Status
Publication
Description
The critically acclaimed adventures of an ex-Goth, ex-straight-girl, ex-lesbian, ex-Catholic schoolgirl on the road in 1990s America. Published by Semiotext(e) to critical acclaim in 1998, Michelle Tea's debut novel The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America quickly established Tea as an exciting new literary talent and the voice of a new generation of queer, bisexual, transgendered, and straight youth. The Village Voice called Passionate Mistakes "the legacy of thirty years of feminism," and Eileen Myles, writing in the Nation, hailed the novel as "a hunk of lyric information that coolly, then frantically, describes the car wreck of her generation. "The too-smart, caustic, and radiant narrator of Passionate Mistakes is, at twenty-seven, an ex-Goth, ex-drummer, ex-straight girl, ex-lesbian separatist vegan graduate of vocational high school in the working class town of Chelsea, Massachusetts. Written with lyrical precision and charm, the novel describes a journey with no final destination, a fast-paced and picaresque road trip that yields a redemptive vision of an America that has nothing left to offer its youth. This new edition of a Semiotext(e) classic includes critical essays by Brandon Stosuy and Eileen Myles that describe Michelle Tea's achievement as a literary innovator and cultural icon. Michelle Tea is the prolific author of the Lambda Award-winning Valencia, the graphic novel Rent Girl, the "inspired queer bildungsroman" Rose of No Man's Land, and other books. She was a 1999 recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for fiction. Her critically acclaimed books have appeared on "books of the year" lists in publications ranging from the Voice Literary Supplement to the San Francisco Chonicle. She lives in San Francisco.… (more)
User reviews
The ad at the back of the book for the Native Agents series says, Michelle Tea's tale has all the grit and adventure of a life lived large, free, and on the edge. On the edge I'll give you, but the life is small, sticky, oppressive and far from free. But there are some great quotes. Speaking of her girlfriend's ecological opposition to fireworks she says She'd been a mean little troublemaker her whole life but getting a political consciousness had really given her direction. I'd watched her progress from random cruelty to truly righteous hostility,
The pathetic hanger on of the memoir becomes Michelle Tea who writes the memoir. How that happens, I guess, is the stuff of other books, but they say all the parts of the journey bring you to where you are. Where Michelle Tea is now is opening our eyes to parts of the world some of us didn't know existed. Where she was then was a cramped and joyless place to be.