Staff Pick: Black Wave

Since her breakout memoir Valencia (2000), Michelle Tea has brought America’s gritty subculture to life with herself right at the center of it. Her work is queer, feminist, punk, working-class, but most of all a ‘fast-paced account of one girl’s search for love and high times in the dyke world of San Francisco’.

Enter Black Wave (2016), which stars an older Michelle, as open to the shifting currents of her heart as ever, yet no longer quite so forgivable for foibles as her younger self once was. By now Michelle should Know Better. She should have found More Success (aka Made More Money), but instead she still struggles to make rent. Everything is less bohemian and more, well… loserish. The Mission district is changing. Gentrifying. Not as cool as it used to be. Heavy drinking has become Problem Drinking. Michelle is broke, a lover, honest, and a wreck all mixed into one. Then something quite unexpected happens. Michelle begins to change. Suddenly we are in an alternate reality, one where Michelle’s life crises are reflected in the book’s worldbuilding; the planet is collapsing, apocalypse is coming, Michelle is spiraling, and yet still we have the familiar memoirist’s candor carrying us through a narrative that has also suspiciously accelerated into fiction. Can Michelle find redemption? Will she Get Her Shit Together? Is minimum-wage life that much different if the planet is collapsing? What does it even mean for a memoirist to lie?

Phenomenal work from a writer ascendant in her craft.

Perfect for: Readers who know what it’s like to worry about making rent, are beginning to realize they are also maybe eventually going to die, and consequently could use a good adventure through the end of the world along with a dose of compassion.

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