ANYTHING THAT MOVES

The singer and composer for the avant-pop group Xiu Xiu boldly dishes on the darkest corners of their desires.

As Stewart writes, their sexuality was anything but conventional. Their first childhood experiences involved being penetrated by a young male friend and taking pictures of a neighbor boy having sex with a stuffed unicorn. Later, the author became a voracious consumer of porn magazines without fully knowing “how jacking off worked.” They first came into contact with the waywardness of adult desire as a preadolescent when their mother’s attractive but “deep-end nutjob” friend absentmindedly fondled her thighs in front of them. At around the same time, Stewart was also experimenting with such actions as inserting knife handles into their anus and putting their penis inside vacuum cleaner hoses. They also experimented with girls, but the author did not meet their first girlfriend—who shaved Stewart’s entire body the first time they slept together—until much later in adolescence. Stewart’s adult sexual experiences have been wide-ranging and diverse, including uninhibited threesomes; relationships with both dominatrixes and female submissives; sex-club escapades with myriad gender identities; anonymous glory hole sex in adult store video booths; and one “unsuitable” relationship with a much younger woman who was “even crazier than I was.” Graphic and crudely humorous, Stewart’s book says little about the successful music career they managed to build at the edges of an unrestrained sex life. Yet their story, which will appeal to only the most adventurous of readers, is anything but a self-satisfied catalog of conquests. Rather, it is a tragicomic depiction of how Stewart used sex to cope with deep—and even tragic—family dysfunction that they hint at but never fully explore. At the beginning, Stewart offers a telling author’s note: “If we are related, please, for the love of God, do not read this book.”

A powerfully erotic memoir that may have a limited audience.