I doubt I’ll look at a butter knife the same way ever again after reading Jamie Stewart’s Anything That Moves. That cool, silver, kind of fussy utensil will forever be etched in my brain as tossed unceremoniously into the bushes like Sally Draper’s Barbie doll after an indulgence in childhood anal fixation. Those rounded edges affixed to an even curvier handle will permanently be connected with getting shoved up the bum of a physically curious young child, perched over granny’s mirror.

Even months after devouring Stewart’s (un-)erotic memoir, published this year by And Other Stories, the butter knife is still perched in my brain as if on the side of a butter dish with its eternal asshole association. Maybe I should try it and break the spell. Because this scene in the book is so apparently–not to mention admirably–unforgettable, it’s worth quoting at length:

“With the theoretical understanding that anal sex existed, I took a butter knife with an oblong bulb at the end of the handle and squatted over my grandmother’s antique hand mirror. My sister now has this mirror in her living room. I inserted the knife handle into my butthole and watched it disappear up me in the reflection. It felt like I wanted it to. Suddenly, a spot of cum the size of a dime dripped down onto the mirror.

I went bananas—yanked the knife out and threw it into the bushes. That was the first time my dick did anything other than pee, and it freaked me out. I did not look at porn or touch myself for a couple of months. After I got over it, my mom kept asking everyone why the butter knives kept disappearing and, for some insane reason, I told her.”

And that’s just the second page.

Sure, we all did remarkably bizarre things as children as we discovered our bodies (In the spirit of Stewart’s revealing and guileless disclosure (it’s only fair), my choice was a Pooh Bear stuffed toy). But, the butter knife fiasco and even more, Stewart’s blunt and hilarious portrayal of it is just one of many scenes in the book that remain stuck in my mind, irrevocably changing how I consider certain inanimate objects and sexual acts. The butter knife is joined in this lengthy list by, to name a few, a unicorn doll (ripped and fucked by a childhood pal while Stewart took Polaroids. How very Dennis Cooper of them!), rimming (“I wiped my tongue off on the back of my hand and it was a tapeworm. I had licked a tapeworm out of her ass…I never told her”), and anal sex (“When I turned on the light, I saw that I was covered in shit. It was all over my stomach, chest, pubic hair, and legs. Instantly, I was sober”). In fact, Anything That Moves depicts sex in such a grotesque manner that it all seems repellant and revolting. No matter how, where, or with whom.

It should go without saying that a memoir that turns readers off of sex altogether is a stunning achievement. Is there anything that is more indicative of a literary triumph than writing about sex in such an unrelenting and merciless way, filled with all the bad feelings—shame, humiliation, disgust, internalized self-loathing, that it strips away any alluring eroticism whatsoever? Stewart themself articulates exactly the type of sex that spurts onto the page, endlessly thrusting its way chapter by chapter: “sexyless sex.” Move over, Erica Jong, with your liberated 1970s “zipless fuck”! It’s 2023 and Stewart is here to make us feel bad about compulsive fucking again. Readers shouldn’t expect anything less from a book that opens with an author’s note—or really, warning: “If we are related, please, for the love of God, do not read this book.”

There is no question why this cautionary preface is necessary. Anything­­ That Moves is a book-long odyssey of fucking. The memoir takes its title literally, derived both from Frank Booth’s (Dennis Hopper) unhinged sing-songy proclamation in Blue Velvet, “I’ll fuck anything that moves,” as well as, upon a curious Google, a magazine published by the Bay Area Bisexual Network from 1990-2001. Notably, there is not a whole lot of handwringing about identity or labels or definitions here. Any hole seems fine. Not that any sexual identity would want to be associated with this litany of damaged, deranged, disturbed, and frequently depressing fucking. The memoir is a stunningly almost single-minded trip through strip clubs near halfway houses, lonely gloryholes, sex clubs, sexual fluids splattered throughout mom’s house, wrecked hotel rooms while on tour, and even a little digital stimulation while perusing the web for a sub mistress for dom MISTER. With the exception of the final chapter, as well as the errant “Bernard Cyrus Lamar” on Stewart’s grandfather who bestowed upon them a box of show tunes tapes (“He was telling me he was a queen”), each chapter is titled with either a name, description, or location, some more amusing than others such as “Random Beauty at a Sex Club” or “Smoke Boobs.” Though most of these titles are deceptively simple, each story is an orgy of excess, equal parts abject and absurd. There are bad hookups in sex clubs that lead to weeping, silly play with cellophane turned quickly terrifying (“She said over and over again that she could stab me anytime she wanted to. She took a kitchen knife and ran it all over my wrapping”), and rancid panties gifted in paper bags (“I gave her a cockeyed look and she told me to smell them. I did, and it was like a felony of decayed mayonnaise and ham”). As should be clear by the latter examples, sometimes these incidents inch towards pure unadulterated horror. The jumpscare of the rotten panties!

Granted, everyone has limits. Even me. At some points, I just wanted to shout like the furious neighboring hotel room guest who begged for silence and mercy while Stewart and sub Moira were in mid-spank session: “No, no, no, enough, enough, enough! GOD! GOD!! GOD!!! STOP ALREADY!!!!” Yet, what keeps Anything That Moves from becoming unbearably exhausting like a sex party gone on too long is Stewart’s clear glee in attempting to reinvent and push the language of erotic writing as far and as funny as it will go. As someone who also strives to tread the line between humor and just plain bad writing, I can see clearly what Stewart is trying to achieve by precariously balancing on that precipice. This is an effort I find thoroughly exhilarating, both to write and to read. Lines like “It was like a stick of butter smashed between a hardcover copy of the biography of Marquis de Sade and a hardcover copy of the biography of Yukio Mishima,” “His ass was like a casserole pan with two halves of a hairy cantaloupe glued to it,” and “I felt like I’d been caught cheap-eating sweet-and-sour pork over a sink filled with abattoir urine” not only gave me a chuckle but were a pure thrill to see on the page. And more than snappy sentences that veer dangerously close to being submitted to the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, the hilarity of certain scenes goes a long way toward holding the readers’ attention, such as this destruction of every swinger’s threesome fantasy:

“By determination, alcohol, and luck, I have had eleven or twelve threesomes. Even the best one, though, would only be rated six out of ten magenta stars. The median hovers around a soft two point five. For all involved, it would seem like when there are more holes, it should be better than this. The conspicuousness of my being the common denominator of these low scores is not lost on me. It only happened once, but I would like to state for the record that the highest score belongs to two of my former across-the-street neighbors, a middle-aged couple with three kids who likes to pretend to be—wait for it—elves. Talking dirty, double goo-ing, and double pissing in high elfin voices, all while wearing green felt elfin caps. They asked that I talk in my normal human voice, but believe me, I would have talked like an elf if they wanted me to.”

Hot!

As seen in the previous passage, the other tool that Stewart flawlessly wields, which saves the book from becoming just a litany of complaints about sexual frustration and dissatisfaction, is their enormous ability to be self-deprecating and self-critical without resorting to self-pitying. “I hoped it would be beautiful and she hoped to get it over with,” they observe about one encounter. Who can’t relate to that?! Or this awkward moment of lost virginity: “…’I’ve never done this before either.’ For a second, I thought she might have been confiding her virginity to me, too, but then I understood that she was making a joke about how strangely I’d fucked her.” In its most desperate moments, Anything That Moves reminds me of the pathetic yearning of Nick Cave’s protagonist Bunny Munro, an aging horned-up salesman on the hunt for “the fucking Valhalla of all vaginas,” in The Death of Bunny Munro.

Black, self-deprecating humor, of course, does not erase the seriousness with which Stewart reflects on these hazily recalled, semi-fictionalized memories. As they told Juan Velasquez in Lithub, “When anything sort of upsetting, peculiar, or overly intense, or just shocking happens [during sex], laughing is a common response. But generally, do I think sex is funny? I mean, I like a good dick joke.” Who doesn’t? This form of humor is both a method of relief and deflection of what is notably a fairly dark narrative, one in which multigenerational abuse, isolation, alcoholism, unsurprising yet still enraging power-tripping religious hypocrisy, suicide, and family secrets all sit at the margins of this relentless pursuit of perversion and pleasure.

The ability to approach these bleak and challenging topics with shocking and sordid candor should come as no surprise for any fan of Stewart’s best-known creative endeavor, as vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and founding member of the band Xiu Xiu. Though the band is never named directly within the text of the book, Anything That Moves includes a few gems for rabid Xiu Xiu fans, such as a chapter detailing the origins of the blank-eyed, Ren Hang-esque photograph that graces the cover of the band’s 2003 album, A Promise. Yet the similarities with Xiu Xiu run deeper than just a few related stories and a fearless descent into subjects most would like to avoid. In April, I saw Xiu Xiu live for the first time after obsessing about their newest album, Ignore Grief. The concert ricocheted between explosive cacophony—beating the audience over the head with distortion, banging, furious cowbells, and squealing balloons—and a quiet fragility that threatened to break or become entirely indiscernible over the ambient crowd noise. This shift between outright aggression and gnawing vulnerability is found within Anything That Moves as well, though you may have to squint to find the latter.

That is, until the final chapter, “M.G.S.”, in which the tone of the book changes suddenly to focus on Stewart’s father’s suicide. “M.G.S.” is penned with a similar distance and emotional detachment as the rest and yet, here it accurately evokes the mix of emotions that grows into numbness after a close family member’s suicide: “When he did it, I wasn’t surprised. I was relieved to not have to wonder when it would happen anymore and relieved that he was free from his suffering and that I was free from his suffering.” While a portrait of a damaged family’s complicated grief, confusion, and struggling attempts to just make it through, this chapter may actually expose the most intimate moment within the text in its final lines. Recalling keeping a bone fragment from their father’s ashes, Stewart writes, “I have a piece of his bone in a small cinnabar box, along with a lucky penny and a blue-green D&D die my brother gave me when we were children. I keep the die with the number three turned up—three for the Holy Trinity—and my father’s bone is wrapped up in tinfoil like drugs. Sometimes I take it out and stick it to the tip of my tongue.” Disgusting, sure. Unsettling, maybe. But, I also find it to be a sweet gesture of remembrance—and something that nobody else would ever admit to but I’m sure many have considered or even tried in secret.

This is as near to a moment of closure or even transcendence as Anything That Moves achieves. One of the aspects I find most refreshing about the memoir is that there’s no feel-good resolution. No meeting the right person who makes sex not quite such a wretched disappointment. No romantic love story that creates a break between that past debaucherous life and now. No reconsideration of sex as this be-all-end-all earth-shattering act that will somehow usher in liberation, a trope that queer literature seems both unwilling and unable to abandon. Instead, Anything That Moves is much more clear-eyed and cynical than that, which, in my eyes, makes it more relevant. In fact, a sentence from the chapter, “Rubber Baby,” about the source of A Promise’s cover art acts as a proper mission statement for the entire book. Traveling in Vietnam with a baby doll in tow as a prop for a not-quite-groundbreaking photography project, Stewart paid a man who they met in a cruising area to pose. The inability to ever ask this spontaneous model for the rights to his image is a bit of an ethical quandary. And yet, as Stewart explains, “The whole time we were taking the photos and then again while doing the cover, I was unsure about its rightness or wrongness, but I was always sure I was going to do it.”