Book Club: A one-of-a-kind exploration of abasement, depravity, joy, and embarrassment, Jamie Stewart’s memoir has it all

This book is honest, very funny and like all of Stewart’s work, it holds both a tender and unashamed vulnerability.

Jamie Stewart is best-known as the singer and composer of the avant-pop group Xiu Xiu. Founded in 2002, the band has released 15 full-length albums to date. Stewart has also collaborated on several large-scale projects and concerts with the artist Danh Vo at the Guggenheim, Walker Museum, and at the Kitchen; and with the blessing and support of David Lynch, the band was commissioned by the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane to reinterpret the music of his landmark work Twin Peaks.

This journey of fleshy self-discovery and queer awakening makes for an extraordinary, cringy, unputdownable epic in miniature, burning always with radical and often shocking self-criticism.

Anything That Moves will be released on the 4th of April and can be preordered on the And Other Stories website. The Sheffield Telegraph publishes here an exclusive extract.

Extract from Anything That Moves

DOTTY CISNEROS

For a while, I went to a tiny school with about twenty-five students per grade. The kids all stayed at their desks and the teachers changed rooms for each subject. Almost everyone there started in kindergarten, so they’d grown up together and were intensely territorial. I started in the fifth grade and was teased mercilessly the entire year for saying the word like a lot, for parting my hair in the middle, and for only wearing black, iron-on, movie-monster T-shirts. I cried to my parents, and they answered in the way they often did, with a rousing, “Life isn’t fair.” In some ways, their motto made me more realistic and self-reliant, and in some ways, it made me callous and viciously self-preservatory. The meanest girl in class—with whom I would later share my first kiss underwater at a pool party, and with whose older brother my sister would unhappily lose her virginity—called me “Rainbow Man” relentlessly, like a hundred times a day and for reasons I have never understood. She had a flat, turned-up pig nose, and the brother had a pig nose too. His unachieved goal in life was to manage a Fatburger in the Valley. She now works as a bank manager on the Death Star.

The next year, I wasn’t fresh fruit anymore and therefore was obliged to terrorize the next new kid. As a class, we managed to run off at least one incoming student per semester—one for being a hesher, one for having what we decided was a Russian accent, one for wearing a pelvic brace as a result of having survived a near-fatal car accident, and, as if we were all the low-foreheaded employees of some smalltown meat-packing plant in the 1950s, one for dressing fashionably. On and on the breaking wheel must spin!

Dotty started in the eighth grade, the last grade that school offered. She was the tallest person in the class, which saved her from being hassled by the feckless boys, but she was the most physically developed, which meant the trendy girls gave her a ton of shit. Half the class was obsessed with her but afraid of her powerful grip, and half the class wanted to be her but was threatened by her vast puberty.

She seemed to float above the hand-wringing mayhem of the court. Some days she read by herself under a tree, some days she hung out with the nerd girls and traded Robotech comics, and some days she played basketball with the couple jock boys and took their five-dollar sunglasses if they lost. From what I could tell, she wasn’t openly messing around with anyone in our school, though there weren’t that many of us and we had all already made out with everyone else, so what would it have mattered. I assumed she must have had an older someone at another school. We didn’t talk much.

Our lockers were inside our classrooms; mine was a lower one, behind the teacher’s desk. I was starting to get really into music at this point, trying to be an art fag, and was crouched down, taping a magazine page of David Byrne onto the inside of my locker door. Dotty slid up and faced me with her knees against my knees.