PEN/America Award winner, 2021 Guggenheim fellow, and Drag Queen Story Hour founder Michelle Tea’s new book isn’t the first queer parenting memoir, nor the first by a single queer person who decided to get pregnant, nor the first to look at infertility. Yet the humorous, revealing, sometimes raunchy tale of her path to parenthood at age 40 brings a unique perspective to the genre. Helping Tea along her journey are a drag queen sperm donor, a friend who assists with the inseminations, others who transport black-market fertility medicines from Canada, her genderqueer new love, whom she met while already trying to get pregnant, and a host of medical professionals, some more helpful than others. “I guess I am really drawn to the less traditional, queer, and community-centric mode of making a family,” she writes.
Tea says in the introduction that she wanted her book to reflect “a sense of irreverence, deep (sometimes macabre) humor, a challenging eye, a gossipy tone” to help humanize motherhood and make it “more relatable and accessible.” She has succeeded admirably. This is not a precious memoir about the dewy-eyed joys of pregnancy and motherhood. Tea is forthright about bumps in the road, mysterious bodily fluids, hormonal mood fluctuations, therapy, alcoholism, and being sober. She shows us the complications and work-arounds when one is navigating the “in/fertility industrial complex” as an uninsured, queer person who is (at least initially) bafflingly infertile and running out of time on her biological clock. And her description of the reciprocal IVF process (one person’s egg and the other’s womb), a process my spouse and I also used, is as clear and explanatory as any I’ve seen (although the book is not intended as a how-to guide).
One sentence, however, has a misleading error. Tea writes of her excitement that after marriage equality became legal in California in 2013, she “won’t have to legally adopt” her future child. As I have repeated for years, even married same-sex couples are still advised by all of the major LGBTQ legal organizations to get confirmatory adoptions or court orders of parentage or equivalents. (And as someone who, like Tea, became a parent through reciprocal IVF, via my egg and my spouse’s womb, I’ll also note that it was me, the egg provider, who needed the extra legal paperwork, not my gestating spouse.) See this post for more, and this one on why this is even more important after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. Tea’s one sentence about this was not intended as legal guidance and does not take away from my enthusiastic recommendation of her book, but nor can I let it go unremarked at the current political moment.
Tea’s story is a delightfully original one even as she explores universals like the uncertainty of how parenthood will change one’s life, and, for those with infertility, how and whether one will get there in the first place. Not all readers will use astrology and tarot cards to guide them as Tea does, but we can all find analogies to our own belief systems and the signs and portents that have meaning for us.
Importantly, too, Tea not only affirms by example that queer people can become parents, but insists there is something special about our doing so. “I’m so freaking grateful to be queer and to be in this queer community,” she writes, “And I love that whoever my hopeful, eventual baby ends up being, they are going to benefit from this love and wisdom and history as well.”
As she passes along some of her own love and wisdom and history to readers and our families, we stand to benefit, too. Knocking Myself Up is essential reading for all parents and prospective parents, especially (but not exclusively) us queer ones.
