Threadworms, From the Archives: Michelle Tea
WRITING (AGAINST) MEMOIR, WITH MICHELLE TEA
Worms talks to the anti-memoirist about the trustworthiness of memory as literary device.
INTERVIEW BY CLEM MACLEOD
PHOTOS BY KEVIN HAYELAND
(AS SEEN IN Worms 3)
Michelle Tea is a renegade of the personal essay. In her 2018 collection of essays Against Memoir, Tea commentates on misfit culture from Sister Spit to Sonic Youth, and wraps it all up with a precise dissection of the memoir form. Shortly after an intrusive eyelid surgery, I chat to the essayist over FaceTime about the trustworthiness of memory in the writing about personal experience, looking up to literary heroines from a young age, and writing in opposition to mainstream culture.
I want to talk to you about the idea of the personal narrative and the memoir form in particular. In the beginning of Against Memoir, you talk about how you wrote a book when you were in the second grade. You started with the blurb then did the front cover. You’ve always been deconstructing the narrative form. What role did stories play in your adolescence?
They were so huge! I learned to read young and I was always a really voracious reader, even in second grade I was reading adult books and had to get permission to take certain books out. I tried to take out Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. and the librarian was like, “This is a little old for you,” and I was so insulted. I was seven and reading books that were more for 13 or 14-year-olds. I was so offended and I went home and was like, “This librarian won’t let me take out a book without a note,” so my mother wrote me the note, and I got to take it out. I was such a goodie-goodie. Early on, Margaret is looking at a copy of Playboy and I was scandalised and shut the book and brought it back. I was like, “You’re right, I am too young for this.” It’s so sad that we can only live one life. Life gives us so many possibilities and we’re constantly having to make choices that narrow our path. Books give you that escape where you get to live other lives. When I was 10 or 11, I remember waking up and looking at my paperback collection and selecting a book and being like, today I’m going to be that person, that heroine, that main character. No one is going to know. It’s going to be my secret and I’m going to make choices that I think they would make. I secretly think that I am that person. It was more than something you just read, close and put down, it was something that really influences you, that you carry around with you.
Did you feel like you had to read books where you could relate to the characters or the writers?
Not consciously. I didn’t have a conscious understanding of myself, but I think about the person I grew into and I certainly was looking for narratives about girls who were wild. I was reading ahead of myself, and once I got more comfortable reading scandalous teen books, I loved books about girls who were on drugs or got pregnant and did the wrong thing. I also loved ghost stories and horror stories. There’s a teen author who put a lot of books out in the seventies named Lois Duncan, who wrote I Know What You Did Last Summer which was then made into a movie franchise. She wrote a lot of spooky books about teen girls and I really liked all her witchy spooky books which always had female protagonists. Of course I loved Judy Blume. When I was in fifth grade, I was probably 10 or 11, I had to do a book report on The Outsiders which I freaked out over. I lost my mind. I loved it so much I felt like the book was a living thing. I wrote a 12-page book report which only needed to be two pages. I couldn’t stop talking about the book, it was like I wanted to write it. It was almost the pleasure a musician gets from covering a song they love, it’s the idea of, as a writer, how you want to cover a story you love. I slept with the book under my pillow. It was really great timing because it was also the 80s when the movie came out. The movie had such a great cast, they did such a good job with the film. It was Francis Ford Coppola so it was good. I was swept away in Outsider fever, then I read all of SE Hinton’s books. I loved that she was a girl. It meant something to me even then that these stories and characters were written by a teenage girl, a young woman.
I set out to destroy my life regardless and I was just lucky that I had a literary banner to drape around it.
I read that you were really into the Beat writers.
I wasn’t really. I was in San Francisco and you can’t help but be in their shadow, especially if you were off the grid, outside the mainstream, which my writing world was. The writing scene I was a part of in San Francisco in the
90s actually had much in common with the Beat writers, but because we weren’t men, we didn’t get that kind of attention. It was a lot of queer girls or future trans people who were writing and working. We did it in obscurity mostly. I had mixed feelings about them. Someone like Jack Kerouac, I admired his freedom, I liked the lore of how he was basically on speed and wrote On The Road in one giant scroll. I was also an alcoholic like Jack Kerouac was. They had freedom to experiment within their lives in a way that women did not because the stakes are higher as far as physical danger. There’s this idea that as women if you walk towards physical danger there’s something really wrong with you. Men can walk towards physical danger. They’re encouraged to, in sports or by joining the military. If a woman walks towards something that is physically dangerous, then it’s like, “You deserve whatever happens to you.” No one would ever say a soldier deserved to die even though you’re like, what were you thinking, you signed up to go into battle. Allen Ginsberg’s prelude to Howl is one of my favourite pieces of writing. I’m not immune to the charms of the Beats, they’re just complicated.
In the first issue of Worms, I did this piece about how there were all these female voices in the Beat generation but no one knew about them: Diane di Prima, Anne Waldman, Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, Carolyn Cassady. I really liked the Beats when I was a teenager but I never questioned the fact that there were no female voices, I was just like wow, these guys make me want to write.
They’re so amazing. Jack Kerouac had a daughter who wrote, Jan Kerouac. She wrote Baby Driver and it’s a memoir, autofiction, and it’s her life. It’s the female experience, which is drugs and travelling and sex work. Inevitably, the female equivalent of the Beat experience involves sex work, it ends up doing that, because you have to support yourself. You don’t have a girl to live off of the way that the dudes did, so it’s like, what do you do?
Maybe because we live in a culture that pushes forgiveness, optimism, looking on the bright side, minimising pain, minimising problems, maybe just giving voice to the reality of it makes it seem so disproportionate because nobody does it.
In your essay about Sister Spit, you say, “The thing about being a poet, a writer, an artist is that you can’t be good.” Later on you say, “As female artists, we require the same opportunities to fuck up and get fucked up as dudes always have and been forgiven for.” You wrote that 13 years ago. Do you think the idea of transgressing is now seen as bad per say?
It’s hard to know. There’s been tons of progress about what a woman or a female person’s role is supposed to be and what a female even is and do we even exist and all of that stuff has definitely influenced the culture. Depending on who you are, where you grow up, what resources you have, what access, and people have more access because of the internet. Whether or not it is labelled as transgressive, or whether or not there is a particular judgement given to it, I do think that as a writer, it is good for you to make unusual choices. Let’s just put it that way. To be open to making unusual choices and to pushing yourself and daring yourself a little bit in your own life. That doesn’t need to be true. Lots of writers take an academic route and make those proper choices. There’s no one way to be successful, but for myself, and maybe because I knew that other route wasn’t available to me, I would have to find a type of education in another way and that was by pushing the boundaries of what experiences were available to me in the world that I could learn from.
Do you think that writers - in particular those writing from personal experience - play on and exaggerate this idea of being transgressive and having hardships?
I certainly don’t think that you need to. When I think of young writers setting out to destroy their life for a story, it’s so ridiculous. I set out to destroy my life regardless and I was just lucky that I had a literary banner to drape around it. It gave me a justification, which wasn’t necessar- ily helpful personally. I think that stories need conflict, we know that. When you’re writing about yourself, what’s the conflict? Is it something you’ve survived, is it you against yourself, is it you against your family, is it you against your environment? There was a real moment for this self-reflexivity in the 80s or 90s of Kathy Acker, Lydia Lunch and Kate Braverman and I love those women, they’re so interesting to me. It needs to be authentic to begin with or else you’re just a weird poser and you’re just striking a pose and that’s going to come through in your writing. When I was younger it was important for me to embody a sort of opposition so I could find my people, whether they were disaffected goths or baby dykes or whatever was important to me at that moment in my development. The world is falling apart so drastically now, so there’s a lot to be in opposition to. Being in sync with the culture as it is right now is really problematic. You need to be outside the culture. Even if we get our mainstream moved over, out of this fall towards facism that’s happening, and we get it to a more progressive place, there’s still so much work to do. It’s beyond us just as writers, but as humans we should be oppositional. Whatever your art form.
Do you think your writing has helped you figure out these oppositional views?
I have a real compulsion towards self-expression and it just feels really rooted in my body. It’s very satisfying to have an outlet for it, to be able to give voice to it. I don’t know that it has helped me sort things out. I did need to sort out the effect of writing memoir, that that had on me and on my understanding of myself and my life, which is what the essay Against Memoir gets into. Writing that essay was really helpful to parse my thoughts about how it feels in addiction and what I think of it.
We can’t really trust our memory and that is something that is embedded in the whole project of personal narrative and memoir.
Has writing more helped you deal with trauma?
I don’t really know if it has. There’s a lot of lip service given to it being cathartic or healing to write about trauma but I think trauma gets healed by tending to it intentionally. Writing can be a part of that, but I don’t know if it did for me honestly. It can cement you in your identity as a trauma survivor, you can get stuck in that place. Other people read it and they talk to you about it, so your identity as a survivor becomes more paramount than it would have otherwise. You may also get praise or attention which can be very risky, especially if so many people survive traumas and then the impact of that trauma is denied to them, it’s minimised, it’s unvalidated, so you can then write about it and then suddenly get all of this validation for it and for what you’ve been through and that can be so delicious that you just want to hold onto it and keep feeding that wound of how your trauma was ignored. It can be cathartic and it can also be harmful. You have to have your eyes open and always be looking at yourself.
As humans we’re conditioned to remember things in a much more positive light than they were, our memories are conditioned to repress pain and trauma, but I feel like when I’m reading the writers I’m into, it can sometimes appear the total opposite?
I worry about that. I’m like, “do I just make everything worse than it was? Is my tendency to highlight the drama or the pain?” That is where the juicy writing is. It’s not necessarily fun or interesting to write about a good time. I think about the city I grew up in in Massachusetts called Chelsea. It’s a real shithole, but then I think “was it really?”. Then something will be in the news or I’ll talk to someone else from Chelsea and realise that it was an insane and terrible place to be raised. Maybe because we live in a culture that pushes forgiveness, optimism, looking on the bright side, minimising pain, minimising problems, maybe just giving voice to the reality of it makes it seem so disproportionate because nobody does it.
Do you think it’s problematic that we have to trust these memories that can seem quite blurry? I always think memories and often memoirs/biographies are sugarcoated.
Sugarcoating it or making it melodramatic. Either way, we can’t really trust our memory and that is something that is embedded in the whole project of personal narrative and memoir. We’re just doing our best. That was always my intention, to try to remember everything as best as I could. Even when I wrote Valencia, I think I wrote about this in Against Memoir, I had written about something that an ex of mine had done, and they were so upset with me because they hadn’t done it, and I was like yes you did, sorry you don’t remember. Then I realised they hadn’t, they actually had done it, but they’d done it with the person they dated after me, and that person had come to me and was like oh my god, you dated her too, this is the crazy thing she did. It sounded so in line with my experience of her that I sort of adopted this memory as it happened, and it hadn’t! I understand why she was pissed, she did do that thing, but she didn’t do it with me. The story was great without that, I wasn’t looking for that. I just ate her memory subconsciously. We can’t really trust our memory. It’s not like a court transcript. We don’t need memoirs or personal narratives to be so on the mark. There’s a difference between somebody doing their best and wanting to record their memories and someone like James Frey writing a million little pieces knowing that it’s a total work of fiction and then saying it’s a memoir. The intentions are very different. When I wrote Black Wave I wanted both. I wanted to write about things that had happened that I hadn’t been able to write about honestly because they were about a relationship that I was in and then freed from that relationship, I was like, oooh I get to tell those stories now. To write fiction, I was like, I’ll just do both, fuck it.
We can’t really trust our memory. It’s not like a court transcript. We don’t need memoirs or personal narratives to be so on the mark.
But do you think that people who read memoir are aware of this uncertainty?
Are readers wondering, is this really true, does this really happen? I think so. Part of the pleasure of memoir is you want to believe the story. I wouldn’t put the same pressure on another writer that I would put on myself. My favourite autofiction writer is Eileen Myles and I’ve never once in my life second guessed what they were saying. I was just reading their new book this morning, and it would never occur to me to think there was anything in there that... Who knows?! They’re just another writer dealing with their memory just like the rest of us. I don’t second guess them at all.
You mean the new book they’ve just released as part of the Why I Write series?
Eileen’s always writing a little bit about why they write at this point. It’s part of the fabric of their life. Wherever they are at any given moment is as a result of their writing. They’re either somewhere to work on something or they’re travelling for writing. They’re talking about the process of being pressured to give up their apartment in New York that they’d had for decades and they really identified with this apartment that was so cheap in New York city. They talk a lot about this idea of wasting time and being a writer allows you to have a structure in which you’re allowed to waste time. It’s about how all art is on some level copying. In memoir, what have I done but copied in language what I saw. I’m killing time until I die. I feel grateful that I’ve been able to build my life around it and that it has intermittently supported me and that it’s been meaningful to other people as well as myself. That’s a huge gift. It is about waste in a way, and I like that.
I love that, killing time until we die. Isn’t that what we’re all doing?
It’s what we’re all doing, so how are you going to do it?
