The first half of Black Wave, Tea’s latest novel, gives only hints of being anything but memoir. In her early work, Michelle Tea makes that life seem perhaps not easy, but attainable, the way the Ramones make playing great pop music seem easy. In retrospect, it wasn’t just the onset of my initiation that made what I perceived as the adult art world feel tantalizingly close. While living vicariously through Michelle Tea, my band received a handful of invitations from feral older kids to play in their dilapidated houses papier-mached with probably load-bearing quantities of art, suggesting that world was nearly in reach. I would have preferred her wealth to actual money.Įnjoying every variety of romantic dalliance and drug, making art, surrounded by interesting, attractive artists, living in punk houses on bookstore wages - I longed for that life. To me at 16, Michelle Tea sounded like some sort of sex millionaire.

I couldn’t imagine not remembering the appearance of a naked woman in my bed.

I particularly remember her description of one relatively understated float in her parade of lovers and/or lovers of a woman she was seeing (that it’s hard to remember which should evoke the grandeur of the parade.) She wrote that she saw the sleeping woman’s mousy brown head poking out from under a blanket, and couldn’t recall when the sight had become a common occurrence. In high school, Michelle Tea’s memoir/novels Valencia and The Chelsea Whistle flooded my virgin imagination with hope and lust for the adventures I had to look forward to as an adult queer.

Black Wave by Michelle Tea