[REVIEW] Against Memoir by Michelle Tea

(Feminist Press, 2018)

REVIEW BY MANDY SHUNNARAH

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Editor’s note:

Mandy asked to have these notes published with the review. They are crucial to understanding the text and the review, so I decided to have them before the piece:
The term “womyn” is used to describe second-wave TERFs, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists, who are cisgender and primarily white.
The term “womxn” is used to describe intersectional feminists who accept and/or experience gender fluidity and do not subscribe to the gender binary.
When the terms “radical feminist” and “radical feminism” are used, it is not a nod to or endorsement of TERFs, but rather feminists that are often deemed too unpalatable, too violent, or “too much” to capture the attention of the mainstream feminist movement.

Michelle Tea is not one to mince words. In her latest essay collection, Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions and Criticisms she tells you exactly what you’re getting and they come in dedicated sections on Art & Music, Love & Queerness, and Writing & Life. It is, arguably, this kind of directness that the modern third-wave feminist movement is sometimes lacking, to its detriment.

Against Memoir is a blend of memoir, journalism, and social anthropology. Tea has an insatiable curiosity about people who go largely ignored in the mainstream. Her book discusses transphobia at the lesbian haven Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, contains a eulogy for radical feminist and would-be Warhol murderer Valerie Solanas and a tribute to the lesbian biker gang HAGS, as well as the challenges of being a queer parent and trying to have a baby via fertility treatments in a system intended for straight people. The essays don’t shy away from topics like first loves, prostitution, drug use, the struggle of getting sober, dysfunctional parents, sexual assault, adolescent sex, alcoholism, summers spent getting fired from first one job then another, and finding the right shade of hair dye after several unfortunate attempts. Against Memoir is a memoir of a feral childhood and a life spent in queer counterculture doing damn well what she pleased.

Tea has been giving voice to these populations whom popular feminism has often left behind long before it was popular to do so. She’s been writing since 1998 with the publication of her first book, a novel titled The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America. In total, she’s published 14 books including Against Memoir and edited four anthologies.  She’s currently the Amethyst Editions editor at Feminist Press.

Tea embraces a kind of radical feminism that, despite our progress, many are afraid to touch. Hers isn’t the rah-rah, feel-good, commodified feminism that’s easily marketed and sold. This is the feminism of sex workers and butch dyke biker gangs and womxn who are not afraid to forcibly remove men from the streets, responding to patriarchal violence with violent reparations of their own. This feminism isn’t cute. It doesn’t look good mass-produced and printed on a t-shirt. This is the feminism the patriarchy fears most; the feminism of womxn who were ahead of their time.

There’s nothing “cute” about this necessary feminism or the people it serves––they’re not the underserved population that the general public generally wants to rally behind. I imagine people getting a mailer with their pictures and pre-printed address stickers and their stories, particularly those of sex work and drug use, not garnering empathy even from those who would self-identify as charitable––and dare I say feminist––people. And this is precisely why Michelle Tea and the people she loves who appear in these essays occupy the fringes of society. Not because there’s something wrong with them, but because society at large doesn’t know what to do with people who reject convention, choosing instead to live life on their own terms outside of patriarchal norms, and thrive in the underground.

All too often, feminism is sugarcoated and made palatable to the masses. This in itself is a system of oppression because it appeals to the prejudices of the day and pushes only as far as the more acceptable forms of discrimination allow. With the inevitable byproduct of having the most polarizing members of the movement forced to wait in the wings, this makes for slow progress.

In the essay “HAGS In Your Face,” Tea describes the biker gang womxn as “the deepest, wildest, truest feminist they frightened other feminists, so feminist they could shit-talk the movement and write it off as trifling because they were living the most hardcore feminist lives that only someone like Valerie Solanas would have recognized and understood. And me. I understood too.”

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 boils down to an exploration silencing: who is given a platform for their voice, both inside and outside of the movement; whose voice is uplifted and represented; and who is palatable enough to garner grassroots support and inspire new feminist recruits. I don’t get the impression Tea stakes her feminism on her ability (or desire) to win people over. Her feminism is hard-won––something she gained through the trials and tribulations of lived experience––and the acceptance of her radical feminism into mainstream feminism should not hinge on the whims of others who know nothing of the particular oppression to which she bears witness.

Likewise, 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.

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Mandy Shunnarah is an Alabama-born who now calls Columbus, Ohio home. Her essays and book reviews have been published in Entropy Magazine, The Citron Review, Barely South Review, The Missing Slate, PANK Magazine, New Southerner Magazine, and Deep South Magazine. Her poems are forthcoming in Southern Women’s Review and Heavy Feather Review. Read more on her book blog offthebeatenshelf.com.