girl in greenwood

Valencia
by Michelle Tea

This is the last of the books I picked up for my summer class. I ended up writing a paper about it, which shockingly earned me a 4.0. "Shockingly" because I thought my paper was kind of terrible, and because the teacher had said that only "near-perfect" papers get a 4.0 instead of a 3.9. Shows what I know.

Anyway, this book is a series of short pieces that chronicle about a year in the life of Michelle, the narrator, who is pretty much Michelle, the author. She's a lesbian. She's in her 20s. She lives in San Francisco. She has a string of girlfriends, some more colorful than others. She does a lot of drugs and has a lot of sex. More sex than drugs, though. She loses her jobs. She briefly works as a prostitute.

The writing is not bad, but for obvious reasons I couldn't relate to any of her story - and I'm not talking about her sexual orientation. It was actually more of a class disconnect for me, which is strange because we were broke as could be until I was a teenager. When I was 26, the age Michelle is in the book, I had a BA and a decent job and was engaged to be married and lived in a nice condo with my fiance and my life was just very different than hers. It was interesting to read in a National Geographic kind of way, I guess, but now I kind of feel like I never need to read it again.

Labels: book reports