Valencia

by Michelle Tea

Valencia is the fast-paced account of one girl's search for love and high times in the drama-filled dyke world of San Francisco's Mission District. Through a string of narrative moments, Tea records a year lived in a world of girls: there's knife-wielding Marta, who introduces Michelle to a new world of radical sex; Willa, Michelle's tormented poet-girlfriend; Iris, the beautiful boy-dyke who ran away from the South in a dust cloud of drama; and Iris's ex, Magdalena Squalor, to whom Michelle turns when Iris breaks her heart. Valencia conveys a blend of youthful urgency and apocalyptic apathy.

Genres: Queer, Fiction, LGBT, Lesbian, Feminism, Novels, Gay

216 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2000

About the author

Michelle Tea (born Michelle Tomasik) is an American author, poet, and literary arts organizer whose autobiographical works explore queer culture, feminism, race, class, prostitution, and other topics. She is originally from Chelsea, Massachusetts and currently lives in San Francisco. Her books, mostly memoirs, are known for their views into the queercore community. In 2012 Tea partnered with City Lights Publishers to form the Sister Spit imprint.

Reviews

[Steph · Rating 5 out of 5]

valencia is a beautifully written trip through the grimy, drug-saturated lesbian subculture of early-90s san francisco.

it took me a while to get into the rhythm of the story, because it's a lot. the reader is thrust into this world of radical women, drunkenness, astrology, trauma, alleyway makeouts, grunge fashion, heartbreak, poetry and zines, public urination, heavy drugs, dyke pride parades, deep longing, casual sapphic sex with latex gloves, DIY tattoos, sex work, greasy vegan food, close friendships and doomed love affairs, and more. i'm awed by the sheer volume of life experiences within this book!!

what's amazing is that though this messy, reckless world is alien to me, michelle tea's thoughts and emotions are deeply relatable. she is a magnificent storyteller. not all of her shenanigans are particularly interesting, but the way she relays them (in such vivid detail) makes me want to curl up across from her and listen to her frenzied stories all evening.

there is a remarkable quantity of introspection and tenderness within these gritty pages.

valencia takes place in the span of roughly a year, and while tea has a string of lovers in this time, there is one girl in particular. there's always one in particular, isn't there? we spend much of the book watching her relationship with iris unfold, and eventually crumble.

She broke my heart, so now I have to write about her forever. It made everything different. It's something that can only happen once.

there is heartbreak and there are unhealthy coping mechanisms. and the book ends abruptly, because presumably this chapter in tea's life was coming to a close, and that's how life is. sometimes things just end.

something interesting: this was a serendipitous connection, but it was cool to read about san francisco's 90s gay scene shortly after reading last night at the telegraph club, which is a sapphic 1950s coming of age story that takes place in SF. such an amazing cultural shift in the scant 40 years between these two books. it made me all the happier to read about how unabashedly open and how alive things were for lgbt+ people in SF by the 90s.

i also read valencia concurrently with tea's modern tarot, and it was really wonderful to see the parallels between the two. different subject matter, but there are common threads. and there is the beautiful vulnerability within tea's writing; always full of heart.

She didn’t know that my heart was a sandstorm waiting to open her skin in a desert of cuts. She didn’t know the animal that waited in my stomach, silently shredding the walls. For her, my heart wore small white shoes and carried a purse, went to bed early. I wanted to shoot myself into her arms so she understood the need to crash cars with me, to tear up pavement because we were beautiful.

i'm kinda mad, because now i have to read every book that michelle tea has written.

[Aradia V · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book saved my life. I was literally in bed so depressed that I was planning on ending it. Dramatic yes, but very true. Someone had given me the book; I picked it up and couldn't put it down. She was tortured, but exciting..and honestly in my mental state I didn't even notice how messed up she might be.lol After finishing, I decided that I wanted a life worth writing about! I got out of bed, came out as femme and started having my own amazing adventures.
I can't say it will have the same profound effect on anyone else, but I am grateful for this book. Thanks Michelle Tea.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fast paced and diaristic, Valencia sketches a vibrant portrait of lesbian life in ‘90s San Francisco. Recalling Eileen Myles’ Chelsea Girls the autobiographical novel is told from the candid perspective of author-narrator Michelle, a twenty-something queer woman recently moved to the Mission District, who recounts her sundry hook ups, romances, gigs, fights, and adventures from the time. At the start Michelle sets out on a road trip to Tucson that she hopes will help her forget a crush, but by the end she’s firmly planted near the center of San Fran’s queer community; along the way she reflects on her traumatic upbringing and her era’s cultural touchstones. The novel’s incredibly episodic, unfolding in swift vignettes, and lacks any sort of center, but the writing’s absorbing.

[Nicole · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's probably wrong to review a book after only 50 or so pages. But god, this book is annoying as hell. as a "queer urban girl" from san francisco, Michelle embarasses me, as she rambles long run-on sentence paragraphs about her tragically hip dyke "radical" friends who are so bad, so sad, they cut themselves and fuck on the dance floor and have stupid names like Tricky and Spacegirl. Her world consists of"Punks", as defined by their clothes, hair and tattoos, who move here and treat the city like their fucking playground. This gives San Francisco a bad name. Don't call your book "Valencia" for godssakes and then have it labeled as the definitive voice of queer women.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a San Francisco reader in the late 2010's it's impossible not to read Valencia through a prism of nostalgia. The subcultures and spaces Tea captures so vividly have now all but disappeared, so many of the coffee shops and dive bars and affordable apartments that provide the staging for Tea's autobiographical experiences now transformed into trendy bistros, expensive boutiques, and upscale bars with "mixologists" that take ten minutes to make your cocktail because it requires a dozen different ingredients. Perhaps even more importantly, the queer—particularly the lesbian—and kink communities have been long driven away by impossible rent and lack of welcoming places. Where Tea's Valencia Street is a expanse of possibility both physical and mental, Valencia Street in 2018 is ground zero for the tensions of hyper-gentrification.

So it was within this context that I savored Tea's tales of heartache and self-discovery, relishing the descriptions of the women she loved, befriended, flirted with, pined over, and hopped in the sack with, as well as all the other individuals that wandered in and out of this specific period of her life. Her prose is jangly and sharp and operates by the rhythms of spoken word poetry and evokes the type of breathless intensity usually reserved for conversations between intimates rather than the more considered and cerebral approach typical of autobiography and memoir. An admittedly exhausting read at times, but an utterly enthralling one as well.

[Leah · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book does a great job of articulating everything I hate about belonging to such a specific subculture. The first half of the book was slow for me, and I have a knee jerk disapproval of people who claim a working class background but are as irresponsible and treat work with the abandon that Tea does. And while this book isn't all about drugs and alcohol, it is enough about drugs and alcohol to bore the hell out of me. Halfway into the book, though, it does have a shining clump of chapters, but it doesn't quite stick out to the end. This book did help me place some of my feelings about said aspects of said subculture, but I wanted to like Tea. Instead, she reminds me of the people I'm forced to hang out with and constantly needing to set my boundaries with.

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a memoir of a 25-year-old lesbian in '90s San Francisco documenting her times drinking, not working, and having a lot of latex-gloved sex with various girls. It's plotlessness really worked for me, and I figured out it was because Tea is completely honest as an autobiographer. This became apparent when I was planning on thinking she was pretentious, and that never coming to be. I assumed she was going to try and make herself sound really hip, being a counterculture woman swinging in one of the most liberal cities in America, but she basically just told it like it was. A lot of times in memoirs, the writer will over-dramatize their situation, like how they hit rock bottom and almost died eight times or whatever, but again Tea doesn't force the issue of making herself seem really down, or really cool. So that's how I decided the slice-of-life material was authentic. Just one person's account of looking for love in bars and parties. Also she's talented in her own right, there were plenty of creative, non-cliche metaphors and good one-liners to be found. One thing that irked me was constant references to astrological signs? Anyways, this book was a pleasant surprise. My roommate had it assigned to her for school and I just happened to keep reading it after she told me to read a particularly tasteful few pages at the beginning, describing your typical girl-on-girl fist-fuck.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. Sure, I'm biased because I'm from SF and worked alongside Ms. Tea at Books, Inc. where she hosted crazy book readings with hard liquor. Sure, I'm biased because I was never part of that scene, but secretly envied it. Reading the book, however, I didn't feel a bit of envy. I just enjoyed the scenes from afar. Sure it's from the era of the 90's, and therefore dated; sure, it's about lesbian sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll, as well as the famous Folsom Street Fair in SF, fisting, and knives, and sex workers, but it is the perfect book for a light read. Advice to the wise: read it where you can laugh openly and not be seen as crazy. Read it, enjoy it. Yes, it's solipsistic, but it's fun solipsism! And, it's the perfect book to give a non-reading, queer friend. It makes that friend feel like a reader. It reads fast, is moving fiction (well, really a memoir, but who's counting?), and has a James Joyce kind of rebellion against punctuation. Fun, fun, fun!

[Jason Pettus · Rating 5 out of 5]

san francisco's michelle tea is the most vital writer of her generation, one of the few people from our era they'll still be studying 100 years from now, and in valencia she is at the absolute top of her game. dirty, shocking, subversive, with an embracing of a complex sexuality and lifestyle that needs no apologies, tea's work has a good chance of permanently changing your life after being exposed to it or at least getting you looking at the "war of the sexes" in an entirely new way. highly recommended.

[Kirsten · Rating 3 out of 5]

I keep trying to read Michelle Tea's books because she is our local lesbian celebrity, but I find her books a little heavy and over-the-top. But I'm weirdly fascinated with reading them, too. Kind of like driving by a train wreck and not being able to avert your eyes. I feel the same way about some Joyce Carol Oats books. Someone described JCO's writing as grotesque once, and that's a good word to describe Valencia, too. I mean, how many freaky, unstable 20-something lesbians are there, having sex in nasty bar bathrooms, trying all kinds of drugs, and living in dumpy apartments? I guess what I don't like about it is that these girl's lives are considered so glamorous and cool, but really, they are just seriously immature. Some things in this book are just gross. Then, some parts are funny, and it seems like Michelle is looking back on her younger days with a sense of humor. But I don't think the whole book is a farce. I think it's an account of what life is like for these girls, and thinking of trying to be like them, or having to try to fit in with that kind of crowd just gives me a headache. I'm glad for Michelle for being successful, and I'm sure there really lots of girls like the ones in this book, but maybe I'm just too old. I'll write it off to generation gap, but reading this book just didn't make me feel good. I felt the same about Rose of No Man's Land, I couldn't finish the Chelsea Whistle. Not quite my cup of tea.

[g · Rating 4 out of 5]

i thought this book was fucking amazing amazing amazing. i could not stop reading it and read it really really fast, everywhere. on the subway. in my bedroom. on lunch break from work. the writing is real and interesting and a bit stream of conscience-y, but i truly got into it because a young crazy radical michelle tea is a narrator i can easily identify with. ok--so i never went to the dyke march high on speed--but i definitely had the "FUCK SHIT UP!" period of my life where my crazy in-love moms and i spray-painted and wheat-pasted our way through life...when the pursuit of drunkenness, drugs and queer debauchery was all we needed and all we had. this pulled at my nostalgic heart strings for that ridiculous and beautiful time.

my only complaint is that the book ended really abruptly and weirdly--like michelle tea got tired of writing it and was ready to move on. otherwise, a superb read.

[Bryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great dyke beach read.

[Christopher Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

ABSOLUTELY LOVED this ......Michelle wears her heart on her sleeve and I TRULY LOVE her for what she has created, EMPOWERMENT I rest my case!!❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

[Ceren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Een boek vol seks, drugs en lesbische drama. Soms is dat wat precies wat je nodig hebt. Het heeft mij in ieder geval meermaals hardop doen lachen. Zeer de moeite waard.

[emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

"so the planet of me completed its revolution around the heart..."

"we will drink cocktails so sweet they pucker our mouths, and we will run through the streets in excellent danger."

this book took my breath away, and not just because it was one of the first novels i've ever read that was about dyke culture without being trashy. oh sure, michelle tells a seedy story full of drugs and booze and sex, but what she's mostly telling the reader about is her heart. like Annie On My Mind, -valencia- is a story about what it feels like to be a girl in love with another girl-- or in michelle's case, a few others, and what it's like when those loves end. one of the reviews on the back of the book said that in another author's hands the book would have just been depressing, and i have to agree-- it could so easily have been a morbid book about how our ideas of love can't exist-- but instead it's a book about how they do indeed exist, except they come to us in ways we could never expect.

[Bob Koelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Michelle Tea is one annoying lesbian" said a friend. I can believe that, but she writes really well. This book is about nothing, except the day to day wanderings of over-dramatic women with zero responsibilities, except to their own feelings. There's no plot, and the book could have ended anywhere. Indeed by the end, I was growing tired of this girlfriend and that drunken evening. It's all just passages, but at her best, the passages read like Ellis or McInerney. One example: "Oh, I wanted her back so badly. Iris. She was soft like a girl no one had broken and, impossibly, no one had. The girls Iris went through wound up cracked vases no longer fit for flowers, leaky dust collectors. After Iris, girls left town or started fucking boys. She ruined everyone. I should have run from her watery smirk, but there I was all bunched up in the booth, trying to act cute and unconcerned, the only way when your heart is so big and ugly, when your brain is a cartographer mapping out her tiniest road of intention."

[Patrick O'Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Halfway through Valencia I somehow misplaced it. I don't know where it went, but my read got totally interrupted. In a fit of "socialism" I hit the local library and grabbed their dog-eared copy. It was well used and slightly beat up, the corners chewed, pages sticky, with scribbly notes in the margin. Looked like every lesbian teenager from here to Venice had already had it in their sweaty palms. And who could blame them. It'd be like reading an anthem – like me twenty-five years ago reading Burroughs' Junky and taking notes.

I fuckin love Michelle Tea. Her poetic words flow, her images, tragic and beautiful. She is San Francisco – her Radar Reading Series rocks. And Valencia beautifully chronicles a time, a sense, a community, and a piece of SF history. It's a must read.

[Robin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read Valencia when it first came out about ten years ago and I HATED it. Words could not express my loathing for this book. I thought it was self-involved, pretentious, obnoxious, terribly written, and completely lacking in both plot and character development. I found a copy at a thrift store last week and decided to reread it and see if my opinion had changed. I didn't expect that it would; however, I was surprised to find that I kind of like it. Not entirely, but kind of.



It's still lacking in plot and character development; nothing has changed there. Literally, there's no plot, and the characters don't change at all- not even the narrator, whom the plot revolves around and who is the only real character in the book. We see Michelle (the narrator) go through a year of trials and tribulations, but Nothing Happened In This Year. I wrote this book in 2000, too. It's called My Year 2000 Livejournal.



That said, I think Michelle Tea is a good writer as far as style and voice go. She's really funny. I couldn't tell if I was supposed to laugh at her or with her, but part of me thinks it's the mark of a smart fucking writer that I can't tell the difference; if it's the latter, I think I was probably supposed to end the book asking myself that, and the reason that I never thought about this ten years ago is because I was smack dab in the middle of taking myself way too seriously. Honestly, I think that any reader who happens to have been a young queer who took themselves way too seriously at some point in their lives will find something to identify with here. Valencia is not a complete disaster. Maybe if Tea had mixed up her chronology a bit and fleshed out some of the chapters, this could have worked as a book of short stories.



Unfortunately, none of this happened. We met new characters all the way through the last six pages of the book, and there are probably fifty different characters in the book, all of whom are indistinguishable from each other, save for Michelle and Iris, her main love interest. It's chapter after chapter of Michelle fucking and getting fucked up. That's pretty much the gist of the entire book.



Valencia is mostly a mess, but there's some diamonds in the rough. I don't know whether to recommend it, or to tell you to stay far away from it. Flip a coin, maybe? I dunno.

[I. Merey · Rating 4 out of 5]

6 stars for writing
2 stars for painful, embarrassing identification with main character

This is the type of book I adored when I was younger. What am I saying, I still love these books. And it is written by a younger person (or at least recounting the tales of a younger person, not sure how old Tea herself was when she wrote it) so that's all well. The book propels on the trajectory of great Beat writing, chaotic and going nowhere and everywhere at once; the narrator and the prose having no responsibility to anyone or anything but the loose, naive self-righteousness of youth and one's own feelings. It's a Peter Pan book, through and through--

You will love the chaos descriptions that go nowhere, or shake your head at the author to grow the fuck up. Well, I haven't grown up yet, so what could I do but love it.

[Jillane · Rating 3 out of 5]

This felt like reading excerpts from Michelle Tea’s diary., which I guess is because this is a version of her diary. Sometimes this was a good thing and sometimes this was a bad thing and most of the time it was just a thing. Ultimately though, this was a personal glimpse into a time and place that I can never experience, and it made me wish I was spending my 25th year running wild with my friends instead of being inside in a pandemic reading about Michelle Tea being 25 and running wild with her friends.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wild and edgy and sexy and hilarious - Michelle Tea is a pretty amazing writer and this book is a slice of SF Radical Dyke heaven. Loved it.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I first read Valencia for one of Susan Fraiman's brilliant seminars (I think Contemporary Women's Texts?) during the spring of my first year of college. Michelle Tea was my first introduction to real lesbian fiction, and she absolutely excels in channeling the frenetic pulse of the girl scene in San Francisco circa the early 90s. Her memoir/fiction (the lines are blurred) zings with the unbound energy of the idealistic, and when she's heartbroken, she's heartbroken to a degree I think only the young, fabulous, and broke are truly capable of. She was an epic, self-indulgent mess, but that's why it's good.

After a re-read (I was in San Francisco, and it seemed only appropriate to replace my lost copy), I have realized that, while I found it still fun and challenging and sexy and totally unique, the first time I read Valencia, it was exactly the right book at exactly the right time, you know? So I don't know that I can ever get back to my original obsession (chalk it up to diminishing idealism), but there's still plenty to really enjoy, and I'll always fondly remember how much I adored this book way back when.

Tea, on inner selves:
"I knew what I stood for, even if nobody else did. I knew the piece of me on the inside, truer than all the rest, that never comes out. Doesn't everyone have one? Some kind of grand inner princess waiting to toss her hair down, forever waiting at the tower window. Some jungle animal so noble and fierce you had to crawl on your belly through dangerous grasses just to get a glimpse."

[J.S.A. Lowe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book stole my heart completely. Comparisons to Francesca Lia Block are inevitable—only, you know, if Weetz were writing a memoir about being a lesbian sex worker and crystal meth user in San Francisco in the eighties. But the same exuberant love and detailing of a specific place/time/clan, and the attention is lavish and beautiful and so, so, so heartbreakingly young. Also I kept wanting to quote passages to you guys every few pages, mostly about breakups but also just these hilarious little gut-punching observations she throws in there, like these small detonations and you groan as you're reading and go OMG IT IS SO TOTALLY EXACTLY LIKE THAT. Would've gotten five stars from me except the ending doesn't really end, it just sort of slides off into nothingness and that made me really sad. I wanted to go out with some kind of a bang. Literal or metaphorical. Hell, just read it! It's so good!

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an awesome hour-and-a-half read that allows me to indulge in my funky/punky/bad side a little. It's a little bit pornographic (ok, a lot bit) so if that makes you uncomfortable I'd maybe shy away, but there is plenty of beauty in between those parts. It's a pro-sex lesbian in San Francisco discovering her self and her sexual identity through the sub culture she is immersed in. She's not perfect and she doesn't try to make herself look good- so she's pretty easy to relate to.

[Anastasia Le]

A profound gift to queer history and local culture…much else to say.

[N · Rating 4 out of 5]

If the definition of a successful novel is one that instantly whisks you away to a different time and place, then Valencia is a highly successful novel.

It takes Michelle Tea less than a page to plunge the reader into her gritty, exuberant version of San Francisco. Tea’s stories – of unsettling sexual experiences, of bad jobs, of drug-induced adventures, of being poor-but-happy in a city you love – will be familiar to most twentysomethings. Yet the narrative is so raw and emotional that the usual post-adolescent angst feels surprisingly fresh.

The big draw here, I suppose, is that 90% of Valencia’s characters are lesbians. (Valencia being a street in San Francisco’s Mission District that’s popular with lesbians.) Indeed, I was surprised to realise that this is the first novel I’ve ever read that refers to the practices of safe sex between two women. (Then I got a bit depressed, because how is this the first novel I’ve read that does that?) So if you’re looking for lesbian love stories, they’re here! That said, the particulars of these love stories may be different, but the messiness of relationships is pretty universal. And Tea does messiness well.

In fact, ‘messy’ is a good word to describe Valencia – for good and for bad.

Valencia has the quality of a series of inter-connected short stories, but Tea’s vignettes aren’t really sharp enough for each one to stand alone. The chapters feature overlapping characters and relationships, but there’s not really enough forward momentum to call it a novel. It’s clearly semi-autobiographical, but it doesn't contain enough meaningful reflection to call it a memoir. The result is something that’s loosely plotted, baggy and unrefined in places, sometimes tipping over into poetic nonsense.

Often, I find it hard to praise or recommend a novel that’s obviously flawed. But I don’t feel that way about Valencia. Flawed, it may be. But if you’re looking for a meaty, girl-centric book, you should read it.

[Renee · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was pretty okay. Sara M. loaned it to me on the fly (hey, Sara, give me some books to read!) and said it was your basically predictable SF lesbian writing, which it was, but that it would be a decent throw-away pool read, which it also was. That's not a dis to Michelle Tea or anything--unlike many books I've read recently, at least some interesting stuff happens in here--but when you're from the Bay Area proper this type of writing fails to maintain the edgy feel it might have for a reader from a more mundane area, so the punch is lost and the book has very little to stand on without it. As seems usual lately, this didn't effect (or even affect) a single bone in my body, didn't make me think differently about anyone or anything, or see the world in any different way. It just was, and that's okay...but that makes it a throw away pool read, even if it's a semi-edgy lesbo pool read.

[Claire · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sad, meandering account of the author's many girlfriends and friendships while living in the dyke community of San Francisco's Mission district. The writing style comes across very stream-of-consciousness, floating around in time and going back to some things over and over. It's not very organized, but also not difficult to follow.
Characters seem to appear out of nowhere, already Michelle's friends, which disappointed me a little because I was interested in how she had met all these people in the first place. This is a social scene I was curious about but totally unable to enter while in the East Bay, being prohibitively shy and invisibly queer. Based on Tea's experiences in Valencia, it seems like an uncomfortably small world where everyone has drunkenly dated each other and exes abound. This was not a feel-good book for me, and I didn't learn much either, so I'm left wondering what its purpose was in my life. I may just be the wrong reader at the wrong time.

[Caitlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first half of the book was pretty difficult to get through, although now I think that was all apart of some necessary character development and that I was supposed to feel annoyed with the tings of insecurity and immaturity coming from the narrator. All in all, by the end of the book, I felt like there was a very genuine chunk of a "Coming of Age: Part II" in there that was gross, exciting, dangerous, and real. You know, the early twenties shit where you're supposed to already be grown up but you're not and now there's no one around who actually knows how to do that. So yeah, it was enjoyable, pretty easy-reading emotionally, all wrapped up with this straightforward attitude of, "I'm figuring this shit out and it is important, but it's hard so I'm going to pretend I don't give a fuck." And haven't we all been there?

[Lauren Deland · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book just plain sucks: narcissistic, shallow and written in a particularly maddening disjointed, flow-of-consciousness style, it's a diaristic mess that will leave you particularly irritated when finally, at the very end, it fails to go anywhere at all. (Here is a little bit of trivia, however: the model on the cover can be seen in the SIR Video Productions films _How to Fuck in High Heels_ and _Sugar High Glitter City._ Look for her tattoo.)