Rent Girl is an absorbing, but extremely depressing read made all the more depressing by its weird hipster cool tone. It strikes me as a modern version of Women by Charles Bukwoski, but this time written by a drug using hip young lesbian prostitute instead of an aging, alcoholic rock star poet. They are depressing books in very similar ways, because they center on a person who is clearly incredibly intelligent and talented who you get to watch kind of destroy themselves through sex and substance...

I read this lying in bed as a weird kind of therapy after the one time I got fired. It was the one relaxation I allowed myself before job hunting.

This book is awesome! I enjoyed every minute of it. The writing and illustrations are great! Alas, it would be five stars were it not the most poorly copy-edited book I'VE EVER READ. I'm sure it's not the author's fault, but next book y'all should totally have someone correct the typos. Aside from that technical issue, thanks for giving me a "good read"! (Ha, was that cheesy to say or what?)

The illustrations are beautiful; but the story rides exclusively on the novelty of its subject matter, using a predictably flat tone to portray situations that are, at best, mildly unusual. The writing itself is unremarkable--a series of blasé, artless sentences peppered sparingly with clumsy attempts at imagery. I found myself wishing the words weren't there so that I could concentrate on the pretty pictures.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. A lot of people have a lot of opinions about Michelle Tea and my opinion is that I like her writing (in this book). I like how she rarely uses contractions. I like the way the dialogue interacts with the narrative. I like her theories and considerations and anger. I like the nonchalant way she introduces the occult and other alternative life choices. I also like the illustrations, although they don't do the same thing illustrations do in comic boo...

A semi-enjoyable tour of the skin trade through one Rent Girl's eyes. It was a relief that this never came off as a morality play or a diatribe of regret. Perhaps the main thesis of this book is that sex work is work. Like any job it has its good days and bad. There are reasons that a person finds this line of work and reasons that they stick with it. But at the end of the day work is still work. And work sucks. I enjoyed Tea's stories but knocked down a star for all the grammatical errors. Did

As a ho memoir, it's middle of the road. As a slice of queer 90s life, it's pretty ok. Saved by the illustrations.

This book is DESPERATELY in need of a copy editor. I wouldn't give it more than 2 stars under any circumstances, but the multitude of typos were just so irritating. It claims to be a graphic novel, but it's more illustrated than graphic. The images augment the text, but don't tell the story. As for the actual story, it was ok. Kind of blah.

reading "rent girl" right on the heels of "the passionate mistakes..." may have contributed to the super-saturated feeling of grittiness i had when i finished this book. while i remain a huge fan of tea's work, i found the graphic novel format a failure. it's a strange hybrid of drawings and dense tiny type-set text that does neither justice. individual pages are lovely, but as a linear narrative, it falls short. maybe i'm just tired of the wobbly line drawings of sexy girls that seem to be crop...

I wanted to like this, but there were just so many grammatical errors and typos it distracted from the flow of the reading experience. The artwork was gorgeous, though! Overall, worth the read just for learning how the author’s life path led to, through, and past sex work. I feel this is another memoir that will help people humanize and relate to sex workers.

If you've ever wondered what it is like to be a prostitute, this book offers a lot of insight. One among many searing moments is when Michelle and her co-worker are lost en route to a client's house. They stop for directions. She muses about how it feels when you walk into a 7-11 and the clerk looks at you as if you're a hooker .. and you are. Another one: Michelle gets increasingly more tattoos as she goes thru her 20s. At one point, she gets some down her arms to her hands, feeling satisfied b...

I probably would have rated this book higher if the book was actually a graphic novel: it is really more of an illustrated novel, and I thought that the text layout was slapdash. The pages weren't really designed with much thought. Sometimes the blocks of text were so wide that I had to hold a piece of paper under each line I was reading, or else I'd get lost. Sometimes the text ran into the illustration in a really distracting way. And the illustrations sometimes betrayed details of characters

Here I am reading it, almost finished. One thing I have to say, that I haven't seen anyone else say, is the editing is awful. There are scads of mistakes. Typos galore!I also wonder why these modern, young lesbian hookers have never shaved their bushes.I love the artwork! I am a fan of this book, yet I think hookers are terribly intriguing and sad.Read "Rose Of No Man's Land," by Michelle Tea. That was wonderful.

Terrible, terrible, terrible. Why did it happen? What makes it possible? This book has no point, it barely tells a story, and it is ridiculously aloof. Like talking to a coked up drag queen, smearing mascara all over your sensible sweater and gushing out their life story, morbidly fascinating, but you just want it to be over. Michelle Tea once again succeeds in convincing the world that yes, she is a vulnerable lesbian badass. And yes, there are people around her that do drugs and don't give a s...

Tea's story of her cool, hipster, lesbian life and the central part of the story is that as a young lesbian, she and a group of friends worked for years as "escort girls" (i.e., prostitutes). The story is sort of distant, and not all that insightful, really, but it still is interesting and well told, and the illustrations, mostly black, white, red and pink, quite spare and stylized, are pretty gorgeous and help capture a life and time. It's not a great work of art, maybe, but I actually liked it...

I started editing it in my head - in my dream version of this book, instead of being a mix of text and one portrait on each page, it's a traditional panel-format graphic novel. This would force the author to tighten up the storyline and maybe take out a big chunk of the middle. The most interesting parts were the beginning, when she starts working as an escort, and near the end, when she and her girlfriend start trying to sell cocaine and briefly go back into the escort business together.

I interviewed Michelle in SF one Summer. I absolutely loved this book. It is funny and insightful and surprising. The darkness is real but the spirit of the character so strong I was carried aloft. Here is the interview http://writerscentre.ie/blog/blog/aut... Rent Girl is an illustrated memoir of Michelle’s days when her girlfriend announced that she was a hooker and, Michelle, who was one broke baby dyke followed her into the world of paid sex. Frankly, I’ve never understood people’s shock at

I had some trepidations about this book, b/c a lot of my annoyance with Valencia was with its aloofish hipster tone romanticizing drugs and easy bad sex---the only time I got caught on that tone in 'Rent Girl' was about 3/4 ways through, when the author takes some time off from tales of sex work to focus on her short and not-so-successful dint with drug pushing.Other than this slight detour, the rest was so honest and relatable to me.I could hear Tea's voice walking the line between the two narr...

Michelle Tea's trademark combination of wit and pathos is used to good effect in this memoir of her days as an escort. Laurenn McCubbin's arty but realistic illustrations complement the text perfectly, but do make it something you might not want to read on the bus. I noticed that Tea's tendency toward break-neck run-on sentences is much more restrained in this book, and that works well; the impression is that of a more disciplined writer than the one who penned The Passionate Mistakes and Intric...

"...people like to say things like 'all work is prostitution'. Most work is exploitation, but most work is not prostitution. Prostitution is prostitution, a very specific sort of exploitation... And while I am doing literal corrections to flippant turns of phrase, the earth doesn't get raped. It gets mined and poisoned and blown up and depleted, it gets ruined, but it doesn't get raped."This book is so powerful I couldn't help but cry and laugh out loud.Raunchy and bold. Michelle Tea shows the l...