The first Michelle Tea book I read was one she edited: It’s So You: 35 Women Write about Personal Expression Through Fashion and Style. Eventually, I read Valencia and The Chelsea Whistle, followed by her beautiful YA book Mermaid in Chelsea Creek, and then her memoir How to Grow Up. When I made the decision to pursue single motherhood, I read her series on xojane.com about motherhood, and discovered the website she founded, MUTHA Magazine, which celebrates mothers in all forms, without the cloying, saccharine quality that most motherhood websites have. This is her founder’s note on the website:
FOUNDER’S NOTE (2013):
I’ve been trying to get pregs for about two years now, and along the way I’ve become increasingly obsessed with all things Mom. In pop culture and science. In art and literature and film and television. The ways Moms looked in the 50s and 60s and 70s; the way Moms look now. I’m interested in baby names and maternity clothes and feminist child-rearing and mothering traditions. Punk moms and hippie moms and hip hop moms. Normal moms and weirdo moms, queer moms and straight moms, tiger moms and slacker moms. IVF and IUI and heterosexual fornication and adoption. Ovaries and uteruses and surrogates. Home births and scheduled c-sections. Bad moms, mommy wars, mommy everything. How people stay creative and vital while raising kids. I want a place online to hang out with all of it, without having pink flowers or digital sprinkles of fairy-baby dust assault my aesthetics. Welcome to MUTHA. ~ Michelle Tea, Founder
Her new book, Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions, and Criticisms, is a collection of essays and journalistic pieces. I caught up with her over email to talk about all things memoir and motherhood.
What have you done to maintain a space for yourself and your work (writing and otherwise) within motherhood?
I am thankful that I pursued motherhood after having established some sort of career. My writing sort of has its own momentum and I’m used to juggling a million things, so it wasn’t too hard to stay on top of things. I mean, I had already accepted that my workload is too much for one person and inevitably things fall through the cracks, so that helped. But really what makes everything work is that I have a wife who is an amazing, phenomenal partner and parent. She is the one staying home with our son while I hustle and try to make us some money, WHICH IS VERY HARD. But we are super privileged. My wife had a great job before becoming a full-time parent, and as a writer, I benefit from that. As far as actual physical space, if I am doing creative work, I usually have to get out of the actual house, because my son does not understand why I can’t play with him if I’m home. And it’s also too tempting to abandon ship and join him!
There’s a line in your last essay that says, “If I were to write VALENCIA right now, it would be a totally different book… Memoir is like that. It picks up the essence of the moment you wrote it.” That rang really true for me, a nonfiction writer. But it also felt very true about parenthood as well. There are these moments of sheer tedium, but also moments of sheer joy—and complaining about one does not negate the other. (I hope I’m making sense here.) How does being a writer affect your experience of motherhood?
I know; I feel very aware of never complaining about mom stuff to my non-mom friends because a.) I did it to myself, how much sympathy are they even going to have; and b.) it’s also the very best thing ever, and I never want to misrepresent it. It has something in common with when I did sex work, actually. It was like the very worst and very best job ever, for all the reasons you could imagine. And it was hard to complain about the aspects that sucked with people not in the industry, because they would just be like, quit! I mean, the reason there are mom groups and all that stuff is that it is such a total and complete life-change, it’s a head fuck and a delight and it’s misery and boredom and revelations and total good times—of course you want to be around other people having this same extreme experience.
I think being a writer affects my experience of motherhood in that I am already this writer-person, totally occupied with this compulsion, and that exists all around my mothering. I am often distracted, because my mind operates in this particular way where it’s conjuring creative ideas all the time. I’m grateful for it, but it also feels like a mental illness sometimes, and of course it can get in the way when I am trying to be present with my son. Plus, I write about myself, so inevitably I will want to write about this experience and am very aware of the potential consequences on my family and community!
Exactly. It can be hard to turn it off and on, but I think they have a way of complementing each other sometimes, if you’re lucky. Conversely, how does motherhood affect you as a writer, or your writing?
I definitely have a new sphere of experience to write from, or about. Being a parent is deeply physical, and it’s emotional and psychological. It’s really weird and funny and hard and great and awful. I mean that is like the best inspiration for writing, right there. So, even if I am not overtly writing about motherhood, my bank of reference has been widely expanded, and that reference bank is probably my most important writerly tool.
The topics in your essay collection run the gamut. Can you tell me about the impetus to write this book?
Well, initially it was to wrangle all these pieces I’d written over the years and have them in one place, because that felt nice and tidy to me. It was also, I thought, a fairly easy way to get a book out! But of course, when you do these things, you have to write new work, too, which I hadn’t considered and really didn’t want to do. As it happened, those pieces are my favorites in the book, and I’m happy for the push to do it!
How do you think the creative community can support women, and mothers, especially?
By paying them. That is my biggest thing right now. For decades, I worked happily for free, to be part of community and to support art in general. And I always will do that—often there isn’t any money, and you can’t always let that determine what you do with your time. But time is a lot more precious now, because time working is time away from my son. If I go out for a reading, I miss bedtime, which is sweet and important. Assignments also mean less time spent, missed dinners, etc. So you have to make judgment calls about what is worth the sacrifice, and it often boils down to money, by necessity.
YES. So true. Especially since having a child, I find myself guarding my time, and it’s really important that I’m able to make a living, obviously.
Yeah. Performance and curating shows has always been a big part of my life and career, but those things usually pay nothing to very little. It’s been hard to know how to balance it. Because if I am only saying yes to things that can pay me, I’m missing out on a whole creative and community–oriented world that might not pay me cash, but is fulfilling and important in other ways. It’s tricky.
What are you struggling with, as a parent and as a writer, right now?
As a writer, I am struggling with finding the inspiration to continue through a YA novel that I started years ago that I fear the light has gone out of for me. I am struggling with the fact that a lot of my ideas or styles aren’t commercial, which means they can’t happen, or I can’t make a living off them. I am struggling with the fears that such situations generate. I am struggling with the very real limits of my talent; I wish I were a better writer. I’m struggling to find a way into the entertainment industry, and that is a struggle for everyone interested in that world. As a parent, I don’t feel I’m struggling with much right now. My son is in a really, really sweet space. He’s thoughtful and communicative and imaginative and expressing a lot of love and making my job pretty easy!
What books inspire you, and what are you reading right now?
I’m hugely inspired by Eileen Myles and by memoir in general. In that world, I’m currently reading an ARC of Thomas McBee’s Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man. It’s a sort of fearsome thing for the mother of a boy to read because it does make the negative aspects of masculinity feel inevitable, but I’m not done with the book yet! I’m also reading Patty Schemel’s memoir Hit So Hard and Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of Love, which is a little too men are from Mars, women are from Venus for me. But I am also reading James VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy and it is epic and wild and very inspiring!
Ohhhh Eileen is great, and Schemel’s memoir is on my TBR list, after seeing her documentary of that same name.
Hit So Hard is really genuine, and funny in spite of its harrowing subject matter. Patty lives in Los Angeles and she told a story at a comedy event called JOSH that I do with my friend Tara Jepsen, and she was SO VERY FUNNY. She’s a great storyteller.
What advice would you give to a writer trying to juggle parenthood and writing?
Hmmmm… just know that no one but you will ever really push you to do your writing, so it’s on you to make the space for it, as impossible as that sometimes seems. When my son was three months old, I worked on a screenplay between 9pm and midnight every night. Just do whatever you have to do. Don’t discount how much progress can be made in a snippet of time. If you write a page a day, you have a book in a year. Try not to resent everyone around you for not understanding how important it is for you to do this thing. If you are straight, go gay and partner with a woman. It helps to have a wife.
Jaime Rochelle Herndon graduated with her MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia and is a writer and editor living in NYC. She is a contributor at Book Riot and a writing instructor at Apiary Lit, and her writing can be seen on Healthline and New York Family Magazine, among others.