Skip to main content
27. Valencia by Michelle Tea

I am perhaps not the kind of girl that one would expect to be reading a Lambda Award winner for Best Lesbian Fiction. Not because I have anything against lesbians, but I am generally averse to stream-of-consciousness, whiney memoirs, and overkill sex scenes. At risk of gushing, I will say I found Valencia beautiful in language and spirit. Even though it fit all the aspects of a book I would most expect to find contemptible.

The opening seemed to prove my hypothesis, that it would be pretentious and vulgar. Tea describes how "little tsunamis of beer" cascade down her T-shirt one night, as she tries to impress a girl she is crushing on. Typical fucked-up girl memoir, trying to use pretty language to seem meaningful, I thought. Backtracking to why I was reading it in the first place...I saw it in the library and remembered an old friend had raved and raved about it. Figured it was different from my usual stuff and gave it a shot.

You can look at Valencia the way I wanted to when I started reading. There isn't much more to it than San Francisco, dyke life, and drugs. But whether I was in the right mood or what, it seemed insightful and true to me as I read.

Tea describes her drunken, stoned, and sober adventures and her experiences with the girls she chases after. She has long-term and short-term relationships with women over the course of the novel, as well as tumultuous relationships with friends and acquaintances. Tea is an assertive, sometime aggressive, character who pursues life vigorously and impulsively. Through her words, you can get in the head of the loudmouth at the party, who is also the clingy girlfriend, also your angry, volatile, emotional, but lovable best friend.

Perhaps that's what sets her memoir apart. I'm a quiet girl, in awe of girls like her. I feel like many writers are. When she combines her view with her talent for wordsmithing, the result is entrancing. Tea uses the best points of stream of consciousness, a flowing rhythm that expresses thought and feeling, without the frustrating constructions of Joyce, or annoying lack of punctuation or organization like Eggers.

Valencia is for those who can take hard-core lesbian sex scenes and drug abuse scenes, both of which are fairly consistent throughout the book. It's maybe one for aspiring writers too, and maybe later for historians or LGBT theorists and whatnot. I'd recommend it to friends, both male and female too.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Book Review: The Speed of Clouds by Miriam Seidel

Book Review: The Speed of Clouds by Miriam Seidel *To Be Released from New Door Books on April 10, 2018* Mindy Vogel is haunted by the future. In frequent daydreams, she toggles between her real, wheelchair-bound life and the adventurous life of her fanfic alter ego, SkyLog officer Kat Wanderer. She's haunted by all that Kat can do which she cannot---belong to an organization of comrades, walk, and fall in love---yet. Because at twenty-four, Mindy's future is very much ahead of her, wheelchair notwithstanding. Through Mindy's "SkyLog" fanzine and related emails, Seidel evokes Star Trek fandom around the turn of the millenium, but also creates a new and compelling science fictional universe, similar to what Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl  does for the Harry Potter fandom with "Simon Snow." Mindy is among the pioneers transitioning fandom from print to digital, boldly encountering like-minded individuals from the comfort of her chair behind the monito...

Books with Single-Word Titles

Happy Top Ten Tuesday over at That Artsy Reader Girl! Books with Single-Word Titles These are all my favorite books that I could think of with one-word titles. A lot of fantasy, a few nonfiction (minus subtitles) and Kindred , whether you consider it scifi or historical fiction. Also two portmanteaus using the word "bitter." I suppose it's a word that lends itself to amelioration. 1. Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler 2. Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore 3. Fire by Kristin Cashore 4. Heartless by Marissa Meyer 5. Inheritance by Christopher Paolini 6. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius 7. Stoned by Aja Raden (has a subtitle) 8. Educated by Tara Westover 9. Fledgling by Octavia Butler 10. Kindred by Octavia Butler

The Ten Most Recent Additions to My Book Collection

 Most of the books I buy these days are ebooks, or books I'm technically "renting" (I guess that's the right term?) on Kindle Unlimited. I also get a few ebooks for review, usually from LibraryThing or directly from authors. Mostly I get books from the library, but I also try to buy/preorder from my favorite authors--sometimes ebooks or sometimes an actual book if I don't have a signed copy from that author yet! Here are the most recent books I've either bought or rented (TBR would be a whole other list!). Happy Top Ten Tuesday over at That Artsy Reader Girl! Top Ten Most Recent Additions to My Book Collection Everlasting Spring: 101 Poems for Every Season of Life by Sonya Matejko (Ebook for review from LibraryThing) Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawagachi (Kindle Unlimited) Spark by Allie Lasky (Kindle Unlimited) The Hannukah Hook-Up by Jessica Topper (Kindle Unlimited) Hooked by M.C. Frank (Kindle Unlimited) A Dance of Blood and Destiny by K.R.S. ...