Valencia

An anarchic and unflinching cult novel “charged with reflection, anger, and the feeling of being alive” (Village Voice), tracing a year of love and lust in San Francisco’s lesbian underground, with a new foreword by Maggie Nelson

Valencia is a fast-paced account of one girl’s search for love and high times in the dyke world of 1990s San Francisco.

Fleeing Tucson and her rotten (ex) girlfriend, Michelle lands in the Mission District, where queers from all over the country are arriving in search of themselves and each other. An aspiring poet, she hurls herself into the city’s riotous underbelly, stumbling through nightlife and open mics, drug adventures, and a string of hookups, breakups, and makeups. As butches and besties spin in and out of Michelle’s orbit, she ponders the powerful force and casual cruelty of their desires, and of her own—all in a singular, biting, deadpan voice shot through with humor and heartbreak.

Heady, beer sticky, and brimming with life, Valencia is a sharply observed and piercingly funny chronicle of a year lived close to the bone. Now with a new foreword from Maggie Nelson, this lesbian cult classic is ripe for rediscovery.

• “A missive sent straight from the mayhem.”
  Maggie Nelson, from the foreword
• “If you want to know how dangerous and great and awful it is to be a girl you’ll scarf Valencia right up. There’s so much colliding and ‘sharing.’ I mean in the good way—sharing bodies, drugs, stories and clothes. The street today is full of girls if you haven’t noticed.”
  Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls
• “Valencia is one of the few true life-changer books I’ve encountered. One of those books that gets casually slipped to you, and then, a couple hours later, you understand you’ve been living all wrong, that everything must change. I wish you luck in the aftermath of reading it!”
  Torrey Peters, author of Detransition Baby
• “I consider Michelle Tea a literary MOTHER—champion, organizer, and co-conspirator of the most potent alt-literature scenes San Francisco has witnessed in decades. I will forever tip my hat to her and the timeless and immortal text that is Valencia.”
  Brontez Purnell, author of 100 Boyfriends
• “Wonderful storytelling...charged with reflection, anger, and the feeling of being alive.”
  The Village Voice
• “A spidery roman á clef for our times...Valencia crackles with take-no-prisoners prose.”
  The Seattle Times
• “There is immediacy in the stream-of-consciousness style, as if Tea were in the room offering the reader a late-night confession.”
  Library Journal
• “An edgy, supercharged, supersurreal reality.”
  Booklist
• “Michelle Tea is the Mission’s poet laureate. She gives us our voice back with tragic porno hilarity at breakneck speeds, our own personal Bill Moyers documenting dramas of queer punk lives.”
  Lynn Breedlove, spoken word artist and singer for Tribe 8
• “Tea’s fiction is beautifully similar to real life—a glimpse into a bad girl’s diary—full of misguided intelligence, complicated sex, and the impossibility, even the undesirability, of redemption.”
  Tracy Vogel, The Stranger
• “What’s truly inspired in this book is Tea’s literary voice, an effortlessly controlled combination of ironic wit and romantic longing.”
  The Bay Guardian
• “The stream-of-consciousness narration is a delightful ride to be on, shifting us into other registers of memory and relationship.”
  Rain Taxi
• “Tea’s exquisite writing performs the miracle, dancing along a razor’s edge between humor and pathos, jaded exhaustion and wonder. In lesser hands, this material would simply be sad. As it is, it’s transcendental.”
  Girlfriends magazine