Cate Simpson

Edmund White is prolific. Not content with his trilogy of autobiographical novels, which span a period of three decades, White also produced a much-condensed memoir called My Lives. He is now working on another set in 1970s New York. In addition to his memoirs, White has written eight novels, one book of short stories and three biographies documenting the lives of other prolific gay writers.

The latest of these is a short but fascinating biography of 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud. "I always wanted to write about Rimbaud because he was an idol of my adolescence," says White. "I think a lot of adolescents like him. He’s a favourite of Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith. They’ve all written songs about him."

Boorish and hard to get along with, Rimbaud alienated almost all of his contemporaries. It didn’t help that he and an older poet named Paul Verlaine were one of the most notorious homosexual couples of their day. But by the time of his death Rimbaud had been hailed as the father of symbolism by the same people who had once shunned him.

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So Many Ways to Sleep Badly, the second novel by radical queer activist and outrageously snappy dresser Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, comes out this month after several painstaking years in the making. "It’s about when you get to a point in your life and nothing is coming together as you expected," says Sycamore, "and you face the overwhelm of the everyday."

Sycamore has edited several anthologies of writing on queer and gender politics, as well as published two works of gloriously disjointed autobiographical fiction. Like her first novel Pulling Taffy, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly offers up the events of Sycamore’s own life in a frantically paced stream of consciousness narrative. Her writing swings between poetic and horrifying as her ambiguously gendered central character lies awake in San Francisco’s rundown Tenderloin district, disturbed by roaches and rats and the real or imagined pigeons in the ceiling of her apartment, before taking off to service a variety of seedy men in the city’s most expensive hotels.

"For me what makes it a novel is not necessarily whether the exact events that happened in the book actually happened to me — most of them did," says Sycamore. "Memoir has become that dominant publishing industry buzz word for anything considered a little different. But, as we know, most of those memoirs are just lies. So I’d rather express my truth in fiction than present lies as if they are something that actually happened to me."

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"It’s my nature and my natural instinct to be completely transparent about my life," says US author Michelle Tea. "I don’t feel any sort of shame about anything I’ve done so it doesn’t occur to me to not talk about it." Tea’s first two memoirs, The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America and Valencia, follow her through hookups and relationships, temp jobs and sex work, and through myriad drunken nights in San Francisco, Boston and Tucson.

This month Tea appears at Toronto’s Writing Outside the Margins, a one-day festival of queer literary arts presented by Xtra, also featuring readings from the creator and star of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, John Cameron Mitchell, and Canadian MC, spoken-word performer and singer Kinnie Starr.

Tea’s books provide much-needed proof that it’s not just middle-class male intellectuals who can meander across America making love and poetry and relying upon a combination of their wits and luck to get by. But as she gets older Tea’s writing and her life are changing.

"I’m sitting against my wall completely hemmed in by boxes," says Tea on the phone from San Francisco where she has just finished moving house. "Yesterday I spent like $150 on this do-it-yourself put-it-together clothing rack, and it fell on me and I broke three parts of it. I just rigged up this crazy busted rack using a pole and a bike rack, it’s totally going to collapse on me. You have to lean on these particular skills when you’re moving and I don’t have them. I don’t have real-world skills."

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"It was brutal to write," says Augusten Burroughs of A Wolf at the Table, a new memoir about his father. "I hadn’t really planned to write about my father. It was sort of like water under the bridge — that’s gone and I’m never gonna have to think about that again. But then when he died in 2005 I didn’t feel the way I expected. I thought I would feel this wave of grief or sadness or longing or just regret over what we didn’t have. But instead I felt free for the first time."

Burroughs shot to fame in 2003 with his first memoir, Running with Scissors, which recounts his bizarre adolescence spent living with his mother’s psychiatrist and his eccentric family — a story so strange and unusual that Burroughs has been accused more than once of fabricating it entirely (these claims have not so far held up in court).

His second memoir, Dry, dealt (perhaps not surprisingly, given the content of the first) with his recovery from alcoholism years later in New York. Now, in A Wolf at the Table, Burroughs has returned to his childhood in Massachusetts where he explores his troubled relationship with his alcoholic and, he claims, sociopathic father.

Wolf is a chilling memoir that is markedly different in tone from his other books, which are full of black comedy even in their bleakest moments. But humour would be out of place in this latest installment in Burroughs’ richly unusual life, which is told from a young child’s uncomprehending point of view. The young Burroughs starts out craving his father’s attention, but gradually grows terrified of the shadowy and dangerous presence that stalks his house at night, starves his guinea pig and turns his docile pet dog into a ferocious beast while Burroughs and his mother are away from the house for just a few nights.

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