TOUCHED OUT
In American society, women are expected to prioritize their children, often by pushing their bodies to the limit and ignoring their own desires and needs. Although parenthood is often presented in media and politics as a choice, motherhood, for many, feels like an assault—one girls are coerced into from a young age.
When author Amanda Montei became a parent, mothers she knew spoke of the physical overwhelm of caring for children as though it were par for the course. But on the eve of #MeToo, as she struggled to adjust to the new demands on her body, she began to see a connection between how women were feeling in motherhood and the larger culture of assault. Memories of being used, violated, and seen by men resurfaced. She had the desperate urge to finally say no, though she didn’t know how, or to whom she might say it.
Like many mothers, she struggled with the physicality of caring for children, but even more with the growing lack of autonomy she felt in her personal and professional life. The conditions of modern American parenthood—the lack of paid leave and affordable childcare, the isolation and alienation, the distribution of labor in her home, and the implicit demands of marriage—were not what she had expected. She found herself asking a familiar question, one that had followed her since girlhood: Had she really asked for this?
Written with the intellectual and emotional precision of writers like Roxane Gay and Leslie Jamison, and drawing on classic feminist thinkers such as bell hooks, Silvia Federici, and Adrienne Rich, as well as on popular culture from The Bachelor to Look Who’s Talking, the author draws connections between caregiving, consent, reproductive control, and the sacrifices women are expected to make throughout their lives. Exploring the stories we tell about psychology, childbirth, sexuality, the family, the overwhelm mothers feel trying to be “good,” and the tender bonds that form between parent and child, Touched Out delivers a powerful critique of American rape culture and its continuation in the institution of motherhood, and considers what it really means to care in America.
In this stunning blend of memoir, theory, and cultural criticism, a mother examines the intersection between misogyny and motherhood, considering how caregivers can take back their bodies and pass on a language of consent
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Two Memoirs
Jaded Ibis Press, 2015
Two Memoirs is written in two voices— Amanda's and her mother’s. In these dueling coming-of-age memoirs spanning early Hollywood and 90s Los Angeles, both mother and daughter explore how addiction, American mythology, class, and their proximity to celebrity shape their lives.
Confronting the instability of memory and the difficult search for truth in memoir, Two Memoirs is a biography of a mother, an autobiography of a daughter, a story about being a girl in the shadow of Hollywood—but also a conversation, an argument, and a tribute to the way our mothers' words follow and guide us.
“In this deft, funny, sad, and strong memoir, Amanda Montei shows a remarkable skill for zooming in on the hilarious, unbearable, sometimes heartbreaking detail (watch for the polyps!), then panning out to give a memorable portrait of a time and place (Los Angeles in the 80s and 90s, with all its deceptive, and sometimes real, glamour). It’s as much discovery narrative as recovery narrative, as its author explores the deep mysteries of both mothers and memory with a wry and steady hand.”
—Maggie Nelson, author of Bluets, The Argonauts and The Red Parts
“Amanda Montei deftly evokes the splendors and miseries of her childhood in LA, a fabulous country of the mind, a land unlike any other. The riches to rags narrative she offers breaks your heart at a hundred intersections; it is a story populated by the demonic energies of family and school life, polished and broken into shards of crystal… With relentless subconscious force Montei’s genealogy slams against her personal life story, creating a stunning reverb effect.”
—Dodie Bellamy, author of The TV Sutras and The Letters of Mina Harker
The Failure Age
Limited edition (sold out), Bloof Books, April 2014
The thirty-three short sections of The Failure Age flip through the daily lives of the yearning-to-be-iconic Woman and her violin-eating Husband, with occasional interruptions by Mother. Subtle, sexy, and hilarious by turns.
“The protagonist walks the Failure Age as if it was a runway and she was a supernatural, rather than a supermodel. She is a triptych of Ariels—the female embodiment of aspiration—the very breath of ambition, the aerial view—as it were—of the glass ceiling (putting the ass back into it, naturally). She is, in part, Disney’s Ariel from The Little Mermaid—a footless footloose Princess putting her foot in her mouth, dreaming of ideals while misnaming things snarfblats and dinglehoppers. …She is, in part, Shakespeare’s Ariel from ‘The Tempest’ bound to serve either the silenced and pregnant witch Sycorax (the mater mal, the symbolic bad breast) or bound to serve the unscrupulous slave-master and colonizer Prospero (the papa capital, the symbolic father). She is, in part, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, weary of obligatory sensuality and exhausted by the relentless objectification that corners her every ambition.”
—Divya Victor, Harriet at the Poetry Foundation (read the rest, including an interview with Amanda)
Dinner Poems
Co-authored with Jon Rutzmoser, Bon Aire Projects, 2014
For five months, these poets, meeting at their dinner table, paused to jot down ruminations, then withdrew to their bedroom to limn their dueling/mutual misunderstandings of eternal questions of love, coexistence, and bodily presence.
"This collaboration opens up what the everyday means to two people in love and what every day can be when opened up to the other. We need this."
—Joe Hall, author of The Devotional Poems
“…Dinner Poems forces us to ask: what is collaborative writing as a genre? Moreover, what is the bare minimum at which a genre can function and still be recognized as itself?”
—Holly Melgard & Joey Yearous-Algozin, from the Introduction to Dinner Poems