Laura Jane Grace celebrating 'TRANNY' in Brooklyn on Tuesday (read an excerpt)

Against Me! singer Laura Jane Grace releases her memoir TRANNY: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout this Tuesday (11/15) via Hachette Books, and she’ll be in NYC on release day to celebrate it at Brooklyn Night Bazaar. Laura and Noisey’s Dan Ozzi, who co-wrote the book, will be in conversation together and will be reading from the book too. Laura is also doing an acoustic performance. The show is co-presented by Noisey and WORD, and it’s also a ‘Going Off Track Live’ show. Tickets, including a copy of the book, are on sale now.

There’s an excerpt from the book up on VICE, about a time in 2007 when Against Me! had just released their major label debut and fans called them sellouts and Laura (then known as Tom Gabel) “couldn’t get out of the way of their own damned ego.” Here’s an excerpt of that excerpt:

Earlier that day, Heather and I walked to a coffee shop in Tallahassee that shared a parking lot with the Beta Bar, a venue Against Me! was scheduled to play that night, a place we had played regularly. We ordered tea, and I walked toward the back to use the restroom, where I saw a bulletin board on the wall with various flyers and notes tacked to it. One was a write-up for our show cut from a newspaper. Someone had taken a pen to it, crossing out all our eyes with “Xs” and scrawling the word “sellout” across my forehead. I tore it down, crumpled it up, and threw it in the trash. When I turned around, there was a punk right in my face.

“What’d you do that for?” he snarled.

“This was insulting to me, so I threw it out,” I told him.

“Who the fuck do you think you are? This is our space, not yours.” He turned his back to me, walking to take his seat at the counter.

I chased after him. “I’m a fucking human being, and I don’t know you. Why are you treating me like this?”

He sat in front of his coffee, ignoring me. “What’s your problem?” I pressed.

“As far as I’m concerned, this conversation is over,” he said, flashing me a smug look.

As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t. I snapped. At that moment, this guy was every person who’d ever called me a sellout, every punk in the crowd who’d given me the finger, every asshole who’d ever slandered my band’s name in a fanzine.

He raised his cup to take a sip, but I knocked it out of his hand before it reached his lips, sending coffee splattering in all directions. I grabbed him by the back of the neck and slammed his face down, pinning his cheek against the wet counter. I was completely blacked out. I don’t know what I would have done at that moment if I hadn’t been torn off of him by some people who started taking shots at me.

Read more, including a letter that Bruce Springsteen wrote to Laura after that incident, here.