These questions underlie the values that have shaped Tea’s life and work for decades: They are the building blocks of a community in which inherited forms, particularly those of romance and kinship, are never taken for granted.
#The outer worlds endings how to#
Tea interrogates each element of pregnancy - how to inseminate, with whom to inseminate, how to name a child, how and with whom to parent a child - with studious commitment. What does it mean to “conjure a life, and in the process, deeply unsettle my own?” Tea asks. A “dare to the universe” turns into a dream, peopled with friends and a devoted partner.
In her new memoir, “Knocking Myself Up: A Memoir of My (In)Fertility ,” the nurturing impulse already manifest in Tea’s work is made literal. Situating herself, her friends and her lovers against the dystopian realities of inequality, climate crisis and capitalism’s most interpersonal effects, Tea’s candid examinations of addiction, pleasure and belonging have embodied and nurtured a subculture. Michelle Tea has devoted her career to chronicling the desires, fears and contradictions of contemporary urban American queer life, in genres as wide-ranging as memoir, picture books, the occult and fiction.
And, sometimes, we look for wholeness in the very institutions and traditions we’ve built our identities in opposition to. We chase happy endings we know are myths. KNOCKING MYSELF UP: A Memoir of My (In)Fertility, by Michelle Tea