Tegan and Sara Rewrite the Queer Coming-of-Age Story

The audience cheered, and Sara Quin scoffed. “Where the fuck were you when I was 15?” she asked the sold-out Murmrr theater in Brooklyn last week.

The question was jokey, but it also wasn’t. Sara, of the band Tegan and Sara, had just told a story about the time in 12th grade when she hurled a chair at a classmate who’d sneered during a health lesson, “Fags get AIDS.” In her and her sister’s new memoir, , Sara writes of “the dangerous sound” of her own voice when she confronted the jerk, the “spectacularly metallic” crash of the chair into a desk, and her “heaving sobs” after she bolted from the classroom and hid in the drama