Rent Girl

by Michelle Tea, Laurenn McCubbin

Rent Girl is the illustrated saga of one broke baby dyke trying to make a buck in the surreal world of the sex industry. Avoiding the stereotypes of prostitute as victim or superhero, Tea instead explores the complicated occupation in all its nuances - absurd, somber, hilarious, disturbing. When Michelle, a young Boston baby dyke, needs money, her adventuresome girlfriend suggests taking up a secretive career in the world of escort services. Her misadventures through her years in the sex trade are at times, humorous, tantalizing, and heartbreaking. Constantly struggling between the worlds of poverty and prostitution, Michelle must make the eventual decision to stay in the business with its financial freedoms or quit for spiritual serenity.

Genres: Graphic Novels, Queer, Comics, Memoir, Nonfiction, LGBT, Sex Work

242 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

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

[Antoinette · Rating 1 out of 5]

Terrible, terrible, terrible. Why did it happen? What makes it possible? This book has no point, it barely tells a story, and it is ridiculously aloof. Like talking to a coked up drag queen, smearing mascara all over your sensible sweater and gushing out their life story, morbidly fascinating, but you just want it to be over. Michelle Tea once again succeeds in convincing the world that yes, she is a vulnerable lesbian badass. And yes, there are people around her that do drugs and don't give a shit about anyone. Blah blah blah. I am so fucking sick of being a part of a group of people that constantly reinforce the stereotypes that plague their group. I hate the casual tone of this book. Like a scared little girl that wants to tell you that she is scared about confused, but instead says "Yeah, I had sex the other night. I didn't even come." Quit being casual, quit being self-involved, write something that has a purpose. So transparent. Not an enjoyable read. Grow up. Grow grow grow grow grow up. This book made me feel strange about the world. So full of pretend glamour, so lacking in the honesty it is praised for being full of. It is a lie, like most art, but this lie does not tell the truth. Terrible read.

[Marissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rent Girl is an absorbing, but extremely depressing read made all the more depressing by its weird hipster cool tone. It strikes me as a modern version of Women by Charles Bukwoski, but this time written by a drug using hip young lesbian prostitute instead of an aging, alcoholic rock star poet. They are depressing books in very similar ways, because they center on a person who is clearly incredibly intelligent and talented who you get to watch kind of destroy themselves through sex and substance use. Both Tea and Bukwoski lack the ambition, education, or money that would give them a chance for anything better and both books have a similar sense of tragedy underscoring their partying and irreverence. They are tell-alls that never really tell you the whole truth about who these people are or why they're doing what they're doing. I think Rent Girl was supposed to end on a triumphant note, but in reality it just made me feel deflated and worn out and irritated that this is one more books cool kids will think is cool, without really getting how awful they actually are.

[Jazz · Rating 5 out of 5]

"...people like to say things like 'all work is prostitution'. Most work is exploitation, but most work is not prostitution. Prostitution is prostitution, a very specific sort of exploitation... And while I am doing literal corrections to flippant turns of phrase, the earth doesn't get raped. It gets mined and poisoned and blown up and depleted, it gets ruined, but it doesn't get raped."

This book is so powerful I couldn't help but cry and laugh out loud.

Raunchy and bold. Michelle Tea shows the life of a hooker from every angle, what a compelling book. The art is just detached from real life to not scare you away but close enough to be simply elegant.

[Ben Bush]

I read this lying in bed as a weird kind of therapy after the one time I got fired. It was the one relaxation I allowed myself before job hunting.

[Catherine Caldwell-Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you've ever wondered what it is like to be a prostitute, this book offers a lot of insight. One among many searing moments is when Michelle and her co-worker are lost en route to a client's house. They stop for directions. She muses about how it feels when you walk into a 7-11 and the clerk looks at you as if you're a hooker .. and you are. Another one: Michelle gets increasingly more tattoos as she goes thru her 20s. At one point, she gets some down her arms to her hands, feeling satisfied because, "I won't be able to hook with these" This is because brothel owners prefer prostitutes with fewer tattoos. Psychologists would say she is making a decision in the present to curtail or restrict future action (like flushing your cocaine down the toilet). Except there will always be an outcall service that will hire a young woman, even with tattoos.

Other reviewers have said the main audience for this book are horny teenage boys. Some have wondered why Michelle keeps going back to prostitution, and say the book raises this question but doesn't answer it.

In fact, Michelle does addresses this question and indeed this question is the point of the book, not to offer titillation about lesbian hookers. This may be more apparent if you've read Tea's other books about growing up working class. Hooking is basically better than the drudgery of working class jobs, where you often do miserable work that is mind-numbing and requires obedience and deference while paying poverty wages. Hooking is soul crushing but at least you don't have to do it 12 hours a day in order to earn enough to live.

Rent Girl is profound for illuminating the troublesome situation of work in America. What should we do about the fact that there isn't meaningful work for everyone. Can we change this? What we need is to rethink work. Star Trek, Next Generation, anyone?

But if you don't have to work in order to get money, who would work? Psychology research and common sense say that people would still work. Think how many people volunteer. But people would demand meaningful work, and society would need to rise to the challenge of providing it.

If you favor the idea of working *for* money, rather than working to make a contribution to society and feel socially involved, consider whose interests are served by the work-for-money approach to arranging our social lives.

And here is what my preschooler thought about Rent Girl:

Our video camera opens with a rather ordinary tirade by one 4 year old boy, and then turns the corner to find twin brother Elias absorbed in Michelle Tea's novel Rent Girl. Every time I pick up Rent Girl I find it hard to put down without reading a section. I wonder what this little boy made of it? He came up with his own title, as he explains dramatically: "The ... Red.... Girl!"

http://youtu.be/wTsk3kzu444

[Emer Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I interviewed Michelle in SF one Summer. I absolutely loved this book. It is funny and insightful and surprising. The darkness is real but the spirit of the character so strong I was carried aloft. Here is the interview http://writerscentre.ie/blog/blog/aut... Rent Girl is an illustrated memoir of Michelle’s days when her girlfriend announced that she was a hooker and, Michelle, who was one broke baby dyke followed her into the world of paid sex. Frankly, I’ve never understood people’s shock at prostitution, in a way we all pay for sex one way or another. There’s no such thing as free love, especially here, 40 odd years after THE Summer of Love turned into a bad acid trip.
Rent girl is a wise and funny book, a very graphic novel. There is a part where the narrator surmises that it is much less effort to be a hooker than to be a stripper. Strippers, she claims, have to give so much of themselves in the performance. Hookers can lie back and let their minds wander. That’s an insider perspective, something I would have never guessed. And I love learning new things that surprise me.

[Aneesa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. A lot of people have a lot of opinions about Michelle Tea and my opinion is that I like her writing (in this book). I like how she rarely uses contractions. I like the way the dialogue interacts with the narrative. I like her theories and considerations and anger. I like the nonchalant way she introduces the occult and other alternative life choices. I also like the illustrations, although they don't do the same thing illustrations do in comic books, and it's pretty batty how they conflict with the text. I do not like it that this book was not copyedited even though Michelle Tea does not know the difference between "then" and "than" (hint: the word "than" never appears in this book).

[I. Merey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had some trepidations about this book, b/c a lot of my annoyance with Valencia was with its aloofish hipster tone romanticizing drugs and easy bad sex---the only time I got caught on that tone in 'Rent Girl' was about 3/4 ways through, when the author takes some time off from tales of sex work to focus on her short and not-so-successful dint with drug pushing.

Other than this slight detour, the rest was so honest and relatable to me.
I could hear Tea's voice walking the line between the two narratives most often heard:
-Sex work is degrading horrible work I have been forced into.
-I love to do sex work and it is so empowering.

Tea is neither forced, nor empowered: the job flexibility is good, the money is good; the johns are 'gross or not gross'. She gets the 'sex' out of 'sex work' so that it remains only 'work', though it may be a while before it will be work like any other job. As Tea aptly points out: Many jobs are compared to prostitution and all jobs are exploitative, but only prostitution is prostitution. And the reasons a sex worker may find themselves wanting to get out might not be what people automatically expect:

'I forgot to tell her about how it makes you mean; makes you vengeful; how it turns you into a greedy monster because no matter how much money they are giving you it is never enough, and you start to want their blood, their homes, their self-esteem lying wet in the wastebasket like a shucked condom.'

The illustrations were spot on, unique and loose and perfectly colored---only black, gray, white and red. Lots of pretty girls and lots of unremarkable men who looked like only slightly altered, creepy reincarnations of each other...

[Liz · Rating 2 out of 5]

I probably would have rated this book higher if the book was actually a graphic novel: it is really more of an illustrated novel, and I thought that the text layout was slapdash. The pages weren't really designed with much thought. Sometimes the blocks of text were so wide that I had to hold a piece of paper under each line I was reading, or else I'd get lost. Sometimes the text ran into the illustration in a really distracting way. And the illustrations sometimes betrayed details of characters given in the text, for example a character would be said to be wearing a polo shirt, and the drawing of them is in a long-sleeved dress shirt. Details like that matter! And, as some folks have mentioned, yeah, there are a helluva lot of typos in this one.

I guess if I had found the story more engaging, those things wouldn't have been so obvious to me, but there are few times when I can really spot the things wrong with a books layout, and pinpoint how they greatly diminish the enjoyability.

[Tania · Rating 3 out of 5]

reading "rent girl" right on the heels of "the passionate mistakes..." may have contributed to the super-saturated feeling of grittiness i had when i finished this book. while i remain a huge fan of tea's work, i found the graphic novel format a failure. it's a strange hybrid of drawings and dense tiny type-set text that does neither justice. individual pages are lovely, but as a linear narrative, it falls short. maybe i'm just tired of the wobbly line drawings of sexy girls that seem to be cropping up all over the place lately.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tea's story of her cool, hipster, lesbian life and the central part of the story is that as a young lesbian, she and a group of friends worked for years as "escort girls" (i.e., prostitutes). The story is sort of distant, and not all that insightful, really, but it still is interesting and well told, and the illustrations, mostly black, white, red and pink, quite spare and stylized, are pretty gorgeous and help capture a life and time. It's not a great work of art, maybe, but I actually liked it quite a bit, so there. Kinda reminds me of the slacker/punk girls gone wild of Ulli Lust's The Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, maybe sort of naive younger women who seem to sort of drift into something they may later regret, dangerous situations. Kind of like watching a train wreck, in a way, as it is unfolding. But that's interesting, right? I stop for stuff like that. The difference for Tea vs Lust is that she never seems to think it was a bad idea, it was just something she disc for money, whatever… though Lust really came to regret it later… saw she had dodged a bullet...

[Dawn Mackey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is awesome! I enjoyed every minute of it. The writing and illustrations are great! Alas, it would be five stars were it not the most poorly copy-edited book I'VE EVER READ. I'm sure it's not the author's fault, but next book y'all should totally have someone correct the typos. Aside from that technical issue, thanks for giving me a "good read"! (Ha, was that cheesy to say or what?)

[Public Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

A semi-enjoyable tour of the skin trade through one Rent Girl's eyes. It was a relief that this never came off as a morality play or a diatribe of regret. Perhaps the main thesis of this book is that sex work is work. Like any job it has its good days and bad. There are reasons that a person finds this line of work and reasons that they stick with it. But at the end of the day work is still work. And work sucks.

I enjoyed Tea's stories but knocked down a star for all the grammatical errors. Did no one edit or spellcheck this book? Usually I'm not such a stickler, but if anything in this book offended this English major's sensibilites it was using "then" for "than" more than once. Ouch!

[MelanieLotSeven · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this, but there were just so many grammatical errors and typos it distracted from the flow of the reading experience. The artwork was gorgeous, though! Overall, worth the read just for learning how the author’s life path led to, through, and past sex work. I feel this is another memoir that will help people humanize and relate to sex workers.

[Morgan M. Page · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a ho memoir, it's middle of the road. As a slice of queer 90s life, it's pretty ok. Saved by the illustrations.

[Kitty · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was maybe just okay. tea offers a lot of insight into her own personal reasons for sex work in the beginning but then it just falls apart.

[Liralen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Up until about halfway through this book, I thought it was fantastic. It's on point, it's funny, and the red-black-white illustrations really make the book.

To an extent, the book remains its funny and on-point self (the illustrations, certainly, are still terrific), but by the time I reached the end I had soured on the narrator. Maybe it was the switch to a focus on drugs (doing them, dealing them), which I didn't expect -- but I think that more than that it was the lack of depth.

I wasn't sure at first what I didn't care for in the second half. I went away for a few days and had to leave the book at home; would I have liked the second half as much as the first if I'd read it all in one go? Or would I still be disenchanted? But then it clicked. The illustrations -- I know; I said this already (and will say it again) -- really make the book. The writing's pretty interesting, sort of stream-of-consciousness mini-essays that connect but most of which could be read independently of one another. But it's pretty...one-sided.

In the first half of the book, the writing has a point to make. The narrator isn't always sympathetic, but it was definitely interesting to get her perspective (even if it was pretty limited) on the sex trade. Do I wonder whether Steph was really as toxic as she suggests? Yes. Do I wish she'd commented on things like legalisation of prostitution? Yes. That said, it was funny and often biting.

The second half more or less loses the plot, though. The focus switches from prostitution to drugs -- but I don't think there really was a perspective here, or a point, except that making money by selling drugs to "friends" was harder than they'd thought and she didn't like working. It wasn't particularly interesting to me (this was also the point at which I started getting irritated by the typos), and although I did appreciate the artwork, it shouldn't be doing so much of the heavy lifting.

I'm glad I read this, though, especially coming so close on the heels of Paying for It. I just found the first half more compelling than the second half.

[Peacegal · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rent Girl is sort of a lazy graphic novel. It's not presented in traditional comics format, but rather in text-dense pages with large illustrations on each page. It may have worked better as a traditional comic, who knows, or maybe its flaws are just endemic to the story. (LOTS of typos--a pet peeve of mine.)

The aspect of Rent Girl I found most annoying by far is the main character is a negative vegan stereotype. She is sickly-skinny, unhealthy, and hypocritical. Every few pages, we are reminded once again the fact that the young woman is a vegan, and how unhealthy or hungry or underdeveloped or whatever she is as a result. It's almost as if the author had a personal vendetta, and it bugged the hell out of me. (I know far more plump vegans than bony ones.) Early on, we read of the main character's veganism as a result of her compassion for animals, whether calves crated for veal or chickens having their beaks seared off. Yet a few pages later, she's "obsessed" with buying taxidermy, animals killed for various chintzy souvenirs. She worries about a bit of butter in corn at one point, but--whoops--here she is eating seafood and chicken. Le sigh.

Rent Girl is more disturbing than sexy, which I am sure was the author's intent. Watch out for the delousing scene--you'll be squirming in disgust and sympathetic pain.

The story doesn't pick up until the two girls become small-time drug dealers...then it starts to find its voice, becoming a much more interesting read. However, this section comes too late in the story to add much to the pace of the earlier pages.

[Kirsten · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michelle Tea's trademark combination of wit and pathos is used to good effect in this memoir of her days as an escort. Laurenn McCubbin's arty but realistic illustrations complement the text perfectly, but do make it something you might not want to read on the bus. I noticed that Tea's tendency toward break-neck run-on sentences is much more restrained in this book, and that works well; the impression is that of a more disciplined writer than the one who penned The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl In America.

[Saara Raappana · Rating 2 out of 5]

The illustrations are beautiful; but the story rides exclusively on the novelty of its subject matter, using a predictably flat tone to portray situations that are, at best, mildly unusual. The writing itself is unremarkable--a series of blasé, artless sentences peppered sparingly with clumsy attempts at imagery. I found myself wishing the words weren't there so that I could concentrate on the pretty pictures.

[Teree · Rating 2 out of 5]

Here I am reading it, almost finished. One thing I have to say, that I haven't seen anyone else say, is the editing is awful. There are scads of mistakes. Typos galore!

I also wonder why these modern, young lesbian hookers have never shaved their bushes.

I love the artwork! I am a fan of this book, yet I think hookers are terribly intriguing and sad.

Read "Rose Of No Man's Land," by Michelle Tea. That was wonderful.

[Meghan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I started editing it in my head - in my dream version of this book, instead of being a mix of text and one portrait on each page, it's a traditional panel-format graphic novel. This would force the author to tighten up the storyline and maybe take out a big chunk of the middle. The most interesting parts were the beginning, when she starts working as an escort, and near the end, when she and her girlfriend start trying to sell cocaine and briefly go back into the escort business together.

[Heather · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is DESPERATELY in need of a copy editor. I wouldn't give it more than 2 stars under any circumstances, but the multitude of typos were just so irritating. It claims to be a graphic novel, but it's more illustrated than graphic. The images augment the text, but don't tell the story. As for the actual story, it was ok. Kind of blah.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this--loved the art, the story was compelling. The only thing that keeps me from giving this 5 stars is the large amount of typos--unfortunately they were distracting. I really wanted to start marking them but this is a library book and I'm not that big of a jerk.

[Rachel Cassandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

not quite a graphic novel, but there are beautiful illustrations on every page

[Faye · Rating 2 out of 5]

Entertaining and sometimes sexy, but also kind of shallow and depressing. It has the opportunity to day something insightful, but falls short. Tea has much more substance in Valencia.

[MariNaomi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this story. It was the perfect yang to Chester Brown's "Paying for It" yin.

[Raina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Totally mezmerizing. The illustrations are really really gorgeous. Fascinating story.

Very not a kids book.

[Andrea Ole · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having recently read Henry Miller's Black Spring (written 1932-33, published 1936, 1963), it came to mind as I read Michelle Tea's Rent Girl (2004) about her young adult years from the 1990s to the early 2000s. Unlike Henry Miller, whose prose style of long, winding sentences with stylistic and verbal fireworks and displays of his wit and learning, allusions to past authors, which brighten up however dark the characters and settings that Miller describes, there is no such or not much relief and verbal fireworks in Tea's narrative.

Tea writes about her experiences getting involved in sex work and later a bit into drugs, and these are two separate narratives with differing styles and perspectives. In her first story, Tea is twenty-one and in Boston, and the style is spare, a matter of fact, without too much inner self-reflection about her experiences. Brief page-long or several page long journal format entries as if written about a day or week mostly focus on what happens, and there are only brief asides when she reflects on her personal situation (mostly she avoided doing so) and some longer comments about gender, sex, family, society.

In the second story, Tea has moved to the Bay area and meets a woman with whom she has a stronger relationship than on the East Coast, and she dabbles in drug sales and a bit in sex work too. In this story, there is more reflection and stylistically, occasional flair.

The line drawings comment on and enhance the narrative, but don't do the distinctive figure of the author justice, for Tea observed she was quite thin and on a vegan diet in her young adult years. She also got tattoos, but these don't appear on her body.

The drawing style is sharp and distinct conveying the beauty and allure of women's nude or clothed bodies, but the esthetic pleasure and erotic charge the drawings possess are at odds with the quiet despair and resignation to forces beyond control that underlies the narrator's siituation. Or perhaps this is intentional, showing the world the beatiful appearance and surface, the allure of the womn's body seen primarily as a source of sexual pleasure and fantasy, which is the requisite promotionl sex worker image, but at complete variance of the woman's state of mind. For the allure of her beautiful body and form, results in the unequal exchange that makes her the fantasy sex object that is subject for a time to the near absolute control of a man's desires and whims. Thus the drawings that convey beauty are at odds with the narrator's troubled and uneasy state of mind that results from high emotional toll taken by her sex work.

The narrative has some striking life becomes fictional moments when Tea describes herself assuming one of two different and distinct personas whom she assumes as a sex worker. And in one instance, someone calls in to ask if he can meet both of these fictive women together!

Otherwise, aside from these surreal moments, the writing style is mostly more down-to-earth in describing the world of exploited sex workers and the sense of hopelessness and cynicism and gloom that predominates. Tea conveys her own sense of misery and entrapment in this world well, perhaps too well, for the reader gets a strong sense of themselves wanting to escape this world, along with the narrator Tea.

And in this regard, by putting the reader in this dismal setting, Tea's narrative echoes American literary naturalism from the early 20th century of Theodore Drieser, Jack London, Stephen Crane: a harsh world where people are often mangled and/or crushed by their poverty, a lack of family and community support, and/or their own uncontrolled sexual and material passions. Yet the Tea, the first-person narrator in her journal entries, does reflect on what in her past and family situation, what has led her into sex work, so she is able to leave sex work behind, no longer allow it to define her. She asserts her sense of self and begins to define herself as a writer and reader once she leaves her home city and moves to the west coast. Thus, the narrative shifts from one that is predominantly sex negative to sex positive, as the narrator begins to find both personal and sexual fulfillment and pleasure.

Finally, one wonders what prompts a writer to tell all (or almost all) in an autobiography. Where is the line drawn and when is the door closed? For most of us, who will never go out so far on the tell all narrative limb, or only a shorter distance, there can a great therapeutic service to read someone who lets loose, streaming their thoughts and feelings uncensored, incorrect, wrong, bad, terrible and regretable. For letting it all out, acknowledging our shadow, we can become better integrated.

For some inexplicable reason, and as a final note, more to the publisher than the author, it should be noted that this book in its third printing has not been edited and proofread, so it is marred by a profusion of typos.

[Gabriella · Rating 3 out of 5]

"..I thought, maybe all men called prostitutes. It was a terrible thought, but really, what did I care. There was a system in place that was older and stronger then I could begin to imagine. Who was I? I was just a girl. What was I going to do about it. If I had any power I would make it so that nobody was ever bought or sold or rented and that chickens kept their beaks and cows could lie and nurse their baby cows with all that milk, but I didn't have any power, I would ride the system until it knocked me off. I would get as much money as I could and feed my hate like a glutton. I had found the perfect job for both." - (p.28)

"...Bye Bye David, I'm Leaving Now, Goodbye! Here, here, he reached into his front pocket, his front pants pocket, and pulled out a tremendous roll of bills. Now that I was a whore I was able to really recognize what a lot of money looked like, and that was a lot of money. I nearly moaned. He peeled a couple off and tossed them at me, shoved the riches back in his pocket. Oh, the thoughts that went through my head. Murder, duh, I could kill him, sure I could. A knife from the kitchen, or a frying pan if he had such appliances. Knock him out, grab the roll. The mind of a whore is a mind of hate and greed. At least mine was." - (p.42)

These two quotes stood out to me as I read, and really helped me to sort of map out the headspace of the author at the time of the events in the book. Though I do feel compelled to emphasize that last part: "At least mine was." This is true for the author's experience at the time, but is not the feelings/views/experience of ALL sex workers...there is no one one-size-fits-all for ALL sex workers. While her feelings and general experiences are probably not solitary to her alone, they are far from the one voice of a vast and varied group.

MariNaomi pointed out in her review that this book nicely accompanies Paying For It by Chester Brown, which I think is fair to say. This is not so much a graphic novel, in the traditional sense. as it is a story with illustrations. The illustrations felt very fitting (of the story, the time and style in the story - 90s, grungy, riot grrl-ish) and I think that they did pull me into the story more. Without the illustrations I think the story would have felt a lot heavier somehow. Although, initially the layout of the pages was rather jarring and frustrating; I felt it could be better organized, but eventually it seemed to work with the story and felt well-suited.
Around the middle/near to the end of the book, I grew concerned where the story was potentially as it began to feel like Requiem for a Dream in many ways. Thankfully things didn't take a darker turn and so I was happier with the ending than I thought I would be, and slightly surprised by the final page.
And as others have said - typos galore. This book should be combed through by an editor and reprinted. Overall, tricky to review. There were parts where I didn't like the book and had a hard time liking the people in it, and other parts where I was into it and wondering where things would go. 2.5 stars feels fair, indifferently 3 stars.