Status
Checked out
Publication
Amethyst Editions (2016), Edition: 1st Edition, 320 pages
Description
"Desperate to quell her addiction to drugs, disastrous romance, and nineties San Francisco, Michelle heads south for LA. But soon it's officially announced that the world will end in one year, and life in the sprawling metropolis becomes increasingly weird. While living in an abandoned bookstore, dating Matt Dillon, and keeping an eye on the encroaching apocalypse, Michelle begins a new novel, a sprawling and meta-textual exploration to complement her promises of maturity and responsibility. But as she tries to make queer love and art without succumbing to self-destructive vice, the boundaries between storytelling and everyday living begin to blur, and Michelle wonders how much she'll have to compromise her artistic process if she's going to properly ride out doomsday. Michelle Tea is the author of numerous books, including Rent Girl, Valencia, and How to Grow Up. She is the creator of the Sister Spit all-girl open mic and 1997-1999 national tour. In 2003, Michelle founded RADAR Productions, a literary non-profit that oversees queer-centric projects"--… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member greeniezona
Oh, Michelle Tea. We all knew there was zero chance I wouldn't buy this book, especially with the promise that Tea had finally written her long hinted at science fiction novel. Not that this big beautiful mess of a book is traditional science fiction. The first half if more like a fictionalized
There are so many ideas here. Are all of them fully realized? I don't know. At a certain point my fondness for Tea pretty much wins over. I love her, and I love that she's taking these big risks. I love that there are a million apocalyptic stories in the world and this is like none of them.
Show More
version of one of Tea's many memoirs, with some occasional "the earth is dying" mentions thrown in for background. In part two the book transforms. Michelle moves to Los Angeles, is writing a screenplay, and is also clearly now writing this book, and struggling with how to write the story when none of her exes want to be included in it, figuring out how to find other motivations for her actions when certain people have been written out, and struggling with how to make her story "universal," or at least relatable to the rich white (mostly straight) men who are the cultural gate keepers in L.A. (and everywhere). On top of all that, the end of the world is accelerating, and as people are figuring out how to deal with that, they begin to have psychic dreams connecting them with lovers that many of them then track down in waking life.There are so many ideas here. Are all of them fully realized? I don't know. At a certain point my fondness for Tea pretty much wins over. I love her, and I love that she's taking these big risks. I love that there are a million apocalyptic stories in the world and this is like none of them.
Show Less
LibraryThing member BrandieC
For most of my reading life, I have consciously avoided feminist and LGBTQ literature, finding the former too strident for my taste and the latter too foreign to my life experience to relate to. That I drew most of my TBR list from the New York Times Book Review did nothing to counter this
It was the apocalyptic setting which led me to pick up Black Wave, but it was the distinctive voice which held me and the deep humanity which has stayed with me. There are not many books in which THE END OF THE WORLD is forced to take a back seat, but that is what Tea has achieved. Here is her heroine (also named Michelle), ruminating on the difficulties autobiographical writers face in live conversation:
Like when you're telling an anecdote and someone interjects - Yeah, you already told us that story. Oh, no - you are repeating yourself, you cannot stop talking, you are so checked out you cannot remember what you have said to whom, you are so self-involved. To hear a person say Yeah, I read that in your book is this shame times twenty. You so cannot stop talking that you actually wrote down your talk and then expected others to read it, and not even that will exorcize your narratives, you will in fact continue to talk and talk, expecting us to pretend we don't know the story, which you have performed into actual microphones in public places. Guess what, Michelle? We know your mother is a chain-smoking lesbian psych nurse.
Black Wave wasn't perfect. The transition between the first part, set in San Francisco, and the second part, set in Los Angeles, was confusing (although that may be a realistic depiction of what it's actually like to move from San Francisco to Los Angeles), and some of the meta-fictional high jinks felt like Tea was showing off her cleverness, rather than adding a truly new layer to the narrative. These minor missteps were more than outweighed by such lovely inventions as the dreaming soulmates finding each other on a worldwide Match.com. The Michelle of Black Wave is exactly the kind of person I want to be with when we shut off the lights for the last time.
This review was based on a free ARC provided by the publisher.
Show More
tendency. Since joining the Goodreads community and, more specifically, such groups as Newest Literary Fiction and The Tournament of Books, however, I have begun to expand my readerly horizons and have fallen in love with authors I formerly would have rejected out of hand. One such author is Michelle Tea, whose description as the author of works "explor[ing] queer culture, feminism, race, class, [and] prostitution" would once have prompted me to run for the hills, but her novel Black Wave is quite likely to be my favorite book of 2017.It was the apocalyptic setting which led me to pick up Black Wave, but it was the distinctive voice which held me and the deep humanity which has stayed with me. There are not many books in which THE END OF THE WORLD is forced to take a back seat, but that is what Tea has achieved. Here is her heroine (also named Michelle), ruminating on the difficulties autobiographical writers face in live conversation:
Like when you're telling an anecdote and someone interjects - Yeah, you already told us that story. Oh, no - you are repeating yourself, you cannot stop talking, you are so checked out you cannot remember what you have said to whom, you are so self-involved. To hear a person say Yeah, I read that in your book is this shame times twenty. You so cannot stop talking that you actually wrote down your talk and then expected others to read it, and not even that will exorcize your narratives, you will in fact continue to talk and talk, expecting us to pretend we don't know the story, which you have performed into actual microphones in public places. Guess what, Michelle? We know your mother is a chain-smoking lesbian psych nurse.
Black Wave wasn't perfect. The transition between the first part, set in San Francisco, and the second part, set in Los Angeles, was confusing (although that may be a realistic depiction of what it's actually like to move from San Francisco to Los Angeles), and some of the meta-fictional high jinks felt like Tea was showing off her cleverness, rather than adding a truly new layer to the narrative. These minor missteps were more than outweighed by such lovely inventions as the dreaming soulmates finding each other on a worldwide Match.com. The Michelle of Black Wave is exactly the kind of person I want to be with when we shut off the lights for the last time.
This review was based on a free ARC provided by the publisher.
Show Less
LibraryThing member RidgewayGirl
Plans led to disappointment, to regret, to chain-smoking and sadness. Michelle refused to be tragic. She would resist having plans.
Michelle is a young lesbian living in a run-down apartment in San Francisco during the 1990s, and also as the world is ending. She works in a bookstore, but she wrote a
Their hard drinking was a sort of lifestyle performance, like the artist who wore only red for a year, then only blue, then yellow. They were playing the parts of hardened females, embodying a sort of Hunter S. Thompson persona, a deeply feminist stance for a couple of girls to take. They were too self-aware to be alcoholics. Real alcoholics didn't know they could even be alcoholics, they just drank and drank and ruined their lives and didn't have any fun and were men.
The first half of [Black Wave] follows Michelle and her compatriots as they carouse around the dying city. It's a self-destructive artist novel in the style of the many published during the nineties, from Suicide Blonde to The Story of Junk. I read a slew of them back then and the story remains the same, although the characters always believe they are forging new ground.
The second half of the novel is an entirely different animal. Here, Michelle Tea makes the dystopian end-of-the-world theme explicit, while also going meta and becoming a novel about the writing of the novel, where what is happening in Michelle-the-character's life becomes a topic of debate. Tea also makes the decision to have Every Thing That Michelle Says Capitalized and has everyone else speak in italics. I had thought that I was fairly open to stylistic quirks, but this annoyed me to the point that I couldn't concentrate on what Tea was doing, or even what was going on in the story.
With Black Wave, author Michelle Tea takes big risks. That they don't entirely work means that the book doesn't hold together the way it might had she played it safe. But I can't help but admire her courage.
Michelle is a young lesbian living in a run-down apartment in San Francisco during the 1990s, and also as the world is ending. She works in a bookstore, but she wrote a
Show More
book once, and so she's collecting experiences for her next book, which mainly means she drinks a lot and takes whatever drugs are offered to her. In the name of artistic experience, of course, she's not an addict or anything. Their hard drinking was a sort of lifestyle performance, like the artist who wore only red for a year, then only blue, then yellow. They were playing the parts of hardened females, embodying a sort of Hunter S. Thompson persona, a deeply feminist stance for a couple of girls to take. They were too self-aware to be alcoholics. Real alcoholics didn't know they could even be alcoholics, they just drank and drank and ruined their lives and didn't have any fun and were men.
The first half of [Black Wave] follows Michelle and her compatriots as they carouse around the dying city. It's a self-destructive artist novel in the style of the many published during the nineties, from Suicide Blonde to The Story of Junk. I read a slew of them back then and the story remains the same, although the characters always believe they are forging new ground.
The second half of the novel is an entirely different animal. Here, Michelle Tea makes the dystopian end-of-the-world theme explicit, while also going meta and becoming a novel about the writing of the novel, where what is happening in Michelle-the-character's life becomes a topic of debate. Tea also makes the decision to have Every Thing That Michelle Says Capitalized and has everyone else speak in italics. I had thought that I was fairly open to stylistic quirks, but this annoyed me to the point that I couldn't concentrate on what Tea was doing, or even what was going on in the story.
With Black Wave, author Michelle Tea takes big risks. That they don't entirely work means that the book doesn't hold together the way it might had she played it safe. But I can't help but admire her courage.
Show Less
LibraryThing member BraveNewBks
February 22, 2017 –
31.0% "I seriously have learned more about buying and doing drugs from the first third of this book than from the rest of my life, I think."
February 24, 2017 –
81.0% "Not as charmed by the world-is-ending portion of this book."
I enjoyed the surprising simile and metaphor
But mostly what I gleaned from this book is the power of description to make an unfamiliar feeling/scenario seem familiar. I’ve never done heroin, for instance, but this book made me feel like I understand a little of what it’s like. Or this: She was in the grips of a detached fascination. She wanted the images on the television to wear her down so she could truly feel whatever it felt like to truly feel what was happening. Surely this alarmed, rubbernecking interest was not what she should be feeling. She was supposed to be feeling something a few layers down, something authentic and meaningful. Michelle feared she was not having an authentic experience of the beginning of the end of the world. She was having a deeply authentic experience of inauthenticity. It’s an oblique way to communicate what a character is feeling about an otherwise inaccessible experience, in that most people have never experienced something they think is the literal end of the world. And yet the fact that Michelle is worried that her experience is inauthentic tells us so much about what kind of person Michelle is, what’s important to her and what she values and how the end of the world threatens that twice over, first by her own impending doom but secondly by threatening to happen without her even properly processing it.
This was a great book to read in close succession to [book:Moonglow|26795307] by [author:Michael Chabon|2715], since both have characters who share the author’s name, and both blur the line between memoir and fiction. Michelle in Black Wave is obviously facing some situations that don’t read true to life (the end of the world, for one), but she is also a writer who is finding it difficult to write a second book after a moderately successful first one, who muses at some length about the difficulties of being too honest in a memoir, particularly when friends and family object to being identifiably included. “Don’t you ever fucking write about me!” screams an ex immediately after a breakup. It’s easy to imagine that being a real-life experience translated into fiction, especially as Michelle talks about revising her book to replace a character that was central to the story. I Actually Wrote The Whole Book With Her In It. Our Whole Story. Eight Years.Five Hundred Pages… She Didn’t Want Me To Write About Her But Our Breakup Was So Shitty And Awful I Just Really Needed To Tell The Story. The capitalization of every word is how Michelle speaks. It’s effective insofar as it gives the character a unique voice in my head, but it gets old really fast to read it on the page.
All in all, I would say this book wasn't exactly to my taste, but I found it intriguing and worthwhile nonetheless. I particularly appreciate the preponderance of queer characters, who too often are a novelty in fiction.
31.0% "I seriously have learned more about buying and doing drugs from the first third of this book than from the rest of my life, I think."
February 24, 2017 –
81.0% "Not as charmed by the world-is-ending portion of this book."
I enjoyed the surprising simile and metaphor
Show More
scattered throughout. Andy was on a lesbian soccer team. Michelle liked to watch her spike the ball with her head like an aggressive seal. … a fracture thin as a spider web had begun to climb the surface of their friendship. She kissed her like she’d been shipwrecked on an island, notching each stranded day onto a fallen coconut, slowly losing her mind. That last line in particular, feels like a poem I want to read further. But mostly what I gleaned from this book is the power of description to make an unfamiliar feeling/scenario seem familiar. I’ve never done heroin, for instance, but this book made me feel like I understand a little of what it’s like. Or this: She was in the grips of a detached fascination. She wanted the images on the television to wear her down so she could truly feel whatever it felt like to truly feel what was happening. Surely this alarmed, rubbernecking interest was not what she should be feeling. She was supposed to be feeling something a few layers down, something authentic and meaningful. Michelle feared she was not having an authentic experience of the beginning of the end of the world. She was having a deeply authentic experience of inauthenticity. It’s an oblique way to communicate what a character is feeling about an otherwise inaccessible experience, in that most people have never experienced something they think is the literal end of the world. And yet the fact that Michelle is worried that her experience is inauthentic tells us so much about what kind of person Michelle is, what’s important to her and what she values and how the end of the world threatens that twice over, first by her own impending doom but secondly by threatening to happen without her even properly processing it.
This was a great book to read in close succession to [book:Moonglow|26795307] by [author:Michael Chabon|2715], since both have characters who share the author’s name, and both blur the line between memoir and fiction. Michelle in Black Wave is obviously facing some situations that don’t read true to life (the end of the world, for one), but she is also a writer who is finding it difficult to write a second book after a moderately successful first one, who muses at some length about the difficulties of being too honest in a memoir, particularly when friends and family object to being identifiably included. “Don’t you ever fucking write about me!” screams an ex immediately after a breakup. It’s easy to imagine that being a real-life experience translated into fiction, especially as Michelle talks about revising her book to replace a character that was central to the story. I Actually Wrote The Whole Book With Her In It. Our Whole Story. Eight Years.Five Hundred Pages… She Didn’t Want Me To Write About Her But Our Breakup Was So Shitty And Awful I Just Really Needed To Tell The Story. The capitalization of every word is how Michelle speaks. It’s effective insofar as it gives the character a unique voice in my head, but it gets old really fast to read it on the page.
All in all, I would say this book wasn't exactly to my taste, but I found it intriguing and worthwhile nonetheless. I particularly appreciate the preponderance of queer characters, who too often are a novelty in fiction.
Show Less
LibraryThing member sprainedbrain
This book was all over the place, and that was a good thing. We follow our main character, Michelle, from San Francisco to LA as she experiences sex, drugs, alcohol, love, family, friends, Matt Dillon, and the end of the world. The writing is really good, the story is completely original, and the
Show More
book was fun. Show Less
LibraryThing member Castlelass
This is a two-part apocalyptic story written in the format of a “fictional memoir.” In the first part, protagonist Michelle is living in the Mission District in San Francisco, working in a bookstore, and trying to write a book. Her life is a hot mess. She drinks, takes lots of drugs, and
This story supplies much material for a group discussion, as there are several ways to interpret it. For example, is the world really ending or is the apocalypse just a device used as an ending to the protagonist’s book? Are people really connecting in dream sequences or are they losing their minds?
I found this book very creative. I got caught up in parts of it, especially the portion that takes place in Los Angeles. It is definitely an unusual take on an apocalyptic story and has a meta vibe. I Am Not a Fan of Mixed Case Sentences in Lieu of Quotation Marks. It was hard for me to get past some of the depressing content, and the numerous sex/drugs scenes, but I liked it enough to read another book by this author.
3.5
Show More
engages in many sexual liaisons. She gets caught in a spiral of self-destructive behavior. She moves to Los Angeles, near her brother, where she gets a job in another bookshop and begins re-writing her book. She wants to stop drinking and get her life on track, just as the world is coming to an end via “black wave.”This story supplies much material for a group discussion, as there are several ways to interpret it. For example, is the world really ending or is the apocalypse just a device used as an ending to the protagonist’s book? Are people really connecting in dream sequences or are they losing their minds?
I found this book very creative. I got caught up in parts of it, especially the portion that takes place in Los Angeles. It is definitely an unusual take on an apocalyptic story and has a meta vibe. I Am Not a Fan of Mixed Case Sentences in Lieu of Quotation Marks. It was hard for me to get past some of the depressing content, and the numerous sex/drugs scenes, but I liked it enough to read another book by this author.
3.5
Show Less
LibraryThing member rosienotrose
“They were twenty-seven already, in no time at all they’d be thirty, terrifying. No one knew what would happen then. Michelle couldn’t imagine anything more than writing zine-ish memoirs and working in bookstores.”
It's 1999 in San Francisco, and as shockwaves of gentrification sweep through
I started this book pretty much knowing nothing beyond the fact it was set in San Fran in the 90s and the main character was a writer. It seems like a normal memoir ish story of life in the town of friends and drugs and rebellion.
When the second half of the book moved to LA I couldn’t figure out what was going on. There was the talk of mass suicides and world ending stuff all being referred to in the background. People ‘dreaming’ about lovers who they would then try to find in waking life and in the centre of it our main character was figure out how to live their life. And what the point was in writing if no one was gonna read it.
I wondered at one point whether it would turn out ‘LA’ was actually a drug trip or some kind of last attempt for her brain to cling to life after she might have OD’d.
If I’d know the story was going to switch to an end of the world scenario I may have been more prepared but that’s my bad and really doesn’t reflect on how well this was written.
All in all this was brilliant exploration of queer life (and life ending) from a writer I’ve not read before. Confusion aside I would definitely read more of her stuff. I’d just be sure the fully read the summary.
It's 1999 in San Francisco, and as shockwaves of gentrification sweep through
Show More
Michelle's formerly scruffy neighborhood, money troubles, drug-fueled mishaps, and a string of disastrous affairs send her into a tailspin. Desperate to save herself, Michelle sets out to seek a fresh start in Los Angeles.I started this book pretty much knowing nothing beyond the fact it was set in San Fran in the 90s and the main character was a writer. It seems like a normal memoir ish story of life in the town of friends and drugs and rebellion.
When the second half of the book moved to LA I couldn’t figure out what was going on. There was the talk of mass suicides and world ending stuff all being referred to in the background. People ‘dreaming’ about lovers who they would then try to find in waking life and in the centre of it our main character was figure out how to live their life. And what the point was in writing if no one was gonna read it.
I wondered at one point whether it would turn out ‘LA’ was actually a drug trip or some kind of last attempt for her brain to cling to life after she might have OD’d.
If I’d know the story was going to switch to an end of the world scenario I may have been more prepared but that’s my bad and really doesn’t reflect on how well this was written.
All in all this was brilliant exploration of queer life (and life ending) from a writer I’ve not read before. Confusion aside I would definitely read more of her stuff. I’d just be sure the fully read the summary.
Show Less
Awards
The Morning News Tournament of Books (Short List — 2017)
The Kitschies (Finalist — 2017)
Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize (Longlist — Fiction — 2017)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
2016
Physical description
320 p.; 5.76 inches
ISBN
1558619399 / 9781558619395