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Valencia: 'An exuberant, hilarious record of an unprecedented and mutinous time in queer history' Maggie Nelson
The 25th anniversary edition of Michelle Tea's classic coming-of-age story, now with a foreword by Maggie Nelson, award-winning author of The Argonauts
'Hilarious, euphoric, perspicacious and punk - the book that showed so many of us how writing can be real' Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Gay Bar
'One of the few truly life changing books I've encountered' Torrey Peters, bestselling author of Detransition, Baby
Fleeing Tucson and her troublesome on-and-off ex-girlfriend, Michelle lands in queer San Francisco's riotous underbelly, stumbling through her early twenties in a haze of nightlife, drug adventures, scams and a string of hookups, break-ups and make-ups. As butches and dykes spin in and out of her orbit, she considers the force and casual cruelty of their desires and her own. Heady, beer-sticky and brimming with life, Valencia is a sharply observed and piercingly funny chronicle of a year lived close to the bone.
'If you want to know how dangerous and great and awful it is to be a girl, you'll scarf Valencia right up' Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls
'Michelle Tea is an intoxicating writer, delivering sentences that land with the snap and force of a punch' Guardian
'Hilarious, euphoric, perspicacious and punk - the book that showed so many of us how writing can be real' Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Gay Bar
'One of the few truly life changing books I've encountered' Torrey Peters, bestselling author of Detransition, Baby
Fleeing Tucson and her troublesome on-and-off ex-girlfriend, Michelle lands in queer San Francisco's riotous underbelly, stumbling through her early twenties in a haze of nightlife, drug adventures, scams and a string of hookups, break-ups and make-ups. As butches and dykes spin in and out of her orbit, she considers the force and casual cruelty of their desires and her own. Heady, beer-sticky and brimming with life, Valencia is a sharply observed and piercingly funny chronicle of a year lived close to the bone.
'If you want to know how dangerous and great and awful it is to be a girl, you'll scarf Valencia right up' Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls
'Michelle Tea is an intoxicating writer, delivering sentences that land with the snap and force of a punch' Guardian
208 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 1, 2000
306 people are currently reading
14762 people want to read
About the author
Michelle Tea
50 books1,020 followersMichelle 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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 630 reviews
April 1, 2024
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.
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.
i'm kinda mad, because now i have to read every book that michelle tea has written.
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.
February 2, 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 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.
I can't say it will have the same profound effect on anyone else, but I am grateful for this book. Thanks Michelle Tea.
December 3, 2007
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
November 16, 2023
Wild and raucous, as Michelle Tea always is
August 8, 2025
would sell first born to read again
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 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.
January 27, 2009
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!
April 29, 2008
A great dyke beach read.
June 22, 2007
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.
October 29, 2011
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.
November 24, 2007
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.
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.
March 19, 2013
"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."
October 13, 2010
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.
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.
August 6, 2018
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!!❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
July 16, 2025
unhinged aquarius behaviour
February 12, 2021
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.
January 16, 2025
je l'ai avalé gloups
✧ plutôt 3.5/5
✧ c'est assez curieux de le lire à ce moment-là de ma vie, je ne sais pas trop quoi en penser
✧ en tout cas l'épisode d'impression furieuse et clandestine de zines......j'y pense.......
✧ plutôt 3.5/5
✧ c'est assez curieux de le lire à ce moment-là de ma vie, je ne sais pas trop quoi en penser
✧ en tout cas l'épisode d'impression furieuse et clandestine de zines......j'y pense.......
September 2, 2025
oh my GODDDDD. making every dyke i know read this
October 15, 2008
"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.
"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.
April 9, 2015
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.
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.
June 13, 2025
yeah no wonder this is a cult classic it fucking slapped so hard
July 18, 2025
The Blueprint
February 17, 2022
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.
September 21, 2024
énormément de respect pour le travail d’édition des éditions Hystériques, merci encore de rendre de tel textes accessibles et bravo les lesbiennes, depuis toujours pour toujours on existe on baise et c’est comme ça hihi 😌
December 7, 2022
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.
December 9, 2024
I love Valencia Street, considering naming my daughter Valencia. Do you like it?
I loved this book. I love the way she writes—sorry I need to say it—because it reminds me of my own writing. Well maybe my writing at its peak. It’s genuinely one of the first lesbian books I’ve read. It’s weird and at times so unrelatable but at its core I was like wow a book that isn’t centered around relationships with men, how lovely. It’s strangely really dense even at just 200 pages, and all the girls formed into one big blob of a girlfriend character, but not in a bad way per sey, just in a way. Read this book with my gf 😏.
Oh so many gloves! I didn’t know that was a thing…
I loved this book. I love the way she writes—sorry I need to say it—because it reminds me of my own writing. Well maybe my writing at its peak. It’s genuinely one of the first lesbian books I’ve read. It’s weird and at times so unrelatable but at its core I was like wow a book that isn’t centered around relationships with men, how lovely. It’s strangely really dense even at just 200 pages, and all the girls formed into one big blob of a girlfriend character, but not in a bad way per sey, just in a way. Read this book with my gf 😏.
Oh so many gloves! I didn’t know that was a thing…
June 2, 2025
This was a really fun book. Felt like reading about the lives of my friends in terms of relatability but also likeable characters. Been wanting to read Michelle Tea for ages so im glad I started on this book
April 27, 2025
divertissant mais redondant!!!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 630 reviews