Read Online How to Grow Up by Michelle Tea - Free Book Online

I’d built my life into something that constantly fed me surprises, and no matter what, I found a way to get by.
    For years I’d quit my menial jobs whenever they got in the way of me doing something for my writing—participating in a reading, going on tour. I’d dealt with my persistent fear of poverty not by working my ass off to snag high-paying jobs, but with a Zen-like acceptance of life’s impermanence, and a fragile comfort in the
now
. As in,
Right now you’re okay. Right now you have some money, have a home, are well fed. And if poverty strikes again, what will happen? You’ll have less, and you’ll be fine. You’ll write, and be with friends, and live cheaply. Just like before.
    Finally, I turned to the ultimate conundrum decider—the old deathbed scenario. When I was on my deathbed, would I want to look back on a life filled with fear-based fidelity to a series of jobs that were not my true passion?
    No. I wanted to have lived. To have taken chances. To
not
have settled for the poor person’s reduced experience of life, shackled to a job, making ends meet, but to have lived as much like a rich person as I could, with their fuller experience of the world, with travel and art and proximity to things beautiful. I wanted to live like I wasn’t afraid, like life was there for my taking.
    When I was on my deathbed, surrounded by young, adoring fans, would I regale them with the time I taught a fiction class?
    No. I would tell them about the time I went to Paris Fashion Week.
    And so I chose Paris, as if there was ever a question. And I gathered purse-loads of glamorous anecdotes to share with whoever might be sitting by my deathbed hoping for a story. I would tell them about how, in the mad rush of people trying to get backstage after the Jeremy Scott show, I nudged up against Kanye West. His then-girlfriend, Amber Rose, was wearing one of the mint-green cropped motorcycle jackets the designer had just sent down the runway, along with a pair of Chanel sunglasses topped in the brand’s iconic dripping gold chains. At Vivienne Westwood, staged in what looked like a condemned French bank, I watched Pamela Anderson horse-stomp along the model path, wearing a tutu starched to look permanently blown up by a gust of wind over her bum. A stand of paparazzi on risers held their cameras like a brass section about to play; when she rounded the bend and headed straight for them the clash of flashes was blinding. Backstage at Stella McCartney I recognized a curly-haired woman as my favorite photographer, Nan Goldin. I struck up an awkward conversation with her, and was rescued by a television crew asking her what she thought of Paris Fashion Week. “Yes,” she replied enigmatically, referencing the surreal responses Andy Warhol would give to journalists. When Olivier Theyskens’s last collection for Nina Ricci came to a close, an army of models in strange shoes with no heels and long whispery gownsand odd hats that dipped into their faces stormed the runway en masse to the thundering sound of the Cure’s
Pornography
, and I actually cried from the whirl of emotion the spectacle produced inside me. Backstage at Karl Lagerfeld I watched Sophia Loren sip champagne in a long fur coat. Olivier Zahm, the grizzled, roguish editor of
Purple Fashion
magazine, asked me to lie upon a carpeted floor at a hotel room after-party, so he could best photograph the tattoo on the back of my leg for his blog. I obliged. At the Loewe show—which I learned was pronounced
Low-vay
and not
Low
—I sat directly across from Anna Wintour and her tremendously cool sidekick, Grace Coddington, all of us at tiny, elegant tables heaped with espresso and champagne.
    When the band took the stage at the Fendi party, tears sprang to my eyes, and I turned around to see that Annie was crying, too. Like me and like Annie, the band commanding Fashion Week’s attention had been raised poor, in