Blurb Me

As you might already know, I won the 2023 Quill Prose Award from Red Hen Press for my memoir Nine Grudges: The Spiteful Origins of the Happiest Dyke on Earth, to be published in September 2026. My memoir’s story goes like this: When I was 22, I wrote my dad a letter, asking him to apologize for nine incidents. To my surprise, he wrote back.

When my final edits on the manuscript were due to Red Hen, I also needed to send some blurbs for the book’s back cover. At first, I had a whole list of famous authors I wanted to contact, but, in the end, that felt like a big ask for people I don’t know, taking precious time away from their own writing to read my book.

So, ultimately, I contacted only two writers I don’t know personally, Michelle Tea and John Waters.

I wrote John Waters a long, handwritten letter about how I watched Polyester with my brothers on the family VCR back in the 80s, and about how Pecker is one of my all-time top five movies.

I met John Waters in New York once, back in 2007, at some promotional event for a new vodka brand, and when I told him he was my hero, he looked surprised, like why hadn’t I chosen an Nobel prize winner or a cancer researcher, instead of him, the director of my favorite subversive trashy movies? But that’s just it. In the 80s and 90s, John Waters was one of the few queer artists who was rebellious and unapologetic about both his queerness and his hilarious disdain for American family life.

In the 80s, the only images of Lesbians I saw on screen were: Wendy and Lisa playing the keyboards hand-over-hand for a few seconds on a Prince video, Magenta and Colombia brushing each other’s hair in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve getting it on for a brief scene in The Hunger. That’s it. Almost nothing. The three sequences together total less than two minutes.

We didn’t have any videos by famous queer people telling us, “It Gets Better,” because, in the 80s, celebrities were not allowed to be simultaneously famous and openly queer.

But then there was John Waters.

In the Waters film Female Trouble, drag queen Divine’s teen character Dawn Davenport stomps on Christmas ornaments and topples the family Christmas tree, pinning her mother under it, all because her parents gifted her flats instead of cha cha heels.

I loved Waters’s irreverence in this scene. Sure, the hapless parents didn’t deserve abuse at the hands of their own daughter. But Waters made this clueless pair feel like proxies for our politicians and church leaders who were whipping up anti-teen hysteria with just-say-no-to-weed campaigns and censorship of heavy metal lyrics—it was gleeful fun to watch an adult drag queen dressed as a teen girl go ape shit on Mom and Dad.

I loved it that Waters himself and his actors and some of his characters were queer. I loved it that their queerness wasn’t the problem. The real problem was the stifling straight world and it’s constant heaping of shame onto anyone not toeing the line. No one mocked that world more mercilessly than Waters.

John Waters made it known that queer was a badass, punk-rock fuck you to middle America. That fuck-you attitude is what kept me from killing myself in the 80s.

I haven’t heard back from John Waters… yet. But, if my letter to him was my one chance to tell him he saved my life, then so be it. I will never regret that ask.

Michelle Tea is another one of my queer heroes. Her autobiographical novel Valencia was first published in 2000, at a time when dyke stories didn’t get much play.

I loved how Tea got it right. Straight-world depictions of Lesbians always held us as lonely, unfashionable women too unattractive to catch a man. Tea negated that propaganda by exploring the highs and lows of dyke dating in the 90s Mission District in San Francisco, the wildness, the fun, and the eventual self-destructive streak.

I couldn’t afford San Francisco rent, but even the Lesbian scene in Phoenix was more Well of Horniness than Well of Loneliness, and Tea captured that exciting truth.

What joy it was to finally see myself in a published book.

Tea has since published some excellent nonfiction including Knocking Myself Up, How to Grow Up, and Against Memoir.

I reached out to Michelle Tea for a blurb, let her know what her work meant to me, and mentioned my Red Hen prize and mutual friends who could vet me. I was thrilled when she agreed to blurb my book! Not only that, but I was able to meet up with her in Los Angeles at the AWP conference, this March, where I snapped the photo for this post.

Here is her blurb for my book: “Nine Grudges grabs hold of you like a best friend ready to divulge terrible, wonderful secrets. Funny, soulful, absolutely unafraid to look life in the eye, Molly McCloy's tough and tender voice is addictive. An electric debut!”

So, my point here is that it doesn’t hurt to ask. But ask politely. And ask writers whose taste aligns with your own work. Know their work. Know what to say about their work. You might get a no. You might get nothing. Or you might get a photo of yourself with one of your literary heroes. You never know…until you try.