Knocking Myself Up by Michelle Tea book review
From 1974 to 1978, my life was devoted to a single, seemingly unattainable goal: getting pregnant. Newly married and giddily confident — I’d aborted my one and only birth control boo-boo; proof, I thought, of my fertility — my husband and I spent Year One vigorously practicing the traditional method. By Year Three, panic had set in. So we brought in the big guns, most of them expensive and uninsured. Brutal fertility tests. Acupuncture. Surgeries. “Romantic” sex-on-schedule vacations. The drugs DES (later proved to cause cancer in mother and child) and Clomid (which caused me to go temporarily, dangerously blind while working on a fast-moving assembly line).
My husband and I exhausted ourselves, our savings and our happiness dragging our barren bodies from one San Francisco fertility doctor to the next. “If you climax during intercourse, that will help,” one advised us. A Berkeley doctor who later lost his license took me aside and lowered his voice. “Go to bars till you find a guy who looks like your husband,” he said. “Go home with him. Tell no one.”
Month after month, my husband and I tried the most advanced technology available: intrauterine insemination (IUI) using his sperm. Year Four, flat-out desperate, we begged my husband’s sister to be our surrogate, and my brother to donate his sperm, to make a baby who’d be related to both of us. My sister-in-law, bless her heart, said yes; my brother’s wife said no. And then, on a rain-slicked freeway, my husband and I skidded into a seven-car pileup. Just before our ’68 Camaro hit the guardrail, I thought, “I’ve spent four years crying every day over something I can’t have, and now I’m going to die.” Unharmed and stunned, my husband and I stood on the shoulder listening to the ambulances’ screams. “I’m done ruining my life trying to have a kid,” I said. I got pregnant that night. Nine months later, during my emergency Caesarean, both the baby and I almost died.
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Fast-forward 33 years. Same place: San Francisco. Same problem: A woman desperately wants a baby, and it’s not working out. “At twenty-seven,” Michelle Tea writes in “Knocking Myself Up,” the latest of her 16 novels, memoirs and how-to-live-an-artsy-life books, “I read Ariel Gore’s book The Hip Mama Survival Guide and suddenly pregnancy seemed sort of cool, like some sort of wild art project. Ariel’s book was the first thing I had ever read that gave me—poor, queer, weird—permission to bring a kid into the world.”
I picked up Tea’s book wondering how much — or how little — the science and the business of infertility have changed in the past three decades. As I did, Tea started with the relatively simple process of insemination. Unlike me, Tea didn’t head for the nearest fertility clinic, husband in tow. Instead, she procured a turkey baster and an arrangement with Quentin, “a baby drag queen who performs under the name Miss Super Extra Deluxe Pandemonium” and hosts drag bat mitzvahs.
“I went on to explain to Quentin that he would basically pleasure himself somewhere in my house, deposit his man-magic in a warm bowl, and that one of my dear friends would bring it to where I lay…You had me at warm bowl, Quentin replied.”
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As it did me, insemination failed Tea. She, too, upped the ante to IUI, which required a call to a dreaded fertility clinic. The consultation, Tea learns, will cost her $375. “That’s half of a half-off Alexander Wang bag I could maybe find on sale somewhere!”
“Your spouse’s name?” the receptionist asks.
Newly in love, Tea reluctantly answers, “Uh … Orson Kogan.”
“Do you have insurance?”
“Nope.”
“And your spouse, does he?”
“They’re a they, Orson is a they,” she says.
The relationship between Tea and Kogan progresses, along with Tea’s commitment to making not only a baby, but a family — a notion solidified by their first fight. “ ‘Do you still like me?’ I ask pathetically.”
“They drape themselves over me in a full-body hug. ‘Like you? I want to marry you!’ ”
“Well, this sure makes me feel better immediately!... Orson brings me a pint of Three Twins Mint Confetti ice cream from my freezer, so I don’t get up and disturb the sperm ... I eat the rest of my feelings and fall asleep under a pile of cats.”
Conducting her baby-making campaign in 2011 to 2014 instead of 1974 to 1978, with a “they” instead of a “he” gave Tea two significant advantages. One, 37 years of fertility research had yielded IVF, the method responsible for the sharp rise in double-strollers hogging sidewalks in hip ’hoods across the land. Two, Tea had, and exercised, the option of fertilizing her younger partner’s eggs with Quentin’s “man magic,” then implanting them in her own womb, thereby accomplishing our shared goal of a baby biologically linked to both sides of the family — but with no in-laws’ donations required.
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As mine did, Michelle’s Caesarean delivery became a life-or-death emergency. “Even though I know I am possibly dying, I feel very great and can’t take seriously the thought that I might die, what with my opiate-enhanced optimism,” she writes. “Obviously, I am right and I totally don’t die.” Like me, she went home with a healthy miracle baby in her arms and the “wild art project” of mothering underway. “Those weeks after birth, I thought my love — a brand-new, searing, scorching, unbearable love, not only for him, but for Orson — I thought this love would kill me.”
Whether Tea is writing nonfiction — including her PEN Award-winning 2018 essay collection “Against Memoir” — or cult-favorite fiction, her work is her own, ringing in her unmistakable voice: wry, witty, authentic, down-to-earth but also way-up-in-the-clouds. Above all, it’s the self-deprecating, self-aware and ultimately self-loving honesty that distinguishes Tea’s way of life and her irresistible, evocative and wise way of writing about it.
So it’s poignant, and very much in character, that Tea ends “Knocking Myself Up” with a painfully honest afterword. “You would think that such an otherworldly reckoning with loss would have made it simpler, less devastating when Orson left our marriage six years later,” she writes, “but alas, I did sob in the shower and sob snottily onto the cigarettes I smoked alone, late at night on the front steps. These moments echoed back to that overwhelming, prescient love I’d felt those first few weeks as a family. Had I felt our end there, in the liminal space of our beginning?”
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Ever the optimist, Tea provides herself and her readers with the happiest of endings. That baby of hers is now 8 years old, funny and bright and quirky, like his mom. Tea’s love for him, she writes, has taken on “a sharper quality than before the divorce.” And, “I can overhear my new partner, TJ, one room away planning our engagement party. … One of my favorites of his many tattoos is a humble stick and poke high up on his legs reading All’s well/Ends well. And I believe that.”
Meredith Maranis a journalist, critic and the author of “The New Old Me: My Late-Life Reinvention,” among other books.
Knocking Myself Up
A Memoir of My (In)Fertility
By Michelle Tea
Dey Street. 304 pp. $28.99
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