Valencia
by Michelle Tea
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Book Summary Information
Author: Michelle TeaEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-04-01
ISBN: 158005238X
Number of pages: 216
Publisher: Seal Press
Book Reviews of Valencia
Book Review: Gossip girl
Summary: 2 Stars
This book was first published in 2000, but the reason for this review is that it is soon to be released (in Australia), in paperback and with a new introduction by the author. In some ways, the intro is the best part, as Tea obviously has a longer perspective now. Maybe she has also grown a sense of humour about herself - the best part of the intro is when she takes a certain glee in the news of one of her hate objects in the book, after hearing a Tea poem about her, having 'kicked a bus shelter and broken her foot - because I was a small-hearted, bad person, I delighted in this'.
Unfortunately, there is not much of this duality or humour in the book itself. Tea took herself very seriously, playing the grunged-out lesbian role to the hilt and beyond. She seems to be under the impression that taking a lot of drugs, drinking too much, and having a lot of violent sex with girls is somehow revolutionary. To which the only response (from the perspective of 2008, at least) is: yeah, that's nice, girl, now get in the queue.
To tell the truth, the community she describes seems a rather unpleasant place: incredibly grotty, sexually aggressive to the point of being predatory, riddled with drugs (the bad kind, not the good kind), and built on self-righteous self-indulgence. And the gossip! These people gossip and bitch about each other, like, all the time! It is as if they combine the worst features of teenage girls and adolsecent boys. Tea: ever thought about not so much finding your inner child as finding your inner adult?
So is the book worthless? Actually, not at all. If you can get past Tea's innate self-destructiveness and obsession - her love of love, her desire for desire - there is a good literary sense here. She occasionally writes a killer line, a spot-on description. Having spent some time walking around San Francisco, I accepted the strong sense of place here (even if Tea's world is restricted to a couple of blocks).
But then, Valencia is not for me, middle-aged white guy that I am. So I will give this book to someone I know, someone young and on the verge of becoming exceptional. It might (or might not) mean the world to them.
Summary of Valencia
Valencia is the fast-paced account of one girl's search for love and high times in the drama-filled dyke world of San Francisco's Mission District. Michelle Tea records a year lived in a world of girls: there's knife-wielding Marta, who introduces Michelle to a new world of radical sex; Willa, Michelle's tormented poet-girlfriend; Iris, the beautiful boy-dyke who ran away from the South in a dust cloud of drama; and Iris's ex, Magdalena Squalor, to whom Michelle turns when Iris breaks her heart.
You don't have to be part of the emerging postpunk subculture of queer urban girls to relish this smooth ride of a novel, like Kathy Acker on Prozac on a sunny day, in which many exciting things happen without affecting much of anything, and one of the most profound moments is a mild, drug-induced insight into the meaninglessness of life. Michelle, the main character, is a person for whom blue hair is as big a style change as blue pants. She lurches between women, more in love with the idea of love than with Iris or Willa or Gwynne or Petra. Her work experiences are equally brief, although she can't bring herself to actually quit jobs. She just stops showing up. "Are you going to work?" her current lover asks one morning.
No, I was not going to work. I was an artist, a lover, a lover of women, of the oppressed and downtrodden, a warrior really. I should have been somewhere leading an armed revolution in the name of love and no, I was not going to work. Willa didn't work. I mean, she did, but it's a stretch to call it work. She bartended at a dyke bar a few nights a week, drank free beer, and bummed all her cigarettes.... All week she was free, writing angsty brilliant poems, drawing comic books, painting gigantic painful pictures, you know, living. I wanted to live.Michelle Tea's characters are a peculiar fin-de-si?cle blend of jaded idealists and thoughtful egotists: sex workers, poets, and mad hatters who end up making breakfast for roomfuls of stoned strangers. The occasional flash of clarity doesn't alter the basically anarchic nature of Tea's meandering narrative, so much like the tales of an incidental figure from Valencia, a loud redhead named Iggy who told stories "so incredible you wondered if they were true but ultimately didn't care because you were so enraptured by her grand gestures and re-enactments." --Regina Marler
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