“Why do women who aren’t afraid to humiliate themselves appall us so much? I think in part because they post a threat to the social order, which relies on women’s embarrassment to keep them either silent or writing in socially acceptable modes,” so says Emily Gould, best known for her incredibly transparent and often fucked up internet confessions. It’s a forceful thing, to show up in a world that doesn’t expect you to exist, and to say something it doesn’t expect you to say. It’s not so much a matter of generosity as one of necessity. But who talks about their first fisting for the good of the general public? Often, they’re talking about it because no one else will, and someone needs to. It feels right, like it acknowledges the spiritually taxing effort that goes into disclosure when someone offers a highly personal narrative. “Thank you for being so generous with your story,” I say to the woman who just described her first fisting experience to contextualize her rape. Post-#MeToo, radical disclosure has become typical, if not necessary, to speak frankly about sexual boundaries and trauma. Recently, I’ve gotten in the habit of saying people have been “so generous” when sharing their stories. But she’s also slowed down and become reflective - while still delightfully contradictory - dissecting the history of the ruptures within the communities which she has documented so well. With her latest release, Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms, Tea continues to write explosively about her life. I wanted to be her, or the women she portrayed, who were all so brash and powerful and sexy. She wrote about sex and friends and death in a way that made me feel alive, kind of like the way watching Party Monster makes some want to do a face full of cocaine. Growing up a lonely and shy teenager, for me Tea’s autobiographical novel Valencia represented freedom. Michelle Tea has made a career of memoir, and in doing so she has chronicled a generation of queer and punk subcultures. Alana Mohamed | Longreads | August 2018 | 12 minutes (3,094 words)

Valencia by michelle tea