Valencia

<i>valencia</i> is a beautifully written trip through the grimy, drug-saturated lesbian subculture of early-90s san francisco.<br /><br />it took me a while to get into the rhythm of the story, because it's a lot. the reader is thrust into this world of radical women, drunkenness, astrology, trauma, alleyway makeouts, grunge fashion, heartbreak, poetry and zines, public urination, heavy drugs, dyke pride parades, deep longing, casual sapphic sex with latex gloves, DIY tattoos, sex work, greasy vegan food, close friendships and doomed love affairs, and more. i'm awed by the sheer volume of life experiences within this book!!<br /><br />what's amazing is that though this messy, reckless world is alien to me, michelle tea's thoughts and emotions are deeply relatable. she is a magnificent storyteller. not all of her shenanigans are particularly interesting, but the way she relays them (in such vivid detail) makes me want to curl up across from her and listen to her frenzied stories all evening.<br /><br />there is a remarkable quantity of introspection and tenderness within these gritty pages.<br /><br /><i>valencia</i> takes place in the span of roughly a year, and while tea has a string of lovers in this time, there is one girl in particular. there's always one in particular, isn't there? we spend much of the book watching her relationship with iris unfold, and eventually crumble. <br /><br /><blockquote> <i>She broke my heart, so now I have to write about her forever. It made everything different. It's something that can only happen once.</i> </blockquote><br />there is heartbreak and there are unhealthy coping mechanisms. and the book ends abruptly, because presumably this chapter in tea's life was coming to a close, and that's how life is. sometimes things just end.<br /><br />something interesting: this was a serendipitous connection, but it was cool to read about san francisco's 90s gay scene shortly after reading <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/35224992.Last_Night_at_the_Telegraph_Club" title="Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo" rel="noopener">last night at the telegraph club</a>, which is a sapphic 1950s coming of age story that takes place in SF. such an amazing cultural shift in the scant 40 years between these two books. it made me all the happier to read about how unabashedly open and how <i>alive</i> things were for lgbt+ people in SF by the 90s.<br /><br />i also read <i>valencia</i> concurrently with tea's <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/32940578.Modern_Tarot_Connecting_with_Your_Higher_Self_through_the_Wisdom_of_the_Cards" title="Modern Tarot Connecting with Your Higher Self through the Wisdom of the Cards by Michelle Tea" rel="noopener">modern tarot</a>, and it was really wonderful to see the parallels between the two. different subject matter, but there are common threads. and there is the beautiful vulnerability within tea's writing; always full of heart.<br /><br /><blockquote> <i>She didn’t know that my heart was a sandstorm waiting to open her skin in a desert of cuts. She didn’t know the animal that waited in my stomach, silently shredding the walls. For her, my heart wore small white shoes and carried a purse, went to bed early. I wanted to shoot myself into her arms so she understood the need to crash cars with me, to tear up pavement because we were beautiful.</i> </blockquote><br />i'm kinda mad, because now i have to read every book that michelle tea has written.

This book saved my life. I was literally in bed so depressed that I was planning on ending it. Dramatic yes, but very true. Someone had given me the book; I picked it up and couldn't put it down. She was tortured, but exciting..and honestly in my mental state I didn't even notice how messed up she might be.lol After finishing, I decided that I wanted a life worth writing about! I got out of bed, came out as femme and started having my own amazing adventures. <br />I can't say it will have the same profound effect on anyone else, but I am grateful for this book. Thanks Michelle Tea.

Fast paced and diaristic, <i>Valencia</i> sketches a vibrant portrait of lesbian life in ‘90s San Francisco. Recalling Eileen Myles’ <i>Chelsea Girls</i> the autobiographical novel is told from the candid perspective of author-narrator Michelle, a twenty-something queer woman recently moved to the Mission District, who recounts her sundry hook ups, romances, gigs, fights, and adventures from the time. At the start Michelle sets out on a road trip to Tucson that she hopes will help her forget a crush, but by the end she’s firmly planted near the center of San Fran’s queer community; along the way she reflects on her traumatic upbringing and her era’s cultural touchstones. The novel’s incredibly episodic, unfolding in swift vignettes, and lacks any sort of center, but the writing’s absorbing.

It's probably wrong to review a book after only 50 or so pages. But god, this book is annoying as hell. as a "queer urban girl" from san francisco, Michelle embarasses me, as she rambles long run-on sentence paragraphs about her tragically hip dyke "radical" friends who are so bad, so sad, they cut themselves and fuck on the dance floor and have stupid names like Tricky and Spacegirl. Her world consists of"Punks", as defined by their clothes, hair and tattoos, who move here and treat the city like their fucking playground. This gives San Francisco a bad name. Don't call your book "Valencia" for godssakes and then have it labeled as the definitive voice of queer women.

For a San Francisco reader in the late 2010's it's impossible not to read <i>Valencia</i> through a prism of nostalgia. The subcultures and spaces Tea captures so vividly have now all but disappeared, so many of the coffee shops and dive bars and affordable apartments that provide the staging for Tea's autobiographical experiences now transformed into trendy bistros, expensive boutiques, and upscale bars with "mixologists" that take ten minutes to make your cocktail because it requires a dozen different ingredients. Perhaps even more importantly, the queer—particularly the lesbian—and kink communities have been long driven away by impossible rent and lack of welcoming places. Where Tea's Valencia Street is a expanse of possibility both physical and mental, Valencia Street in 2018 is ground zero for the tensions of hyper-gentrification. <br /><br />So it was within this context that I savored Tea's tales of heartache and self-discovery, relishing the descriptions of the women she loved, befriended, flirted with, pined over, and hopped in the sack with, as well as all the other individuals that wandered in and out of this specific period of her life. Her prose is jangly and sharp and operates by the rhythms of spoken word poetry and evokes the type of breathless intensity usually reserved for conversations between intimates rather than the more considered and cerebral approach typical of autobiography and memoir. An admittedly exhausting read at times, but an utterly enthralling one as well.

This book does a great job of articulating everything I hate about belonging to such a specific subculture. The first half of the book was slow for me, and I have a knee jerk disapproval of people who claim a working class background but are as irresponsible and treat work with the abandon that Tea does. And while this book isn't all about drugs and alcohol, it is enough about drugs and alcohol to bore the hell out of me. Halfway into the book, though, it does have a shining clump of chapters, but it doesn't quite stick out to the end. This book did help me place some of my feelings about said aspects of said subculture, but I wanted to like Tea. Instead, she reminds me of the people I'm forced to hang out with and constantly needing to set my boundaries with.

This is a memoir of a 25-year-old lesbian in '90s San Francisco documenting her times drinking, not working, and having a lot of latex-gloved sex with various girls. It's plotlessness really worked for me, and I figured out it was because Tea is completely honest as an autobiographer. This became apparent when I was planning on thinking she was pretentious, and that never coming to be. I assumed she was going to try and make herself sound really hip, being a counterculture woman swinging in one of the most liberal cities in America, but she basically just told it like it was. A lot of times in memoirs, the writer will over-dramatize their situation, like how they hit rock bottom and almost died eight times or whatever, but again Tea doesn't force the issue of making herself seem really down, or really cool. So that's how I decided the slice-of-life material was authentic. Just one person's account of looking for love in bars and parties. Also she's talented in her own right, there were plenty of creative, non-cliche metaphors and good one-liners to be found. One thing that irked me was constant references to astrological signs? Anyways, this book was a pleasant surprise. My roommate had it assigned to her for school and I just happened to keep reading it after she told me to read a particularly tasteful few pages at the beginning, describing your typical girl-on-girl fist-fuck.

I loved this book. Sure, I'm biased because I'm from SF and worked alongside Ms. Tea at Books, Inc. where she hosted crazy book readings with hard liquor. Sure, I'm biased because I was never part of that scene, but secretly envied it. Reading the book, however, I didn't feel a bit of envy. I just enjoyed the scenes from afar. Sure it's from the era of the 90's, and therefore dated; sure, it's about lesbian sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll, as well as the famous Folsom Street Fair in SF, fisting, and knives, and sex workers, but it is the perfect book for a light read. Advice to the wise: read it where you can laugh openly and not be seen as crazy. Read it, enjoy it. Yes, it's solipsistic, but it's fun solipsism! And, it's the perfect book to give a non-reading, queer friend. It makes that friend feel like a reader. It reads fast, is moving fiction (well, really a memoir, but who's counting?), and has a James Joyce kind of rebellion against punctuation. Fun, fun, fun!

san francisco's michelle tea is the most vital writer of her generation, one of the few people from our era they'll still be studying 100 years from now, and in <i>valencia</i> she is at the absolute top of her game. dirty, shocking, subversive, with an embracing of a complex sexuality and lifestyle that needs no apologies, tea's work has a good chance of permanently changing your life after being exposed to it or at least getting you looking at the "war of the sexes" in an entirely new way. highly recommended.

I keep trying to read Michelle Tea's books because she is our local lesbian celebrity, but I find her books a little heavy and over-the-top. But I'm weirdly fascinated with reading them, too. Kind of like driving by a train wreck and not being able to avert your eyes. I feel the same way about some Joyce Carol Oats books. Someone described JCO's writing as grotesque once, and that's a good word to describe Valencia, too. I mean, how many freaky, unstable 20-something lesbians are there, having sex in nasty bar bathrooms, trying all kinds of drugs, and living in dumpy apartments? I guess what I don't like about it is that these girl's lives are considered so glamorous and cool, but really, they are just seriously immature. Some things in this book are just gross. Then, some parts are funny, and it seems like Michelle is looking back on her younger days with a sense of humor. But I don't think the whole book is a farce. I think it's an account of what life is like for these girls, and thinking of trying to be like them, or having to try to fit in with that kind of crowd just gives me a headache. I'm glad for Michelle for being successful, and I'm sure there really lots of girls like the ones in this book, but maybe I'm just too old. I'll write it off to generation gap, but reading this book just didn't make me feel good. I felt the same about Rose of No Man's Land, I couldn't finish the Chelsea Whistle. Not quite my cup of tea.