Review by New York Times Review
Two women essayists on coming of age in a culture with a violent fixation on female bodies. DEAD GIRLS Essays on Surviving an American Obsession By Alice Bolin 273 pp. William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers. Paper, $15.99. AGAINST MEMOIR Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms By Michelle Tea 319 pp. Feminist Press. Paper, $18.95. "THE KEY element of any Dead Girl story is the investigator's haunted, semi-sexual obsession with the Dead Girl, or rather, the absence she has left," Alice Bolin writes in her deliciously dry, moody essay collection, "Dead Girls." Bolin's own obsession is nowhere near as lurid but just as fascinating. Once she spots the necrophiliac thread running through our culture - from "Twin Peaks" to "True Detective," and including every procedural ever made - she can't stop seeing it, can't stop thinking about what it would be like, as a girl who's alive and kicking, to occupy so much central, privileged space. The ubiquity of the popular narrative she comes to call the "Dead Girl Show" makes her think that the dead girl might be something she "could hitch my wagon to." This might seem an oddly static choice if it didn't prove so generative. "Dead Girls" is one of the latest entries in a welcome genre: coming-of-age stories about struggling to be seen in a culture that refuses to see you, at least not as a living, breathing person. The story that typically gets told instead - the Dead Girl Show - Bolin perceives as a modern-day fairy tale, with shadowy woods and an idyllic, small-town setting colored by "worshipful covetousness and violent rage" directed at "the highest sacrifice, the virgin martyr." The dead girl is usually not a girl but a young woman, and her death is usually not natural but intentional and violent. Her exemplar is Laura Palmer, of "Twin Peaks," an idea of a girl unconnected to reality. As Bolin observes, "Everyone loves the Dead Girl," but, of course, "that's why we love her: because she's dead, and her death is the catalyst for the fun of sleuthing." She's a blank slate onto which a male protagonist can project his fantasies, mostly about himself. Week after week, on episode after episode of "Dateline" and "Forensic Files," a male protagonist grapples with the meaning of the Dead Girl's death, and his identity becomes organized around hers - with none of her personality or perspective left to get in the way. The question of authority hovers over these essays - white, patriarchal authority. In the Dead Girl Show, the husband and the father loom large and dangerous. It's a given that the culprit in the killing is a male relative. At the same time, Bolin notes, the narrative (and the law) tend to favor him, making it easier for him to get away with it. Of course, the Dead Girl's status as "the perfect victim" has a way of "effacing the deaths of leagues of nonwhite or poor or ugly or disabled or immigrant or drug-addicted or gay or trans victims," and it does notescape Bolin's notice that the Dead Girl could be her, "the very face of white female complicity." Bolin began to write her book shortly after publishing a well-received essay about the series "True Detective" - a show about a troubled detective and a photogenically arranged female murder victim - and soon after moving from smalltown Idaho to Los Angeles, where she knew almost nobody and had few prospects. Her real-life move, which at first seems disconnected from the themes of the book, turns out to be integral to them. A naive young woman escapes her hometown - in the Northwest, a region renowned for its serial killers, she notes - for a big, indifferent city, where she soon loses her illusions (along with her wallet). This girl, who is not dead (though she might be a little bit dead inside), comes to the city in search of her missing self and finds only more anomie. It's a seductive story line that Bolin calls the "Hello to All That," after Joan Didion. Her favorite narratives in this genre also include Rachel Kushner's "The Flamethrowers" and Eileen Myles's "Chelsea Girls," both of which feature narrators who arrive in a city from nowhere and try "to assert themselves as artists, despite all appearances." It's easy to romanticize this plotline, Bolin writes, but "the sentimental education is hardly an innocuous trope, particularly when white American women, from the heroines of Henry James to the narrator of 'The Flamethrowers,' stand in for the innocence of their young country" - one in which the symbol of the Dead (white) Girl is often used to justify violence against others, to uphold a racist status quo. Michelle Tea's collection "Against Memoir" is more eclectic and wide-ranging, but it riffs on many of the same themes in swift, immediate prose. She, too, reconstructs her artistic and feminist coming of age through her cultural influences, revisiting scenes from a more turbulent youth. If Bolin's book is a lyrical meditation, Tea's is a good-natured slap. The book opens with a piece on Valerie Solanas, the infamous Andy Warhol shooter and author of the outlandish SCUM Manifesto, which Tea understood when she first encountered it "to be totally for real and totally not," in telling a truth "so absurd it's painful": that we live in a world where "men got to do anything to women and women got to walk around scared and traumatized and angry." A palpable pain animates many of these essays, as well as a raucous joy and bright curiosity. Having discovered that the stepfather she thought of as her dad had drilled holes in the walls of their house to spy on her and her sister, Tea writes, "He would have to deal with the shame of being caught, but he kept the house, the daughters had to flee. He kept the wife the daughters would never again be able to trust as a mother. He came into the family like an invasive parasite, killed it, and inhabited its dead body." It's a memorable image, and an emblematic one: Tea's essays tend to center on transformation, on one thing turning into another, even as they are stories of escape and resilience. Like Bolin, Tea also runs away from a nowhere town ("scabby old Chelsea, Massachusetts") to the city (first Tticson, then San Francisco), where she, too, discovers Myles's "Chelsea Girls." "For me, at 23, girls were the mystery, and drinking (being drunk) and writing was the mystery. Eileen Myles was deep in it, solving it, reporting from the inside." What strikes her about Myles's book is the experience of being buried alive in a culture - under the rubble of others' stories: "to have so much to say yet forced to claw out a place to say it with your own ragged, dirty fingernails." Her wild youth is now long enough ago that the period is shrouded for her in myth. An essay about the HAGS, young punk lesbians, many of them junkies, who lived and died (in scary numbers, from contaminated heroin) in San Francisco's Mission District back when the city was punk and queer and cheap and dangerous, and made space for "wild ruffians" and "gorgeous monsters," is especially haunting. But she's equally memorable on what it's like to be a young woman in the city, confronted daily with indecent exposure, or as they were called in the 1970s, "flashers"; on pigeons as despised urban fauna; and on longing and heartbreak. In both "Dead Girls" and "Against Memoir," the lure of autobiographical writing is also a longing to capture our experience of time, to trap us in a moment that is always passing. "You will never be in this precise state ever again," Tea writes. "Its marks lie all over the version of your story you are telling today." carina chocano is a contributing writer for The Times Magazine and the author of "You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Trainwrecks, & Other Mixed Messages," which won a National Book Critics Circle Award.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 16, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Reading the first of Tea's (How to Grow Up, 2015) fine essays feels like opening a bag of chips: you know it's impossible to eat just one. Tea's irresistible essays are arranged under Art & Music, Love & Queerness, and Writing & Life. Her beautifully crafted, if painful, look at the infamous Valerie Solanas, who shot Andy Warhol and wrote the 1967 SCUM Manifesto, sets the book's complex tone as Tea recounts her own abusive family trauma and praises similarly mistreated Solanas' humor, noting that her world was patently absurd, a cosmic joke, and that her radicalism enabled Tea to live among would-be-Valeries. In a husband-wife essay, Tea maximizes her own bittersweet humor about the bewilderment surrounding same-sex relationships that leads to pronoun confusion, as when Tea writes about marrying and honoring my person, her masculine-appearing female partner. In the titular piece, Tea declares that she hates the nostalgia for her teens that brings her to tears at night but embraces the fact that memory is the story line of life, while memoir picks up the essence of the moment. Tea proves that words can heal. An essential work, especially for LGBT collections.--Scott, Whitney Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Tea (The Chelsea Whistle) takes readers on a raucous tour through American counterculture, instructing readers in what it means, and has meant, to be a queer feminist in the United States. The essay collection pulses with frequently dark and often hilarious anecdotes from Tea's life, such as the difficulties of maintaining her punk-goth style of whiteface and mohawks. Her voice and message are brightest in her less personal essays, such as "Hags in Your Face," about a gang of punk rock lesbians- (many of whom would transition to male later in life) who roamed in packs in San Francisco's Mission neighborhood in the 1990s. In "Summer of Lost Jobs," Tea tactfully weaves tales of her teenage angst, alcoholism, and an encounter with Joey Ramone into an essay about the summer she was 16 and obsessed with fitting into the goth scene. Tea's prose is conversational, whether writing about her stint traveling the country as part of a lesbian spoken-word collective or delving into complex topics such as the harassment of young women as a product of misogynist culture. Queer counterculture beats loud and proud in Tea's stellar collection. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Author and poet Tea (Without a Net) covers the gamut of her experience in this unputdownable antimemoir, which consists of previously published articles, talks, essays, and reviews but mostly recollections of her experience as a queer activist. Valerie Solanas and Andy Warhol make star appearances at the start, but the book's core is devoted to an array of topics on queerness, transgender rights, childbirth, and romantic relationships of many types. Tea demonstrates admirable honesty on various subjects. The standout essay "How Not To Be a Queer Douchebag" is a prime example. Readers unfamiliar with the author should be advised that she is often explicit in her descriptions of sex, but they will likely understand her tone and not find the writings to be purposely offensive. VERDICT These charming essays deserve a wider readership beyond the LGBTQIA community, and since Tea is already well-known in those circles, it can be hoped that this will expand her audience.-David Azzolina, Univ. of -Pennsylvania Libs., -Philadelphia © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A collection of essays that defies genre and gender.In her latest work of nonfiction, Tea (Modern Tarot: Connecting with your Higher Self Through the Wisdom of the Cards, 2017, etc.) collects her thoughts about queerness, femininity and feminisms, and gender identity. As the title indicates, this book is not a traditional iteration of the author's intellectual history. Rather, Tea includes texts she has performed at conferences, readings, and ad hoc events as well as essays previously published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, xoJane, and other venues. Her tone is often unapologetic and abrasive; as a result, she is highly effective in communicating the difficulties and wonders of queer communities. In the most compelling essay, "How to Not Be a Queer Douchebag," the author writes, "we are the rest of the world, we're not so different, so let's lighten up, but I also believe, really believe, that we're special. We occupy a special place in our cultures, we always have and we still do. I think we have a greater opportunity to transcend bullshit and be generous people, I think we have a greater awareness and that this can bring about transformation on all levels of our lives and culture." Tea's authentic voice, infused with punk aesthetics, creates a literary environment that magnetizes and keeps readers spellbound to her line of inquiry. Later, she writes, "we broke, female queers may be called upon to protect ourselves at any minute, and the safety of numbers were always more effective than a pocket book." The fine balance between idealism and realism makes this text echo with powerful conviction. With a textual presence evocative of Kathy Acker, Tea continues to lead the conversation in queer studies, though her approach is by telling the stories she knows are true: her own.An entrancing collection of irreverent and flamboyant essays. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
