Tea has not always been sober, and has written about her drunkenness in both her novels ( Black Wave) and other memoir-y books ( How to Grow Up, Rent Girl). “I’m thinking that going totally fucking insane is a completely rational outcome for an intelligent women in this society,” Tea writes, “and I think this idea only becomes more solid the farther back in history you go.” “I wanted them to feel unsafe,” she writes, “to become vulnerable.” The stepfather revelation showed Tea that “men could do anything they wanted.” This truth upends her universe: “It’s easy to lose your grip on reality when your entire world is suddenly laid bare as a surreal conspiracy horror show.”įrom this point of empathy, Tea lays out the mechanisms of Solanas’s insanity and her brilliant writing, mourning the fact that she died poor and young. She had just discovered that her stepfather had been spying on her and her sister through holes in the wall of the family home.įrom that trauma she loops back to Solanas, loops through her own time in sex work, loops through the connected circles that are poverty and queerness and wanting to make men suffer in revenge.

“I was thinking a certain way when I first came across the SCUM Manifesto,” she writes-and that way was determined by circumstances that were shaping her nascent identity. The opening essay on Valerie Solanas is Tea in crystallized form. The book is divided into sections: “Art and Music” “Love and Queerness” “Writing and Life.” But these subjects all overlap. Tea is now a sober and married mom, but she turns again and again to her youth as a poor femme running drunkenly away from Chelsea, Massachusetts. The essay reminded me of a person who can’t stop telling wild stories about themselves. “We needed the right to start a stupid brawl and emerge victorious or with a black eye,” she writes. But romanticism is not always the happiest bedfellow to essay-writing, particularly when it veers into sentimentality.

She and her companions hit the road to get dirty and heroic. “We needed the right to ruin our lives and crawl out from the wreckage, maybe wiser,” Tea writes.

Sister Spit was a very, very cool project, and its members surely had glorious fun. She co-founded the group in 1994 with Sini Anderson (who directed the 2013 documentary The Punk Singer about Kathleen Hanna), and the crew crisscrossed America “delighting audiences and racking up adventures” from their rickety van, inside crazy outfits. The only bum note in Michelle Tea’s new essay collection Against Memoir is in a piece about her time on the road in the queer feminist spoken-word collective Sister Spit. Let’s start with the bad so that we may hasten to the good: Queer swagger can be corny.

Without a Net by Michelle Tea