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aspen_moon's review
adventurous
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.25
A story I relate to heavily, saw, related and understood ,a lot of the way she thought, thinks and acted.
horfhorfhorf's review
4.0
Tea's essays have always been a mixed bag for me, but this may be linked to the fact her essays are more memoir than anything else.
"How Not to Be A Queer Douchebag" is the real MVP from the collection - should be required reading for anyone, really.
"How Not to Be A Queer Douchebag" is the real MVP from the collection - should be required reading for anyone, really.
booksarentbinary's review against another edition
4.0
Against Memoir is a tender teaching. A closet door thrown open to expose the colours we wear, the yarns of our being. A whole spectrum of vibrancy, spanning years and cities.
Honouring the alchemy that occurs in the daily life of queer folk, Michelle Tea reminds me just why memoir is the shelf I remain most drawn to.
Honouring the alchemy that occurs in the daily life of queer folk, Michelle Tea reminds me just why memoir is the shelf I remain most drawn to.
nearfutures's review
5.0
My most frequent complaint about essay collections is that their contents are better read separately—in the most irritating instances, recycled anecdotes and statistics become distracting and upcoming rhetorical moves easily anticipated before they happen. Some internet thinkpieces should stay on the internet, especially if the writer only does a few flavors of essay.
This is decisively not how I feel about Michelle Tea's Against Memoir, which I tore through in a day and a half. The essays span two decades, which I'm sure does wonders for content variety, but I suspect I would find her work from over a shorter period just as compelling. Tea's writing is intensely passionate yet informative, engagingly specific but shockingly, sometimes embarrassingly relatable, and intensely personal without feeling like oversharing, for all that she confesses to sometimes being too open about her life.
It's hard to pick favorites. "On Valerie Solanas" and "Times Square" stuck out to me particularly in the Art & Music section, although it I should admit the essay genre "folks shouting articulately about their media passions" is basically my favorite, and "articulate" is not even close to adequate enough of a complete for the power of Tea's words. Another very niche/hard to define sort of category that some of the essays fall into is "in which a cisgender queer woman writes about her reconciling her identity and her attraction to trans people, and it is beautiful and empathetic and hopeful even though the subject is nearly impossible to discuss without being hurtful in some way"—the only other writer who I've had that experience with was Maggie Nelson in The Argonauts so I was ecstatic to experience it here. In Love & Queerness my favorites were "Transmissions from Camp Trans," "How to Not Be a Queer Douchebag," and "HAGS in Your Face," each for very different and complicated reasons. In Writing & Life, "Sister Spit Feminism" was the best storytelling and "Pigeon Manifesto" had the most jaw-dropping writing, and now I've listed almost half the essays so I'll stop. But I love this book! And I look forward to going back and reading some of Tea's older work.
This is decisively not how I feel about Michelle Tea's Against Memoir, which I tore through in a day and a half. The essays span two decades, which I'm sure does wonders for content variety, but I suspect I would find her work from over a shorter period just as compelling. Tea's writing is intensely passionate yet informative, engagingly specific but shockingly, sometimes embarrassingly relatable, and intensely personal without feeling like oversharing, for all that she confesses to sometimes being too open about her life.
It's hard to pick favorites. "On Valerie Solanas" and "Times Square" stuck out to me particularly in the Art & Music section, although it I should admit the essay genre "folks shouting articulately about their media passions" is basically my favorite, and "articulate" is not even close to adequate enough of a complete for the power of Tea's words. Another very niche/hard to define sort of category that some of the essays fall into is "in which a cisgender queer woman writes about her reconciling her identity and her attraction to trans people, and it is beautiful and empathetic and hopeful even though the subject is nearly impossible to discuss without being hurtful in some way"—the only other writer who I've had that experience with was Maggie Nelson in The Argonauts so I was ecstatic to experience it here. In Love & Queerness my favorites were "Transmissions from Camp Trans," "How to Not Be a Queer Douchebag," and "HAGS in Your Face," each for very different and complicated reasons. In Writing & Life, "Sister Spit Feminism" was the best storytelling and "Pigeon Manifesto" had the most jaw-dropping writing, and now I've listed almost half the essays so I'll stop. But I love this book! And I look forward to going back and reading some of Tea's older work.
floraelmcolone's review against another edition
5.0
the perfect book to carry around everywhere in your tote bag
sophievigeant's review
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
4.0