Molly Crabapple is a seriously impressive woman. An artist, activist, writer and journalist, Crabapple has been influential in the Occupy movement and exhibited her protest-inspired art in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. She’s reported on conditions in Guantanamo Bay, confronted Donald Trump at a Dubai real-estate conference, and depicted heartbreaking portraits of Syrian refugees from inside the Domiz refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan. Only 32-years-old, Crabapple’s had more life experiences than most people thrice her age, so it was pretty inevitable that someone somewhere would ask her to write an autobiography.

Drawing Blood, Crabapple’s first memoir, is part autobiography, part reflections on political activism and the role of art in documenting the 21st century, but mostly just a really good read. As Crabapple tells us, “writing a memoir is like severing parts of yourself, fancying them up, and presenting them on exhibition at a white-walled gallery. It doesn't feel like revelation because once you've written about them, they become, somehow, no longer pieces of you. This is the weird alchemy art does on life."

Dazed readers can now read an exclusive excerpt from Drawing Blood below.

In November 2010, my cell phone showed a call from a familiar number.

“Darling! Gorgeous! We’re opening a new club in London.” It was Richard, his voice bubbling with enthusiasm.

“Yes?” I forced myself to sound bored.

“We want you out there! We want you to paint the whole place. The stairs. The rooms. The mirrors. The tile. The wallpaper. The everything. Think of it as your Sistine Chapel.”

I paused. I’d never done a mural before. And Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist, was my idol. He took years to paint the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City, living on his scaffolding, fucking on his scaffolding, wearing guns at his belt to fire at anyone who dared criticize him. I wanted to be Diego. I wanted to paint walls as elaborate love letters between me and the Box’s staff. When the audience entered, they’d be forced to see that they were the pigs in this hellscape. The performers were the gods.

“Yes, of course. I would love to,” I told Richard. “I adore you.”

That December, the Box flew Melissa Dowell and me out to London. We took the tube to Piccadilly Circus.

“Cockfosters,” the mechanical conductress’s voice announced, indicating the direction of the line. We burst out in giggles.

The Box Soho was taking shape in the shell of an old strip club, surrounded by gay bars, jack shacks, and bookstores with signs blinking “Sex! Sex! Sex!” When we arrived, it was a construction site, unheated in November, pockmarked with asbestos warning signs. A desperately polite British staff fought to get it ready in time for its scheduled opening date, while Simon and the designer made capricious changes. The budget spiraled. Simon disappeared for days at a time.

My job would call for ninety feet of murals in two weeks. When we showed up, we didn’t even have scaffolding. The builders cobbled together a platform, then watched us as we balanced on the rickety thing in our miniskirts and Doc Martens. Neither Melissa nor I knew what to wear on job sites. After the first few hours, we were caked in grit. The green dust came out in our snot.

“Don’t fall. We don’t have insurance,” one of the staff warned me as I balanced a ladder on the staircase. I didn’t care. Wobbling on that platform, I just wanted to paint. I started on the staircase, sketching so loosely that only I could understand my marks.

“I know your secret,” Melissa snickered. “To do the Molly Crabapple style, just draw like you have epilepsy.”

Out of those lines, my friends started to emerge. I painted Buck, Flambeaux, and Nik Sin. Melody Sweets sang next to Rose Wood, whose tits were as massive as her cock. Waitresses in towering wigs served pig customers. When I was alone, I’d kiss the wall. “This belongs to you,” I’d whisper to whatever girl I’d just painted. I drew and Melissa filled. I shaded and Melissa gilded. We worked feverishly, racing to complete enough of the wall that Simon wouldn’t tell us to tear it down when he returned.

Days passed. Simon still didn’t show. We hadn’t seen each other since our fight over the poster, and I started to worry that the whole job was some sort of trick. Every day, I grew more certain that Simon would appear like Rumpelstiltskin and order everything sandblasted off the walls, as whimsically as he might order a staircase torn out. The morning Richard texted me to tell me Simon was back, I hid under the hotel bed.

At the job site, a new Simon approached us. He’d lost weight, trimmed his beard, and seemed to have stepped right out of the bath. “Love it, Molly,” he said, hugging me. “Absolutely love it.”

“That’s who you were whining over?” Melissa laughed. “From now on, I’m calling him Sweet Philanthropist Simon.”

In the Box’s antechamber, I painted pigs riding the eternal symbols of Britain: lions and unicorns. The pigs were dressed as fox hunters but hunted a faceless man. Pigs threw money from trees. Women chased the fox-man. He ran up the staircase, where Rose Wood presided like a goddess. At the other end, he was thrown back out, in pig form, to persecute humans alongside his friends.The walls were raw linen, which soaked up the paint. I diluted the paint with water, then scrubbed it in with brute force. The paint water froze. My hands cracked, then bled. Melissa added constellations in gilt. We worked mostly nights, from eight in the evening till four in the morning, after the construction workers left. Halfway through our shifts, we overhead drunk Brits pouring out of the bars. “Why the fuck you looking at me?” one shouted. Angry grunts in reply. Then the sound of breaking glass. When we complained about the November cold, the Box gave us a heater that resembled a flamethrower in a cage. On the builders’ radio, we blared the Pogues. We screamed along, gorging ourselves with champagne and potato chips from Tesco. No matter how much she drank, Melissa never got tired. “Alcohol is a beautiful woman,” she told me. “I’m not going to ditch her before the end of the night.”

Artists are the fanciest of the fancy. We’re presumed to exist in a rarified space requiring silence and deep thought. Because of this, the world often ignores the physical reality of what we do in favor of the ideas that animate it. The work of artists often involves skilled and demanding manual labor. Yet we’re often treated more like sophisticated pets than like true workers. This has its privileges. Unlike the builders working alongside us, Melissa and I were allowed to smoke and drink. We came in whenever we wanted. We needed no foreman, no management, and no discipline.

But art is labor, and labor is art, and both have a claim on the sublime. The construction workers and Melissa and I were all skilled crafts people. They built the walls. Then, as they watched, I scrubbed pigment into their walls until pictures emerged. We all had dirty nails and aching backs. As an artist, I got credit for my work—even the stars

Melissa actually gilded. The construction workers got nothing but pay. They were a team, unnamed, lost to history. But we all built that rich kids’ paradise together. Stone carvers once chiseled their names below the windowsills of buildings they worked on. It was an artist’s signature, by people whose talent is seldom acknowledged. With that tradition in mind, I took some time in the Box’s tiled VIP room to draw Sharpie portraits of the construction guys, their hard hats and lined faces. Then, with clear nail polish, I lacquered them into the tile.

Those construction workers would never get past the doormen once the club opened. But in my pictures they partied forever. They were the room’s first VIPs.

Molly Crabapple will be in London for "Trump, Isis, and Capitalism," an event at Waterstone's Piccadilly, in conversation with Paul Mason on 4 April. She'll also be speaking at the Frontline Club on 6 April, in an event that is open to the public