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Alcoholism
Black Wave: Alcoholism, Creativity, and Today’s Truth
Ariel Gore interviews author Michelle Tea.
Posted September 5, 2016
Michelle Tea’s new dystopian genre-bending novel-memoir excellently pulled my brain into its world of addiction and apocalypse, used bookstores and magical soul-salvage. As a memoirist and teacher of memoir writing, I particularly appreciate the meta moments in Black Wave (The Feminist Press), as Michelle’s character grapples with the responsibility of the storyteller and the failings of perspective.
For longtime readers of Michelle’s work, some of the terrain of Black Wave is familiar—queer West Coast life and the hope and horror of the fantastical—but here she dives completely into the creative mind-fuck of Being Michelle Tea. This is a story we haven’t heard before. I think it’s her masterpiece.
Ariel Gore: So, you wrote a memoir and then your ex asked you to write them out of it. How did you not despair? Can you talk about grappling with that artistically?
Michelle Tea: It was super hard. In original form, Black Wave read as a far more traditional memoir. It still contained fantastical elements, but as I played with myself as a character, having Michelle experience some things that were real and some that were fiction, I had done the same with my ex. He felt way too vulnerable, and as I write about in the book itself, asked that I not. I felt so frustrated, because I had felt like I'd written a book I really liked, and the thought of just throwing it away was heartbreaking. But the more I thought about it, the more good I could see in excising him from the narrative, for so many practical, personal reasons. Once I got a creative plan together I actually felt really exciting.
Ariel Gore: I love the idea of creative planning! There's so much cultural mythology that tells us creativity just happens. How do you make a creative plan?
Michelle Tea: It took me a minute to figure out how I could salvage the book. I was very attached to it as it was, and I didn't like the feeling that my creative output was being controlled by my ex, even though it's very understandable to protest your placement in someone's memoir. I had to let go of it and chill out and then come back to the project understanding the new limitations as creative challenges. I am generally a very subconscious writer and sit down to write with a very vague plan at best. This stream-of-consciousness was still in play, but I first had to excise the parts of the book that told too much of my ex's story, then create a new character to share some of the scenarios I wanted to keep with the Michelle character. I think this sounds more complicated than it is! Basically, the book needed to be restructured, gaps needed to be filled in and I had to think creatively about how to do this in a way that worked for the book and remained enjoyable for me.
If someone tells you from the start, 'don't write about me,' it's easier—I just stay away from that subject. But I didn't have those orders, so I felt like everything was fair game, until it existed. That was much harder. Because I don't write solely to cope; if I did it would have been enough, I guess, to have just written the book. But the things I create are deeply bound to my sense of my self as a writer, my identity, my ego, I guess. It's also my livelihood. So to have created something you think might be good and have an outsider sort of forbid you to share it with the world—it was triggering, to use a tired but true word.
Ariel Gore: I appreciate the way you talk about being a writer as a kind of a mental illness—this compulsion that is maybe not always good for us. Another mega theme in Black Wave is alcoholism. You write about being an alcoholic as part of your identity, saying that more than anything else—more than being queer or a writer or a woman or Polish, that alcoholism is what’s shaped your life. That’s a powerful thing to say. In your thinking, what are the similarities and differences between being an alcoholic and being a writer? Do you think they are rooted in trauma?
Michelle Tea: I think the similarities between being a writer and an alcoholic far outweigh the differences, at least in my experience of them. They both seem to spring from what may be a glitch in my neurochemistry. It absolutely seems like something alive in me that demands expression. I say 'glitch' without judgment; I just mean that most people are not writers and are not alcoholics, and it seems to me that these conditions are so strong inside my body that I can't imagine them not having a physical root there. The desire to write comes into my body as a kind of excitement, a little thrill that wants attention. It’s more or less a craving. If I ignore it, it will pass, but it's not like ignoring it is effortless. It's like getting in there and turning something off. Same with drinking. After 13 years of recovery and doing the physical and mental practices that accompany those traditions, I don't crave alcohol very much anymore, but when I do, it's certainly similar. And even though I don't consciously crave alcohol, I am pretty sure I dream that I'm drinking every single night! That's a bold statement, but I know for sure that I do multiple times a week (two nights ago I was very excited to dig into a mason jar full of crusty cocaine I'd kept around since the 90s, because it was the apocalypse and I figured it would be okay and even helpful), and considering we don't remember most of our dreams I wouldn't be surprised to learn that I had such dreams nightly.
As for trauma, I don't feel that alcoholism or writing is rooted in trauma, not for me at least. I do think it is closely aligned with some part of me which again feels physical, and seems to crave more bigger faster everything now! As it happens, my life has encompassed a fair share of trauma, and I coped with that as both a writer and an alcoholic would, but I believe I was both those things—a writer and an alcoholic—before I experienced significant trauma.
I was trying to write a book since first grade, and I did manage to start a novel and produce a bunch of poems in like third grade, plus I started a class newspaper in second grade. It sort of read like a National Enquirer, like gossiping about who'd gotten chickenpox and whatnot. And I was always drawn to altered states of consciousness. Drugs always sounded fun and exciting to me, ever since my mother pulled me out of bed to watch the TV movie version of Go Ask Alice, ostensibly to scare me away from drugs but it only served to show me an alternative to the life I saw around me that looked cool and exciting. I never wanted to dull my feelings or escape, I wanted to enhance my feelings and be sort of super-present. Of course, that's not what winds up happening. But at the start there was this purity of desire and it was to experience life in the biggest, most hi-fi way I could.
Ariel Gore: I love the scenes in Black Wave that take place in the used bookstore where Michelle works--the way she’s able to commune with failed writers there in a way one can never do in bookstores that only sell what’s new and successful.
Michelle Tea: Used bookstores are where literature truly lives. Of course it's bound to the market somewhat, but the variety of books, especially out of print books, gives you a way more populist selection of writers and writing. When I worked in new bookstores, as a writer, I was always feeling a low-grade anxiety, seeing what authors had put out something new and had a cadre of publicists shoving their work out into the world. At used bookstores it felt more like, here I am in this wild, sort of ancient community of writers. It sort of levels the playing field, which makes for community or something. That's what it felt like to me.
Ariel Gore: You were a well-known writer in San Francisco in the late '90s when you moved to Los Angeles. I remember when you moved. Your life seemed very glamorous from the outside, like you were really ascending in your career the way we’re supposed to, and you were writing about your life which gave your readers a sense that we knew you.
There was this paradox: In your books you portrayed yourself as being incredibly messy, but then once a book is published and celebrated, the author suddenly looks like she’s got her shit together. Like, that Michelle’s been through it and survived! She must have totally figured out the art of overcoming! I get that Black Wave is fiction, but can you talk about the conflict that feels intrinsic in “overcoming” and “success” narratives?
Michelle Tea: I never felt, in publishing those books about being so messy, that I had overcome anything, really. So much was written in real time; what I got out of it was this feeling of like, life is messy and fucked up and that's totally okay. At least my life is. It's interesting to hear that it looked like I was moving to LA, back in the 90s, cause everything was going so great. I didn't know it looked like that! It certainly wasn't feeling great, not at all, but that denial about drugs and alcohol being the reason I was miserable was strong. I think if you had asked me if I was happy I would have said yes, because I'm an optimist and part of me always is. If you were to have asked me what my problem was I would have said it was San Francisco, San Francisco had been ruined and it was depressing me and I had to go. I thought I was handling my drugs okay. My standard of living at that point was pretty low. It had always been, but drugs had lowered it.
Writing How to Grow Up was the first time I really looked at my life from the perspective of, oh wow, I really did overcome something. I really have achieved a sort of success. And it was a really awkward book to write. I guess I'm much more comfortable with presenting myself as a fuckup, and there are a lot of psychological underpinnings for that. I grew up in a broke family that really demonized everyone better off than us, and so you sort of prized your underdog status and hated on anyone who had found a sort of success that we hadn't. When I grew up and went out to the world, totally politicized around class and also feminism and queerness, I was an underdog, and my identity as such helped shaped my literary voice and interests. It took me a long time to sort of unpack all this shit and see how, though these stances had helped me, they were also holding me back. Though there was truth to them, there was also a lot of falsehoods and ego-inflation going on. It wasn't totally honest. On one hand, writing about this in How to Grow Up was liberating. I think a lot of people go through this strange process—being a legitimate underdog, over-identifying with your oppression and eventually understanding you are oppressing yourself. But I also had to shed that comfy underdog identity in order to do it. So I felt super vulnerable.
Ariel Gore: And then with Black Wave you’re really dropping all the bullshit and submerging yourself into the problem of what it means to be a woman writer, a queer writer, a marginalized intellect in a world that demands “universal” characters—meaning very mainstream-if-conflicted straight, male characters. This is a reality that’s tormented me my whole life as a working writer, as someone who has to pay her bills with her writing, not just gaze glamorously out the window of a room of my own. What pushed you over the edge to want to address this so directly in Black Wave?
Michelle Tea: It's something that plagues a lot of non-mainstream writers. We all want the same kind of success as those bigger writers have—readers, praise, fat advances, more opportunity. But, when you are writing about queer things especially, and also to some extent writing that wears its class affiliations, and feminist writing, you constantly come up against this notion that you are a niche market. I haven't read about this experience too often, though I know it is something like all the writers I know struggle with. I really wanted to write about that feeling of wanting to take your life to the next level but being really stumped about how to do it, how difficult and frustrating and heartbreaking it is. And there are so many reasons for it. Poor people don't know how to get money because the system is invested in keeping them poor. Queers are told, even still, that our experiences are second-tier, third-tier. Men can write the same fictional stories that women tell as memoirs and get a huge career, while female memoirists are forever defending their right to even write memoir in the first place. Not to mention the accumulation of PTSD for queer people in the world that just makes a life at the bar among friends seem a lot more feasible and enjoyable than trying to figure out what, if anything, you'll be able to accomplish in the straight world. I really wanted to get into these situations, because I think about it all so often. How anyone succeeds or fails on these mainstream terms; how set up for failure so much of the population is.
Ariel Gore: Some research has come out pointing to writing about our lives as a tool for healing. Does it work that way for you?
Michelle Tea: I don't know that it's so helpful to approach it from this direction. I haven't come to writing with that intention—to heal. I wouldn't recommend it. I mean, it can be helpful to put a vexing story down on paper to get clarity, but I don't think is healing per se. I think you write your story because you are compelled to do so, for mysterious reasons you may never comprehend. Along the way you may heal yourself, or you may worsen your psychological condition. I think I've experienced writing doing both for me. I don't think the writing has been healing so much as the responses to it have been validating. But memoir writing also does this tricky thing where you sort of freeze your story in one particular perception of it, and it is very easy for you to believe that's 'the story,' and you tell it so much (read from it, etc.) that you never get the opportunity to see it from another angle, or even know another angle is possible. I think it's important to know, when you are gunning for the 'truth' in your memoir writing, that the truth you're going to get is just today's truth.
