By Matthue Roth

WRITING A MEMOIR is hard work. You brew coffee, start working, and – after 10 hours of solid typing, when a friend/loved one/dude on the next barstool over asks what you did all day – you attempt to reply, "I talked about myself" in a way that does not make you sound like the most self-involved, patronizing bastard ever.

Now, it's not even enough to be egotistical.

You have to be egotistical with enthusiasm.

Late last year Cleis Press asked me to pitch them book ideas. Book ideas. I had a zillion book ideas lying around: poetry (I'd just been on Def Poetry Jam), short stories, the novel I'd been writing since high school.

"No," they said. "We want your memoir."

A memoir. I'd never written a memoir. I was only 25; I hadn't even lived much yet. Sure, I had lied and told the Cleis people that I had a book's worth of nonfiction pieces, but that was lies – some CD reviews and an article about a book about Ronald Reagan were neither long enough nor worthy enough for bookhood.

But they were asking, and I was flattered enough to lie more. "I'll clean up some pieces and send you something in two weeks," I said to the publishers over the phone, already reaching for a pen to list down Events That Have Happened to Me, anything I'd ever experienced that I might be able to exaggerate into a 10-page chapter.

The actual plotting of a memoir is tricky. Nobody seriously expects you to remember your life verbatim, what people wore and the texts of exact conversations and what song was on the radio at the time. Think of your life as a book and the memoir as the movie adaptation; nobody expects it to be as good as the original, but if you get away with a few sharp one-liners and some attractive costars, you're doing alright.

Until recently the memoir was primarily a literary form for faded movie stars and former presidents. In many of those books, the subject wasn't even necessarily the person but the events and rumors that surrounded that person, or – as in the case of Brooke Hayward and Priscilla Presley – the events and rumors that surrounded other people.

But now, modern lit has developed a genre that's sometimes called New Memoir, sometimes called Sudden Autobiography, and sometimes Confessional Nonfiction. These books are chatty, gossipy, fast-paced, and fiery; they're written in that tell-all confessional style as though you were a priest and a famous person were sitting on the other side of a private wooden box, whispering in your ear.

Only, the subjects aren't actual famous people.

Instead, they're people who are mostly famous for writing about themselves.

San Francisco has played a leading role in the rise of New Memoirists, among them Dave Eggers, whose A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is still, years after its original release, getting regular airplay in bookstore windows; and Bay Guardian contributor Michelle Tea, whose 1999 book, Valencia, became an instant cult classic among young queers and the new generation of writers and spoken word poets. JT LeRoy's lush and disturbing books – the surreal Sarah and the less mythical but still hypnotic collection The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things – seem to hinge between based-on-a-true-story events and modern American folklore. And Tea and Clint Catalyst's recent New Memoir collection, Pills, Thrills, Chills, and Heartache, featuring Charlie Anders, horehound stillpoint, and several other San Francisco authors, is almost an indie-press Norton Anthology of New Memoir Writing.

Jennifer Traig's Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood takes its cues equally from old-Jewish-grandmother stories. Unpretentious, unassuming, and funny as hell, Traig seems to be barely aware of an audience looking over her shoulder as she recounts what, in other circumstances, might be a by-the-numbers catalog of the most embarrassing things ever to happen to a tween-becoming-teenage girl.

And it all starts in the context of 12-year-old Jennifer Traig's deciding to become an Orthodox Jew just as she's diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The book's opening scene finds Jennifer standing in the laundry room, defending herself to her father after having emptied all her worldly possessions – including barrettes and sneakers – into the washing machine. Earlier that evening, Jennifer explains, her sister microwaved bacon, smelling up the whole house, and she was only trying to remove the smell.

Her father fishes her Nikes out of the wash while Jennifer, in pajamas and a yarmulke, looks on. After that, the scene zooms out, sorting through other manifestations of Jennifer's OCD like a wide-screen-movie pan of her life.

Then, in a soliloquy that puts us dead in the center of preteen Jennifer's brain, she zeroes in on her scrupulosity, watching it like a victim in a car crash, able to see everything and totally powerless to stop it: "Anything you do or say or wear or hear or eat or think, you examine in excruciatingly minute detail. Will I go to hell if I watch HBO? Is it sacrilegious to shop wholesale? What is the biblical prohibition on organic produce?"

Traig writes about Judaism in a style that neither proselytizes nor loads up with ritualistic language. As Jennifer in the book learns about Jewish law and rituals, we learn about them too, and she finds humor in it all that's always deserved and never condescending. When she learns the biblical injunction to leave a portion of one's harvest for the poor, she leaves the corners of her yard unmowed so beggars may collect her family's excess crabgrass.

Books like The Chosen, in my public high school, got annoying and irritating when the non-Jewish and the non-Orthodox kids had to try and discern what words like kipah and kreplach meant with only the vaguest hints from the rest of the story. But when Traig writes about learning Jewish law, she's so accessible that you can't even tell you're not supposed to understand. Gently, she glides us into the understanding of the extremeness and the eccentricities of both scrupulosity and Orthodox Judaism by letting us discover them as she discovers them:

There were so many laws, and they were so weird .... What was I to do with this: "And whoever sits on anything on which he who has the discharge has sat shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the evening." Suddenly I would have to determine who had sat at my desk before me, and whether or not he had had the discharge recently. Great.

In Devil in the Details, there's almost no removal between the 12-year-old protagonist and her much older self, who's doing the writing. Without resorting to something as cheesy as a conversation between me-then and me-now, both Jennifers coexist in the narrative, never breaking the in-the-moment stream of the story, but drifting through it, with echoes of her future self lecturing her former self on how exactly she screwed up.

(Kevin Killian's story from Pills, Thrills, Chills, and Heartache is just that: he writes the script for a conversation between himself as a 20-year-old and his current, fortysomething self. In short, funny turns, the younger Killian belittles the older one, asks questions with a self-awareness like Odysseus returning home from the war, and ultimately tries to seduce his older persona.)

Devil in the Details, though, is most brilliant when it's least self-aware. Traig doesn't try to make herself into a star. In all her nose picking and list making, we get an honest and funny picture of preteen Jennifer at her most embarrassing but also at her most frank and lovable – yeah, I said it. Lovable. The scenes that have the most impact are those rendered like memories, the kind of memories that don't make it into the family photo album. After Jennifer's sister feeds her a grape and Jennifer, hyperaware of its caloric content, spits it onto the floor, her sister picks it up – tangled with lint and cat hair – and pops it into her own mouth.

"Ith delithuth," her sister exclaims, epitomizing the darker, dorkier side that none of us recognize within ourselves, but when we see it in our sisters, our parents – or, less uncomfortably, somebody else's sister and somebody else's parents – recognize as love.

Zoe Trope's coming-out, coming-of-age memoir, Please Don't Kill the Freshman, is the diametric opposite. While Traig's story is about very specific subject matter (Orthodox Judaism and OCD), Trope writes about anything that crosses her mind. The book, arranged in dated entries, is her high school journal. It starts with a rant on extra-credit work that's a cross between a marijuana haze, a bored-in-school haze, and an existential crisis all at once.

Then she throws us into her life with a breathless, sudden energy that's like the guy in Quantum Leap jumping into a stranger's body in mid-conversation. Freshman tells its story in these moments, snapshots of a day that build into a greater whole, like a Magic Eye book jumping into three dimensions. Trope drops anecdotes with rapid-fire timing, with only the space between entries to serve as downtime. We think there's no connection between the scattered scenes of Zoe at the meeting of her school literary magazine and Zoe lusting after her gay best friend and Zoe playing brass in her school band.

The sequences of entries go quickly. You can almost see Zoe digging out a pencil and a grimy notebook, on a bus or between classes, scribbling down something that occurs to her. The entries are rarely longer than a page or two, and rarely directly connect with the preceding or following entries. Oh, there are times when they do – when Zoe's best friend Linux Shoe goes away for the summer and she writes letters, retelling stories from their relationship and recasting them in the light of her just-realized romance, and when Zoe's other best friend is raped.

But, like any rewarding peeking inside a journal, the book transcends the moments, building to a greater story, sacrificing little things like cognitive order and plot tempo because, geez, it's her life. She doesn't talk about being queer or being punk-rock as a theoretical approach, or even as the Face of Queer Teen Life. Instead, she talks about arguing with her principal about her presentation for Diversity Week, agonizes about wanting to kiss her gay-boy friends and about how her conversations with her girlfriend change when her girlfriend becomes a boy. The subject of Zoe's girlfriend, whom she meets online, is the most understated part of the book. Their relationship is described in a soft, almost poetic way, avoiding sensationalism and a lengthy setup. Instead, her introduction of Scully is swift: "Dear Scully, It's raining hard tonight and I'm thinking about you." We understand who she is and what she means to Zoe. We keep reading, only now we know Zoe is in love.

These are the kinds of stories Zoe shares. The kinds of things we all remember having happened, but nobody remembers that they actually did happen.

And then, halfway through the book, Zoe talks about selling her book. You're on the edge of your seat – will she find a publisher? Will she get famous? – until you realize, duh, you're holding the book in your hands.

First Zoe finds a small independent press in Portland to publish her 40-page chapbook. She goes on a West Coast tour. It climaxes in San Francisco, where she meets, with stars in her eyes, underground celeb performance poets Thea Hillman and Justin Chin. In the publishing world, Zoe Trope is, arguably, bigger news than most of her heroes (when Trope sold her book, several major publishers fought in a bidding war that reportedly topped out in a six-figure deal), but what really blows us away is the unfettered mania when Trope gushes about them.

Yes, this is teen angst. Yes, Trope has not yet realized that all any writer really is is a measure of marketability, or at least, she has not yet succumbed to being OK with that realization. And, yes, sometimes she writes a little close to the surface, yelling at her editor, ranting – "She says she wants a 'narrative arc' and 'character tension' and I want to tell her this is MY LIFE not a novel for her to rearrange but my life and my story" – too much about the book to really feel like part of the book, so self-aware it hurts.

But then, four pages later, Zoe writes:

My fingers are guilty and my palms are red and you caught them, look.... I'm not really going crazy. It's just my hands. My stupid ugly hands. They are disconnected from my mind and they are trying to sabotage me. I don't think anything that I write but it's merely my hands trying to destroy me. I could cut off my fingers ... but how would I draw turkeys at Thanksgiving?

And it hits us: in the hands of the right author, even writing about cutting off fingers can be beautiful. This is the kind of poetry that Trope finds in her life. These are the reasons people write books.

But the art of a memoir is reducing yourself from a person to a two-dimensional character, and then reinflating yourself and breathing life into this character that is not exactly you – and Michelle Tea does this in her latest book, a graphic-novel collaboration with Laurenn McCubbin called Rent Girl.

"I am trying to give you a landscape, a crumpled map. I am trying to extract, thread by thread, the causes and preoccupations that provided me with the willingness to pursue this occupation. I wanted to try things, everything, especially things that are illegal and have a faint whiff of glamour."

On a timeline, Rent Girl overlaps the existing series of Tea's memoirs, following her from Boston to Tucson to 2000-era San Francisco. But the adventures are all-new stories, and she recontextualizes the settings to tell different tales connected by a very specific aspect of her life: working in the field of prostitution.

By the first page of the book, Tea's mission statement is clear. She's not writing a panegyric or a manifesto about prostitution; she's telling stories about what it's like to be a prostitute. The indifferent-but-hot girl in garters, standing by the text with an impatient expression on her face, is her own mission statement: this book is sexy, but it's not at all going to be the kind of sexy you expect.

One of the pleasures of Tea's writing is that it's so finely visual on its own. The detail is so specific that you could swear she copies it out of her journal, when the truth is, she doesn't even keep a journal. Her descriptions of hair color and gestures and facial expressions so exactly render her characters that changing their names seems superfluous; her characters seem reinvented as fictional people: Marina, the coked-up prostitute who dyes her pubic hair; David, the middle-age balding client who's compulsively paranoid and sends a naked Michelle tiptoeing around the house to check the locks and make sure his ex-wife or the CIA isn't breaking in. These stories churn with a smooth rhythm that carries them along on their own, seamlessly switching scenes like a movie, even without McCubbin's visual accompaniment.

That's why, in Rent Girl, McCubbin doesn't even try to compete. Her pictures are sometimes straight-up depictions of the action, sometimes portraits of the characters. Sometimes they reinvent the scenes; Tea's history of her first call-girl solicitation headline (which the madam changed from "Teen Dream" to "College Co-Ed" and then, in Tea's fantasies, "Confused Lesbian Slacker with No Saleable Job Skills") is done up as a series of porn-style faceless body shots with newspaper captions. Another cool-looking segment lines up three girls, all Tea in different guises. You know the same model was used for each, but as illustrations, they look like three completely different people. It's an illusion as slick and tricky as prostitution is.

I wrote my memoir in six weeks, a deadline that was half born of necessity – I was afraid I'd get cold feet – and half because the lease on our house had run out and my best friend's ex-girlfriend offered me a free ride to New York for the summer. I wrote fast, never proofreading, relying only on Microsoft Word's neurotic red underlines as an editor. The stories I threw onto paper gelled into a single coherent epic, connecting like Lego bricks into the story of how I became an Orthodox Jew and moved to San Francisco. Sure, there's stuff that I never wanted my parents or my rabbi to find out about – dating a lesbian stripper is the most obvious example – and I had qualms about turning my friends into fictional characters. More qualms than they did. I mean, things might change when the book comes out, but so far I've showed it to the people who I think I've embarrassed the most, and they've laughed.

And, so far, it's helped me laugh too.

The most anxiety-inducing part by far was the day I finally did the marathon chapter, writing that lesbian-stripper story, dishing out all 18 pages in a day. The streak was punctuated only by a single phone call, from my grandmother, asking how my book was going. (My other book, a teen novel from Scholastic, is completely devoid of explicit sex.)

"I never think I've got anything to talk about," I said, bracing myself – in case G-d took this as the last straw and finally shot that lightning bolt I'd expected for years – "And then I finally decide to open my mouth. And when it rains, it pours."

Matthue Roth is a poet and spoken word artist. He lives in San Francisco, sometimes.

Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood

By Jennifer Traig. Little, Brown, 224 pages, $22.95.

Please Don't Kill the Freshman

By Zoe Trope. HarperTempest, 320 pages, $7.99 (paper).

Pills, Thrills, Chills, and Heartache: Adventures in the First Person

Edited by Clint Catalyst and Michelle Tea. Alyson, 328 pages, $15.95.

Rent Girl

By Michelle Tea and Laurenn McCubbin. Last Gasp, 239 pages, $24.95.