Against Memoir Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms by Michelle Tea

Winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award, Michelle Tea’s electric essay collection spans two decades of chronicling the vibrant, messy realities of marginalized queer life in America. Divided into thematic sections tracking art, writing, and queerness, Tea turns a sharp journalistic and deeply personal lens onto the countercultural movements that shaped her. The book documents a broad spectrum of outsider history, including a deep-dive on SCUM Manifesto author Valerie Solanas, an intimate memorial to the 1990s San Francisco lesbian biker gang HAGS, and firsthand dispatches from the late-1990s political tensions of Camp Trans. Equal parts biting wit, cultural critique, and raw vulnerability, the text acts as an essential archive of late-twentieth-century lesbian-feminist and trans activism.