But in the 2010s, she’s a settled adult with an apartment, a girlfriend and a record player, and there’s space for Gene Loves Jezebel and Sonic Youth in her life once again. That music belonged to her adolescent immersion in goth and punk, she writes, and it “made no sense with this new me who had chopped off her hair, gone vegan, sold all her ‘objectifying’ clothing, and was busy purging all male-created culture from her life”. In the throes of what she describes as her “Radical Lesbian Separatist Nervous Breakdown”, she moved to California and left her once-beloved vinyl behind in her Massachusetts hometown. Take the series of pieces she wrote for the now-defunct website xoJane about rebuilding her teenage record collection. You can be rattling along under the spell of, say, 2003 Tea (and she is an intoxicating writer, a mix of swagger and bathos, delivering sentences that land with the snap and force of a punch) then suddenly a voice cuts in from the present, and the whole vehicle shudders on its wheels. It’s an anxiety about the way writing can trap us in our own past selves, and it might explain one of the strangest features of Against Memoir, which is that several of these articles have been unsubtly amended to be more representative of the contemporary Tea than the one who originally wrote them. At a reading, Tea meets the woman for whom a long-ago ex left her, and on whom she revenged herself in the novel Valencia: “Times change and people change and new information comes to light, and forever in the pages of that book Sara is the destroyer of my young lesbian romance. But, as she admits in the title piece here, it’s something she feels ambivalent about. More than most, she has made an industry out of writing her own life, either in straight-up memoir or adapted into autofiction (most recently, 2016’s bracingly apocalyptic Black Wave).

A nyone who knows anything about the American author Michelle Tea will recognise the joke in the title of this collection of journalism.

Valencia by michelle tea