Valencia

By Michelle Tea

Recommended by Riley

“Just one person's account of looking for love in bars and parties, or as the author puts it, ‘a snapshot, more or less, of my 25th year on earth, written not how it happened but how I felt it happened’. Funny and gross at times, but always swiftly followed with some of the most devastating and tender prose I’ve ever read, the amount of life Tea lived in one year (or rather what is gathered in this book) is huge." -Riley

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.

Serpent's Tail, 2021