A PRODUCT OF GENETICS (AND DAY DRINKING)

A former journalist from Arkansas reflects on her formative escapades with a devil-may-care attitude.

Gutierrez’s memoir is tough but sweet, as she relays her often outrageous adventures in a fierce, funny, and ferocious narrative voice. Sometimes crass, occasionally insightful, often plainspoken, and unapologetically frank, she is also grounded and refreshingly self-deprecating. “I am an amateur in a vast pool of amateurs who are way better at pretending that they know what in the hell is going on than I am,” writes the author. With comic zeal, she covers a lot of ground, including growing up in rural Arkansas, shenanigans involving drugs, dental issues, and choosing a sperm donor. She also charts her experiences with Christian zealotry, meeting her firefighter paramedic wife, who “has the refinement and movie taste of most nineteen-year-old guys,” her three children (she is simultaneously a conscientious mother and candid about her parenting abilities and motherhood), and coming out. “There was never a time when I wasn’t queer,” she writes. “There was, however, a super-long stretch in my life during which I had no idea that I was.” A 1990s kid, Gutierrez offers a survey of the decade’s pop culture (Friends, Titanic, and Ace of Bass are a few fixations) and junk food (“We were the first generation to eat every single meal beneath the trans-fat saturated golden arches of McDonalds”) in the days before the internet. “We rode skateboards, played pixelated video games, and threw dirt and curse words to our hearts’ content,” writes the author. “We were nineties kids, and we didn’t have to give a shit.” She admits that her brain works like a 300-page TikTok video, and her memoir often reads like one. Still, the text is suffused with an appealingly wise grit.

Not groundbreaking literature, but an entertaining and endearing journey.