Synopses & Reviews
Passionate Mistakes helped catapult the nascent queer girl culture of San Francisco's Mission district to the world. The novel charts the turbulent adventures of one girl in America as she moves from Boston's teenage goth world to whoring in New Age Tucson before finally arriving in San Francisco’s dyke underground.
Honest, sarcastic, lyrical and direct, Tea's writing is possibly the most literate and sophisticated treatment of underground dyke culture ever written and circulated. She is a reincarnation of when Jill Johnston used to be cool.
Review
"... a gem of endangered narration from a loud and highly marginalized subculture, in particular the third wave of feminism. Tea's work resists categorization, and like all surprising vanguard literature, it's the news—a hunk of lyric information that coolly, then frantically, describes the car wreck of her generation and everything that surrounds it."
— Eileen Myles, The Nation
Review
"The legacy of thirty years of feminism... Rollicking and blistering, pained and hilarious, wired and wild-eyed and smashingly good. The narrator, diving into fourteen, trying to be an INXS groupie, feeling grossed out by the role but wanting experience that doesn't have a name."
— Laurie Stone, Village Voice
Review
"At 27, Michelle Tea is an ex-prostitute, ex-Goth, ex-drummer for Dirt Bike Gang, ex-straight girl, ex-lesbian separatist vegan, ex-Catholic schoolgirl, and ex-resident of Chelsea, Boston's working class slum. She is poised, with this breakthrough debut volume, to become the spokesperson for America's young queer girl mutant horde."
— New Books Weekly"The legacy of thirty years of feminism... Rollicking and blistering, pained and hilarious, wired and wild-eyed and smashingly good. The narrator, diving into fourteen, trying to be an INXS groupie, feeling grossed out by the role but wanting experience that doesn't have a name."
— Laurie Stone, Village Voice"... a gem of endangered narration from a loud and highly marginalized subculture, in particular the third wave of feminism. Tea's work resists categorization, and like all surprising vanguard literature, it's the news—a hunk of lyric information that coolly, then frantically, describes the car wreck of her generation and everything that surrounds it."
— Eileen Myles, The Nation
Synopsis
This novel charts the turbulent adventures of one girl in America as she moves from Boston's teenage goth world to whoring in New Age Tucson before finally arriving in San Francisco’s dyke underground.
About the Author
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 Chronicle. She lives in San Francisco.