Valencia, Michelle Tea
Valencia, Michelle Tea
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

Valencia

Author: Michelle Tea, Maggie Nelson

Narrator: Abby Craden, Maggie Nelson

Unabridged: 7 hr 8 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Seal Press

Published: 06/03/2025


Synopsis

An anarchic and unflinching cult novel “charged with reflection, anger, and the feeling of being alive” (Village Voice), tracing a year of love and lust in San Francisco’s lesbian underground, with a new foreword by Maggie Nelson

Valencia is a fast-paced account of one girl’s search for love and high times in the dyke world of 1990s San Francisco. 
 
Fleeing Tucson and her rotten (ex) girlfriend, Michelle lands in the Mission District, where queers from all over the country are arriving in search of themselves and each other. An aspiring poet, she hurls herself into the city’s riotous underbelly, stumbling through nightlife and open mics, drug adventures, and a string of hookups, breakups, and makeups. As butches and besties spin in and out of Michelle’s orbit, she ponders the powerful force and casual cruelty of their desires, and of her own—all in a singular, biting, deadpan voice shot through with humor and heartbreak. 
 
Heady, beer sticky, and brimming with life, Valencia is a sharply observed and piercingly funny chronicle of a year lived close to the bone. Now with a new foreword from Maggie Nelson, this lesbian cult classic is ripe for rediscovery. 

About Michelle Tea

Michelle Tea is the author of over a dozen books, including the cult-classic Valencia, the essay collection Against Memoir, and the speculative memoir Black Wave. She is the recipient of awards from the Guggenheim, Lambda Literary, and Rona Jaffe Foundations, PEN/America, and other institutions. Knocking Myself Up is her latest memoir.Tea's cultural interventions include brainstorming the international phenomenon Drag Queen Story Hour, co-creating the Sister Spit queer literary performance tours, and occupying the role of Founding Director at RADAR Productions, a Bay Area literary organization, for over a decade. She also helmed the imprints Sister Spit Books at City Lights Publishers, and Amethyst Editions at The Feminist Press. She produces and hosts the Your Magic podcast, wherein which she reads tarot cards for Roxane Gay, Alexander Chee, Phoebe Bridgers and other artists, as well as the live tarot show Ask the Tarot on Spotify Greenroom.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Aradia on February 02, 2008

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 m......more

Goodreads review by Jesse on January 26, 2018

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 aut......more

Goodreads review by Leah on May 16, 2012

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......more

Goodreads review by Sunny on November 15, 2023

Wild and raucous, as Michelle Tea always is......more

Goodreads review by Patrick on October 28, 2008

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 ap......more


Quotes

“A missive sent straight from the mayhem.”—Maggie Nelson, from the foreword

“If you want to know how dangerous and great and awful it is to be a girl you’ll scarf Valencia right up. There’s so much colliding and ‘sharing.’ I mean in the good way—sharing bodies, drugs, stories and clothes. The street today is full of girls if you haven’t noticed.”—Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls

Valencia is one of the few true life-changer books I’ve encountered. One of those books that gets casually slipped to you, and then, a couple hours later, you understand you’ve been living all wrong, that everything must change. I wish you luck in the aftermath of reading it!”—Torrey Peters, author of Detransition Baby

“I consider Michelle Tea a literary MOTHER—champion, organizer, and co-conspirator of the most potent alt-literature scenes San Francisco has witnessed in decades. I will forever tip my hat to her and the timeless and immortal text that is Valencia.”—Brontez Purnell, author of 100 Boyfriends

“Wonderful storytelling...charged with reflection, anger, and the feeling of being alive.”—The Village Voice

“A spidery roman á clef for our times...Valencia crackles with take-no-prisoners prose.”—The Seattle Times

“There is immediacy in the stream-of-consciousness style, as if Tea were in the room offering the reader a late-night confession.”—Library Journal

“An edgy, supercharged, supersurreal reality.”—Booklist

“Michelle Tea is the Mission’s poet laureate. She gives us our voice back with tragic porno hilarity at breakneck speeds, our own personal Bill Moyers documenting dramas of queer punk lives.”—Lynn Breedlove, spoken word artist and singer for Tribe 8

“Tea’s fiction is beautifully similar to real life—a glimpse into a bad girl’s diary—full of misguided intelligence, complicated sex, and the impossibility, even the undesirability, of redemption.”—Tracy Vogel, The Stranger