Tea’s candid examinations of addiction, pleasure and belonging have embodied and nurtured a subculture ... In her new memoir, Knocking Myself Up: A Memoir of My (In)Fertility, the nurturing impulse already manifest in Tea’s work is made literal ... Tea interrogates each element of pregnancy...with studious commitment ... Tea brings her fierce and nuanced class analysis to bear on what she calls the 'Labor Industrial Complex,' observing both the humor and difficulty of navigating the artificial insemination industry as an aspiring parent outside the heterosexual economic elite ... Tea is a guide to the worlds of integrated anticapitalism, trans politics and sex-work-affirming feminism, and offers a playbook for family-building from someone with simultaneous aspirations of familial security and genre-bending communal care. Tea has no difficulty with dissonance ... Her all-encompassing acceptance, of herself and others, is one of her greatest gifts as a writer. She extends the same generosity to readers, and her unborn child. With humor, candor and the ease of a veteran storyteller, Tea reminds us that there is no making life in pursuit of a prefigured plan.

... [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.

We are given a front row seat to these three years that Tea and Orson (and their friends and their families) spent consumed with the hopes of them eventually becoming parents. Tea narrates the ups and downs of the process with her trademark humor and doesn’t shy away from giving us all of the gory, sad, disappointing, and heart-wrenching details that became parts of their paths to parenthood ... She provides us with a heavy dosage of education on the subjects of insemination, IVF, and childbirth, but it never feels overwhelming. In the parts of the story that are the most devastating, Tea’s faith in the universe and in the world around her shines through her writing to show us how courage and resilience are powerful tools we should utilize in the face of any hardships we may encounter, whether they’re related to Tea’s journey here or not ... Knocking Myself Up is, of course, extremely queer — and not just because Tea is or just in the cast of past lovers and friends who show up in the narrative — but also in the way Tea approaches the memories of this journey overall ... Some might see the subject of this book and think it’s simply not for them, but taken as a whole, Tea’s work here absolutely transcends any expectations someone could possibly have simply by looking at the description.

Whether Tea is writing nonfiction or cult-favorite fiction, her work is her own, ringing in her unmistakable voice: wry, witty, authentic, down-to-earth but also way-up-in-the-clouds. Above all, it’s the self-deprecating, self-aware and ultimately self-loving honesty that distinguishes Tea’s way of life and her irresistible, evocative and wise way of writing about it ... So it’s poignant, and very much in character, that Tea ends Knocking Myself Up with a painfully honest afterword.

... there’s a feeling of urgency throughout Knocking Myself Up. There’s an unfair pressure to make its story—and other stories about the choices of reproduction—universal, to explain things to those who insist on ignorance. There’s an imperative to try to persuade people (never mind that many are probably unpersuadable) of one’s humanity ... Although she’s not immune to some of the minor pitfalls of the genre, her writing is winning, companionable, and intimate; she has a talent for letting you know her ... One can imagine that this play-by-play would be a balm for someone going through the same process, especially a queer person who has not found much previous representation that isn’t heteronormative. For the general reader, though, while the first part of the story is dynamic, the IVF part becomes stagnant. There’s just not much tension or narrative juice in swallowing pills or in describing who gets shots where or in the question of whether the medical professionals who treat Tea will be brusque (sometimes yes, sometimes no). By necessity, IVF is a cyclical process that’s repeated until the implantation succeeds or the money runs out. So it’s predictable, but still unfortunate, that the book gets a little, well, repetitive ... a book about forging a life for oneself beyond addiction, and the story is told with humor and without pretension. But it also diverges from Tea’s earlier projects in its comparative lack of breadth. Formally, it adheres to the timeline of her attempts to get pregnant, followed by the pregnancy itself, making it less sprawling than her other books—and I wondered, in contrasting it with them, whether something has been lost in this laser focus. The Michelle Tea of the new book has it together...the book is smaller overall, and its stakes feel lower. One gets the sense that the Michelle Tea of Knocking Myself Up will be fine, regardless of the outcome of her pregnancy journey ... Yet something is gained, too, by the book’s confined scope. It gives Tea the space to go deeper, to think about why she wants something as conventional as motherhood after a lifetime of not just living unconventionally herself but of worshiping outsiders ... Does the book capture 'all of life,' as Tea promises in its opening pages? I don’t think so, but then that’s an unrealistic expectation to place on anyone’s fertility story—and anyway, I think Tea had already come close in her previous work. She’d already located that universality in her stories about growing up poor and weird and in the many interesting things she has written about art. Does she speak for all of us? No—how could she? No one person does. But she speaks for herself, which is all you can do. You speak for yourself and hope the world opens its heart chakra.

While there is no shortage of information about pregnancy available to twenty-first century readers, Tea’s experience is a uniquely queer and feminist one that is rarely at the forefront of these discussions ... Never the one to mince words, Tea’s prose is florid with personal descriptions of each part of the process: from the initial decision, the complications, a dozen of life pivots, to the eventual birth of her son. For readers learning about the more technical (and sometimes grisly) side effects of fertility treatments and pregnancy for the first time, Tea’s exuberance and zest for the experience will hopefully offer solace ... Recommended to round-out parenting collections with a new perspective on family.

... frank and funny ... Every stage of Tea’s quest presents revelations devastating—like discovering uterine fibroids after months of failed insemination attempts—dazzling, and packed with information one may not expect when they’re expecting: ovulation (unexpectedly aggro), implantation (may cause bleeding), pregnancy (who knew it could change the shape of one’s eyes?). Taken as a whole, Tea’s unconventional 'birth story' serves as a celebration of the human body, its hidden miracles, and, as she aptly puts it, 'not just the dramatic climax of a last push and a first breath, but the story of a choice made, a dare accepted, a journey undertaken.' This heartfelt work embraces every facet of the human experience: heartache, hope, and—with a little luck—joy.

... intimate, comic, and irreverent ... Though many anecdotes are amusing, she reveals the emotional and physical cost of the 'baby-making/baby-failing roller coaster' that completely dominated her life ... Tea shares the particular challenges that queer and trans individuals encounter when seeking medical help, and she records the bodily changes, mood swings, fears, and anxieties that she experienced, including worries about her response to her baby’s gender ... A refreshingly entertaining, lighthearted memoir about a serious topic.