Michelle Gurule with Tatiana Johnson-Boria: Thank You, John

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Sex sells, but what can it buy?

Thank You, John is Best American Essays Notable Michelle Gurule’s debut memoir: a heartfelt, laugh-out-loud tragi-comedy of errors based on her time spent as an inexperienced sugarbaby in 2010s Denver.

Michelle, a queer, wanna-be writer exasperated by student loans, bad teeth, and the poor decisions of her loveable sitcom-worthy family, believes a sugar daddy is written in her destiny as firmly as she believes her idol, Alanis Morissette, holds the musical blueprint to the life she desires most.

With a salt-of-the-earth Chicano father who's convinced aliens will eventually rule the world, a white mother who maxes out her credit cards on fast food, and a sugar-hyped 7-year-old nephew, Michelle diagnoses herself as self-parentified with a core mistrust in the world’s unreliability. Left to her own devices and barely making ends meet, she turns to the world of stripping until her chance for financial freedom arrives in the form of John, a lonely older man who offers her a weekly pile of cash for lively conversation and sex. She will keep her family, and only her family, availed of all the gritty details.

Grateful and convinced by the immediate improvement money makes in her life, sugaring takes the role of any other exploitative job in America– the physical wear and tear, competition between colleagues, the crossed personal boundaries, dangerous power imbalances, and the reliance on hierarchy to keep only the rich and powerful rich and powerful—it’s just a lot more intimate. A worthy sacrifice, right?

Looking back at her time as a 24-year-old stripper and sugarbaby, struggling to pull herself–and her entire family–out of poverty, Gurule grins and bears it all in a tragi-comedy of errors: heartbreak, complete social isolation and self-denial, glares at The Cheesecake Factory, cringey sex, and scheme after scheme for a better life with everything money can buy.

Michelle Gurule (she/her) is a writer and educator based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her creative work, which explores the complexities of sex work, class, power and Michelle’s intersectional identity as a queer, mixed-ethnicity (white / Chicana) woman, has appeared in The Offing, Joyland, StoryQuarterly, Drunk Monkeys, Homology, and Alien. In 2021, her essay, “Exit Route,” won StoryQuarterly’s Nonfiction Prize, judged by T Kira Madden. She currently teaches writing at Arizona State University as well as The University of Colorado, Boulder. She lives in New Mexico with her partner Daisy.

Tatiana Johnson-Boria (she/her) is the author of Nocturne in Joy (2023), winner of the 2024 Julia Ward Howe Book Prize in Poetry. As an educator, artist, facilitator, and mother; she uses her writing practice to dismantle racism, reckon with trauma, cultivate healing, and to explore the complex magic of mothering. She has received fellowships and awards from Tin House, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, MacDowell, the Brother Thomas Fellowship, and St. Botolph Club Foundation, among others. Tatiana is a 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee, teaches at GrubStreet, and has been on faculty at Emerson College, among other institutions. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review Online, and more. She is represented by Lauren Scovel at Laura Gross Literary.

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