From a PEN/America Award winner and 2021 Guggenheim fellow comes the taboo-breaking story of her journey to pregnancy and motherhood as a 40 year-old, queer, uninsured woman.
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.
