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Michelle Tea
By Shawna KenneyPhoto By Adam Wallacavage
Styling By Clint Catalyst
Writing is a lonely endeavor. Cerebral, solitary, and gutwrenching at best, the very nature of the art ensures that, much as we may love to read them, few writers ever achieve actual rock-star status. But few writers deliver the goods like Michelle Tea. The San Franciscan superhero of the literary world tours relentlessly, reading to standing-room-only crowds everywhere, able to induce roaring laughter and crushing heartbreak—sometimes within the same sentence. Live, she’s a charming ball of wit wrapped in tattoos. On the page, she’s the type of writer that makes fellow scribes either strive to do better or give up altogether.
Tea, 35, is the author of four memoirs: The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America, Valencia (winner of a Lambda Award), The Chelsea Whistle, and the illustrated novel Rent Girl (currently being developed for television). She also authored the poetry collection The Beautiful, and has edited and contributed to an exhaustive list of anthologies. Her latest novel, Rose of No Man’s Land, follows 14-year-old Trisha Driscoll through a dazzling maze of mall culture and teen angst. The New York Times describes it as “delivered in a street-smart literary voice that growls and purrs, gnashing about fakery, crooning about lust,” and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore says it “lets us inside the heart of female energy and intelligence.” The book marks a transition for this champion of the working class from indie sensation to mainstream success.
Born in Chelsea, Massachusetts (described as “a grimy pocket of New England” in one of her books), Tea’s rags-to-royalty story is told in her prolific body of work, but the uninitiated should note that her rabid following started back in 1994 when she formed Sister Spit, an all-girl open mic show she took on the road, tackling love, sex, drugs, and the complexities of being human (think Bukowski, Miller, or Kerouac, only better) and female. In true Tea style, she describes her favorite tour bar fight, which happened in 1998: “The insane chaos Lynn Breedlove provoked when she whipped out her dick at Charlie’s Kitchen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and had a straight guy circus performer take out his dentures and give her a gum job, and the jockish Catholic guy who somehow had managed to not get shot and killed by a high-school student got upset and started yelling, and I whipped a jar of Grey Poupon at him and he pulled out a knife. But no one got hurt!” The group included Breedlove (singer of Tribe 8), Sini Anderson, Marci Blackman, Tara Jepsen, Beth Lisick, and Kassy Kayiatos among other notables, and advertised themselves as “a freewheeling gaggle of loud-mouthed girls, kicking for revolution and calling it like we see it, or how we want it, or any other damn thing a damsel pleases.”
In an essay entitled “Explain,” published in Narrativity, San Francisco State University’s literary magazine, Tea defends her choice of gritty subject matter: “Why not me. My poverty and the girls that don’t love me and how drunk I got the other night. How I was a prostitute. It seems to be literature when guys write about it, it’s practically become a genre, men writing about their transcendental trips to the cathouse, their orgasms and revelations. Or men writing about women’s lives in general. Straight people writing about queers and white people writing about every other race on the planet. The writing that I love, it’s the Other telling the part that got left out, the truth.”
The strong themes of sisterhood and sex running through Tea’s work have given voice to legions of young feminist fans who often find it difficult to relate to what are commonly referred to as the “first and second waves” of the movement. Third-wave feminism strives to embrace sex-positivity, queer theory, and class- and color-awareness that earlier incarnations have commonly been accused of ignoring—the “Other” that Tea refuses to leave alone.
Lately, Tea’s been burning up the lecture circuit, speaking at universities, dive bars, and festivals around the world. She also currently pens horoscopes for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and hosts the Radar Reading Series at the San Francisco Public Library. Tea credits acclaimed poet/novelist Eileen Myles, performance artist Breedlove, and author Judy Blume as some of her own icons—“But I really can’t think of myself in such a way!” she says. “You know? Is there another question I can answer? Or is that my answer?”