valencia is a beautifully written trip through the grimy, drug-saturated lesbian subculture of early-90s san francisco.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 fr...

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 valencia 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 rec...

"so the planet of me completed its revolution around the heart...""we will drink cocktails so sweet they pucker our mouths, and we will run through the streets in excellent danger."this book took my breath away, and not just because it was one of the first novels i've ever read that was about dyke culture without being trashy. oh sure, michelle tells a seedy story full of drugs and booze and sex, but what she's mostly telling the reader about is her heart. like Annie On My Mind, -valencia- is a

I read Valencia when it first came out about ten years ago and I HATED it. Words could not express my loathing for this book. I thought it was self-involved, pretentious, obnoxious, terribly written, and completely lacking in both plot and character development. I found a copy at a thrift store last week and decided to reread it and see if my opinion had changed. I didn't expect that it would; however, I was surprised to find that I kind of like it. Not entirely, but kind of.It's still lacking i...

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...

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 s...

ABSOLUTELY LOVED this ......Michelle wears her heart on her sleeve and I TRULY LOVE her for what she has created, EMPOWERMENT I rest my case!!❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

"Michelle Tea is one annoying lesbian" said a friend. I can believe that, but she writes really well. This book is about nothing, except the day to day wanderings of over-dramatic women with zero responsibilities, except to their own feelings. There's no plot, and the book could have ended anywhere. Indeed by the end, I was growing tired of this girlfriend and that drunken evening. It's all just passages, but at her best, the passages read like Ellis or McInerney. One example: "Oh, I wanted her

6 stars for writing2 stars for painful, embarrassing identification with main characterThis is the type of book I adored when I was younger. What am I saying, I still love these books. And it is written by a younger person (or at least recounting the tales of a younger person, not sure how old Tea herself was when she wrote it) so that's all well. The book propels on the trajectory of great Beat writing, chaotic and going nowhere and everywhere at once; the narrator and the prose having no respo...

This felt like reading excerpts from Michelle Tea’s diary., which I guess is because this is a version of her diary. Sometimes this was a good thing and sometimes this was a bad thing and most of the time it was just a thing. Ultimately though, this was a personal glimpse into a time and place that I can never experience, and it made me wish I was spending my 25th year running wild with my friends instead of being inside in a pandemic reading about Michelle Tea being 25 and running wild with her...

Fast paced and diaristic, Valencia sketches a vibrant portrait of lesbian life in ‘90s San Francisco. Recalling Eileen Myles’ Chelsea Girls 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 t...

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 li...

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

i thought this book was fucking amazing amazing amazing. i could not stop reading it and read it really really fast, everywhere. on the subway. in my bedroom. on lunch break from work. the writing is real and interesting and a bit stream of conscience-y, but i truly got into it because a young crazy radical michelle tea is a narrator i can easily identify with. ok--so i never went to the dyke march high on speed--but i definitely had the "FUCK SHIT UP!" period of my life where my crazy in-love m...

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. I can't say it will have the same pro...

For a San Francisco reader in the late 2010's it's impossible not to read Valencia 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 differen...

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, b...

A great dyke beach read.

Halfway through Valencia I somehow misplaced it. I don't know where it went, but my read got totally interrupted. In a fit of "socialism" I hit the local library and grabbed their dog-eared copy. It was well used and slightly beat up, the corners chewed, pages sticky, with scribbly notes in the margin. Looked like every lesbian teenager from here to Venice had already had it in their sweaty palms. And who could blame them. It'd be like reading an anthem – like me twenty-five years ago reading Bu...

Michelle Tea irritates the crap out of me. Sorry.