Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms

Praise for Black Wave "A Gen-X queer girl's version of the bohemian counter-canon." --New York Times

"Events, though outlandish, are narrated with total conviction, and powerfully express the intensity both of attaining sobriety and of the writing process." --The New Yorker

"Gliding deftly through issues of addiction and recovery, erasure and assimilation, environmental devastation and mass delusion about our own pernicious tendencies, this is a genre- and reality-bending story of quiet triumph for the perennial screw-up and unabashed outsider. A biting, sagacious, and delightfully dark metaliterary novel about finding your way in a world on fire." --Kirkus (starred review)

"It's this rawness that makes Black Wave so disarming, a rollicking hallucinatory fantasy that's as sobering as cold air. . . .It's sentimental and reckless and not quite like anything I've read before. An apocalypse novel that makes you feel hopeful about the world: could anything be more timely?" --The Guardian

"In Tea's skillfully loose, lusty prose, Michelle is both vulnerable and brash, blitzing through lovers and bags of heroin, terrified but also convinced of her own invincibility... [A]n important portrait of the late '90s." --Publishers Weekly

"A philosophical meditation on the end times, complete with suicides, protests, magical dreams, and Matt Dillon." --Los Angeles Review of Books

"The prose is fucking gorgeous, the characters are hilarious and upsetting and miserable, the world is heart-stopping in its strangeness and bleak crawl to the edge of the cliff, then its tumble over the edge." --Tor.com

"Out of a messy, scabrous delve into the personal, Tea has created something uncomfortably funny and bleakly gorgeous." --New Statesman

"[L]yrical but blunt, capturing her narrator's duel hopelessness and genuine desire for a life full of love and promise. . . .this book exists in a new kind of literary ecosystem--one that doesn't need to fit neatly into the structures of an older era." --BUST

"A love letter to literature's lasting power and the ability of writing to save one's future. . . . If the world is going to end, then Tea's way out isn't so bad." --SF Chronicle

"Eclectic and wide-ranging. . . . A palpable pain animates many of these essays, as well as a raucous joy and bright curiosity." --The New York Times

"Gorgeously punk-rock rebellious." --The A.V. Club

"The best essay collection I've read in years." --The New Republic

"Michelle Tea's is a singular voice -- brilliant but also irreverent, optimistic but also abrasive, as curious as it is critical. . . . Reading Tea can feel like conversing with your smartest friend, and it's one of those hangouts you never want to end." --Buzzfeed

"Bristles with life and a fierce intellect." --The Millions

"An entrancing collection of irreverent and flamboyant essays." --Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"Rich with deep feeling and critical precision." --Shelf Awareness

"Queer counterculture beats loud and proud in Tea's stellar collection." --Publishers Weekly (starred)

"An essential work." --Booklist (starred)

"Against Memoir is a must-read for hopeless romantics and anyone passionate about life." --BUST

"A thrill to read, and an essential look into lives too often relegated to the margins of literature, instead of where they belong: front and center." --Nylon

"A thoughtfully curated showcase of Tea's writing about queer politics, relationships, history, and the self." --4Columns

"From its opening sentence to its finish, Michelle Tea's Against Memoir is a bracing, heaven-sent tonic for deeply troubled times. Its clarity, hilarity, range, nonchalant brilliance, and decades of experience in 'art and music, love and queerness, writing and life' remind me over and over again of the adventure, the party of it all--the joy of raucous thinking and loving and making--that's fundamentally ours." --Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts

"The essays in Against Memoir remind us how pleasure, pain, wisdom, and delight come from the ground up, by and through the body, and in this case, a body unapologetically firing all her desires, pleasures, fears, and dreams like lightning. A hardcore delight, a queer blood song picking the scab off the skin of culture." --Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan

"Against Memoir ripples with compassion, anger, curiosity and humour."--Fiona Mozley, author of Elmet

"These essays blow my mind with their algebraic rhythms by which Michelle Tea manages pain and bliss. They take turns erupting in a pulpy and marvelous parade: landscape, passion, morality, family, cigarettes--each cited frankly and exquisitely like a smart kid with a dirty crayon explaining to us all how she sees god." --Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls

"From the beautiful trenches of our affections, Michelle Tea's Against Memoir brings home that queerness is universal."--Rita Indiana, author of Tentacle

"I gobbled up these essays. Michelle Tea is riotously, wickedly funny, with an uncommon knack for naming the more hideous and complex parts of being human. Her particular genius makes the hardest truths and sorrows an irresistible joy to read." --Melissa Febos, author of Abandon Me

"These are dispatches from a mind on fire. Every essay goes where most writers fear to go - whether she's taking down privilege, talking up the books that save us from abuse, or celebrating every suburban girl who ever had a Prince fantasy, Michelle Tea's irresistibly fresh writing and openhearted voice make Against Memoir a brilliant, wild ride."--Preti Taneja, author of We That Are Young

"If you want to know how the best queer writing comes out of community, lived experience and political urgency, start here."--Isabel Waidner, author of Gaudy Bauble

"A typically visceral and defiant collection of essays spanning nearly two decades of work." --The Guardian

"The author's kindness and intelligence is a barbiturate in the telling of a bold memoir that details abuse, addiction, sex and the communities brought together through American counterculture." --Irish Times