of irreverent and flamboyant essays.
...a raucous tour through American counterculture, instructing readers in what it means, and has meant, to be a queer feminist in the United States ... ea’s prose is conversational, whether writing about her stint traveling the country as part of a lesbian spoken-word collective or delving into complex topics such as the harassment of young women as a product of misogynist culture. Queer counterculture beats loud and proud in Tea’s stellar collection.
