A refreshingly entertaining, lighthearted memoir about a serious topic.
An award-winning writer chronicles her attempts to get pregnant.
Guggenheim fellow and PEN/America Award winner Tea recounts in intimate, comic, and irreverent detail her four-year quest to get pregnant, beginning in 2011, when she was 40, a recovering alcoholic and addict who stabilized her mental state with antidepressants. Although happily independent, she felt firm in her decision to have a baby. Describing herself as “mostly gay,” the author realized that getting pregnant through sex with a man was unlikely. Among her many gay friends, Quentin, a “virile, healthy 28-year-old” drag queen, happily agreed to be her sperm donor, coming to her service every time she ovulated. A close friend stood by to shoot semen into her vagina with a syringe; soon, Orson, Tea’s new queer lover, took over the process. Tea’s journey to motherhood involved tarot cards, astrology, and witches; a loving queer community; a caring partner; and medical practitioners sympathetic to a queer woman’s desire for a baby. Though many anecdotes are amusing, she reveals the emotional and physical cost of the “baby-making/baby-failing roller coaster” that completely dominated her life. At first, she writes, she was “determined to graciously accept any inability to actually have a baby,” but after months of failed attempts, both with her homemade insemination technique and in vitro fertilization, she admits that “the feelings that accompany the surge of blood in my underwear are not so mild.” Tea shares the particular challenges that queer and trans individuals encounter when seeking medical help, and she records the bodily changes, mood swings, fears, and anxieties that she experienced, including worries about her response to her baby’s gender. “Folks in my world have separated sex from gender so wholly that there is no way to comfortably relax into the idea of a baby girl being like this, or a baby boy being like that.” Nevertheless, “whatever potential the baby expresses,” she felt ready.
A refreshingly entertaining, lighthearted memoir about a serious topic.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-321062-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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