Michelle Tea Livres

An urgent proclamation of what life is like for American women without the security of a financial safety net

A collection of essays from the remarkable Michelle Tea, author of Black Wave. The razor-sharp but damaged Valerie Solanas, a doomed lesbian biker gang, and teenagers barely surviving at an ice creamery: these are some of the larger-than-life, yet all-too-human figures that populate Michelle Tea's excavation of America's fringes. In documenting their lives, she reveals herself in unexpected and heartbreaking ways, telling the stories most people try to forget.

Exploring the artistic, radical, and romantic facets of queer and misfit life, this essay collection delves into significant cultural references, including Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto and the lesbian biker gang HAGS. Michelle Tea shares personal insights and reflections on the complexities of identity and community in contemporary America, offering a unique perspective on the intersections of art and activism within the LGBTQ+ experience.

An outrageous and wildly popular performance tour of queer-centric, feminist, sex-positive writers, captured in print and coming to your town!

From PEN/America Award winner, 2021 Guggenheim fellow, and beloved literary and tarot icon Michelle Tea, the hilarious, powerfully written, taboo-breaking story of her journey to pregnancy and motherhood as a 40 year-old, queer, uninsured woman Written in intimate, gleefully TMI prose, Knocking Myself Up is the irreverent account of Tea's route to parenthood--with a group of ride-or-die friends, a generous drag queen, and a whole lot of can-do pluck. Along the way she falls in love with a wholesome genderqueer a decade her junior, attempts biohacking herself a baby with black market fertility meds (and magicking herself an offspring with witch-enchanted honey), learns her eggs are busted, and enters the Fertility Industrial Complex in order to carry her younger lover's baby. With the signature sharp wit and wild heart that have made her a favorite to so many readers, Tea guides us through the maze of medical procedures, frustrations and astonishments on the path to getting pregnant, wryly critiquing some of the systems that facilitate that choice ("a great, punk, daredevil thing to do"). In Knocking Myself Up, Tea has crafted a deeply entertaining and profound memoir, a testament to the power of love and family-making, however complex our lives may be, to transform and enrich us.

The narrative follows Michelle, a young Boston dyke navigating the complexities of the sex industry as she embarks on a career in escort services. Through her misadventures, the story delves into the absurd, somber, and often humorous realities of sex work, avoiding typical victim or superhero tropes. As she balances the allure of financial freedom with her desire for spiritual peace, Michelle faces the difficult choice of continuing in the trade or seeking a different path.

"Passionate Mistakes" helped catapult the nascent queer girl culture of San Francisco's Mission district to the world. The novel charts the turbulent adventures of one girl in America as she moves from Boston's teenage goth world to whoring in New Age Tucson before finally arriving in San Francisco's dyke underground.Honest, sarcastic, lyrical and direct, Tea's writing is possibly the most literate and sophisticated treatment of underground dyke culture ever written and circulated. She is a reincarnation of when Jill Johnston used to be cool.

Everyone in the broken-down town of Chelsea, Massachusetts, has a story too worn to repeat--from the girls who play the pass-out game just to feel like they're somewhere else, to the packs of aimless teenage boys, to the old women from far away who left everything behind. But there's one story they all still tell: the oldest and saddest but most ho

It's 1999--and Michelle's world is ending. A dreamlike and dystopian meditation on sobriety, adulthood, and the weird obligations of storytelling.

"A gutsy, wise memoir-in-essays from a writer praised as "impossible to put down" (People) As an aspiring young writer in San Francisco, Michelle Tea lived in a scuzzy communal house; she drank, smoked, snorted anything she got her hands on; she toiled for the minimum wage; and she dated men and women, and sometimes both at once. But between hangovers and dead-end jobs, she scrawled in notebooks and organized dive bar poetry readings, working to make her literary dreams real. In How to Grow Up, Tea shares her awkward stumble towards the life of a Bonafide Grown-Up: healthy, responsible, self-aware, stable. She writes about passion, about her fraught relationship with money, about adoring Barney's while shopping at thrift stores, about breakups and the fertile ground between relationships, about roommates and rent, and about being superstitious ("why not, it imbues this harsh world of ours with a bit of magic.") At once heartwarming and darkly comic, How to Grow Up proves that the road less traveled may be a difficult one, but if you embrace life's uncertainty and dust yourself off after every screw up, slowly but surely you just might make it to adulthood."-- Provided by publisher