KNOCKING MYSELF UP

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.