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STORY TIME
Michelle Tea’s art of memoir
BY CAMILLE DODERO

If memoir is an outsider’s art, as Geoffrey Wolff once called it, then few people exemplify the genre better than Michelle Tea, a stream-of-consciousness raconteur coming to Cambridge’s New Words Center this weekend to teach a two-day memoir course. In her writing, Tea draws on her lifetime of fringe experiences as a white-trash Catholic schoolgirl, pasty-faced goth, raucous death rocker, boozy club-hopper, anarchist union worker, uncloseted gay girl, spoken-word savant, autodidact author, and part-time prostitute. In a discipline that’s inherently self-obsessed, her voice is more self-aware than solipsistic, more J.T. Leroy than Elizabeth Wurtzel — if fiction writer Mary Gaitskill and lesbian bard Eileen Myles had a daughter fathered by Charles Bukowski, the kid might write like Tea does.

Tea doesn’t care that some people see memoir as a dirty word in the literary lexicon, especially after Kathryn Harrison’s tonsil-hockey-with-dad confessional The Kiss. " I was recently on a panel at this queer literary festival in New Orleans, and I got asked, ‘What do you say when people ask you demeaning questions about memoir? Like, is it really an art?’ I’m just like, ‘You don’t say anything. You just don’t answer those questions.’ " The stigma, she believes, is tied to gender. " It only has a negative connotation if it’s a lady writing it. If it’s Frank McCourt, then it’s being made into a film. "

Nevertheless, does it ever get, y’know, strange having strangers think they know so much about you? " I’ve definitely had people contact me, especially after Valencia [her second book] came out, because there’s so much sex and drugs in the book that I had girls getting in touch with me, sharing their sex fantasies that I was the star of, calling me to brag about how much beer they drank. " Tea’s now a married teetotaler, so while she’s flattered by the attention, she doesn’t encourage those kinds of responses. " I like when people read my books and feel like they can talk to me. It’s only when they want to have sex with me or get drunk with me that I’m really weirded out. "

Michelle Tea will teach a two-day memoir seminar on Saturday, June 21, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, June 22, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., at the Center for New Words, 186 Hampshire Street, in Cambridge. Call (617) 876-5310. Tea will also appear at " K’Vetch Boston " on Thursday, June 26, at the Oni Gallery, 684 Washington Street, in Boston. Call (617) 542-6983.

Issue Date: June 20 - 26, 2003
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