Product Description

In this confessional memoir, Michelle Tea tales the reader back to the city of her childhood -- Chesea, Massachusetts, Boston's ugly, scrappy little sister, and a place where time and hope can only be spent on keeping things from getting any worse.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1522714 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 331 pages

From Publishers Weekly
"Childhood is morbid," declares Tea, author of the Lambda Award-winning Valencia, in this gritty girlhood memoir. As a kid, she perfected the art of playing dead. In her teens, she was deep into Goth-black lipstick and lace, her hearse-driving boyfriend and other grim reaperesque fashions. In lush detail, she describes growing up on the other side of the tracks in the Boston suburb of Chelsea. Her alcoholic father abandoned the family, and her mother was overworked. Tea longed to possess cool clothes, experimented with drinking and drugs, had sex with boys and then with girls. Recounting these bits leads to an obsession with proving that her stepfather had bored holes in the house's bathroom and bedroom doors so he could spy on Tea and her sister when they were growing up. However, his confession isn't exactly gratifying; Tea wishes he had actually "grabbed" her, wishing for the "indisputable trespass of a hand," which would have made her the unarguable victim of sexual abuse. Tea finally walks out of her mother's house for good, proclaiming herself not a woman but "some new girl, an orphan." The writing is well-honed (e.g., Tea describes her father extracting lobster meat as "pulling fingers from a glove"), and the image of the "Chelsea whistle" is poignant ("the boys it meant to call were the boys I would need to be saved from"). However, the book's starts and stops, coupled with a disappointing ending make her account ultimately unsatisfying.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Tea's memoir of growing up poor and white on the East Coast in the 1970s and '80s begins with her playing at being dead with her cousin and sister. Death and a sort of stagnant life in death were pretty much what this aging, "graffitied" working-class suburb of Boston had to offer its inhabitants. Tea's formative years aren't unusual, given her class background or the time. Her parents are divorced, and soon after their separation, her father, whose upbringing has left him completely unprepared to relate to his wife and daughters, deserts the family. Tea's biography is her attempt to explore the truth of her childhood, including incest. What makes it remarkable is her flair for description and her ability to recall vividly the indignities of her childhood. Tea has written a powerful and useful narrative for other incest survivors. June Pulliam
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved