Black Wave

By Michelle Tea

Grungy and queer, Michelle is a grrrl hung up on a city in riot. It’s San Francisco and it’s 1999. Determined to quell her addictions to heroin, catastrophic romance, and the city itself, she heads south for LA, just as the news hits: in one year the world is Officially Over. The suicides have begun. And it’s here that Black Wave breaks itself open, splitting into every possible story, questioning who has the right to write about whom. People begin to dream the lovers they will never have, while Michelle takes haven in a bookshop, where she contemplates writing about her past (sort of), dating Matt Dillon (kind of), and riding out the end of the world (maybe).

New from Michelle Tea, novelist, essayist, and queer counter-culture icon, Black Wave is a punk feminist masterpiece and a raucously funny read for everyone … except, perhaps, for Scientologists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: And Other Stories
• Release date: Feb 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781908276919

Michelle Tea

Michelle Tea is the author of over a dozen books, including the cult-classic Valencia, the essay collection Against Memoir, and the speculative memoir Black Wave. She is the recipient of awards from the Guggenheim, Lambda Literary, and Rona Jaffe Foundations, PEN/America, and other institutions. Knocking Myself Up is her latest memoir. Tea's cultural interventions include brainstorming the international phenomenon Drag Queen Story Hour, co-creating the Sister Spit queer literary performance tours, and occupying the role of Founding Director at RADAR Productions, a Bay Area literary organization, for over a decade. She also helmed the imprints Sister Spit Books at City Lights Publishers, and Amethyst Editions at The Feminist Press. She produces and hosts the Your Magic podcast, wherein which she reads tarot cards for Roxane Gay, Alexander Chee, Phoebe Bridgers and other artists, as well as the live tarot show Ask the Tarot on Spotify Greenroom.

Reviews for Black Wave

[sprainedbrain · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book was all over the place, and that was a good thing. We follow our main character, Michelle, from San Francisco to LA as she experiences sex, drugs, alcohol, love, family, friends, Matt Dillon, and the end of the world. The writing is really good, the story is completely original, and the book was fun.

[brandiec-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

For most of my reading life, I have consciously avoided feminist and LGBTQ literature, finding the former too strident for my taste and the latter too foreign to my life experience to relate to. That I drew most of my TBR list from the New York Times Book Review did nothing to counter this tendency. Since joining the Goodreads community and, more specifically, such groups as Newest Literary Fiction and The Tournament of Books, however, I have begun to expand my readerly horizons and have fallen in love with authors I formerly would have rejected out of hand. One such author is Michelle Tea, whose description as the author of works "explor[ing] queer culture, feminism, race, class, [and] prostitution" would once have prompted me to run for the hills, but her novel Black Wave is quite likely to be my favorite book of 2017.It was the apocalyptic setting which led me to pick up Black Wave, but it was the distinctive voice which held me and the deep humanity which has stayed with me. There are not many books in which THE END OF THE WORLD is forced to take a back seat, but that is what Tea has achieved. Here is her heroine (also named Michelle), ruminating on the difficulties autobiographical writers face in live conversation:Like when you're telling an anecdote and someone interjects - Yeah, you already told us that story. Oh, no - you are repeating yourself, you cannot stop talking, you are so checked out you cannot remember what you have said to whom, you are so self-involved. To hear a person say Yeah, I read that in your book is this shame times twenty. You so cannot stop talking that you actually wrote down your talk and then expected others to read it, and not even that will exorcize your narratives, you will in fact continue to talk and talk, expecting us to pretend we don't know the story, which you have performed into actual microphones in public places. Guess what, Michelle? We know your mother is a chain-smoking lesbian psych nurse.Black Wave wasn't perfect. The transition between the first part, set in San Francisco, and the second part, set in Los Angeles, was confusing (although that may be a realistic depiction of what it's actually like to move from San Francisco to Los Angeles), and some of the meta-fictional high jinks felt like Tea was showing off her cleverness, rather than adding a truly new layer to the narrative. These minor missteps were more than outweighed by such lovely inventions as the dreaming soulmates finding each other on a worldwide Match.com. The Michelle of Black Wave is exactly the kind of person I want to be with when we shut off the lights for the last time.This review was based on a free ARC provided by the publisher.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Plans led to disappointment, to regret, to chain-smoking and sadness. Michelle refused to be tragic. She would resist having plans.Michelle is a young lesbian living in a run-down apartment in San Francisco during the 1990s, and also as the world is ending. She works in a bookstore, but she wrote a book once, and so she's collecting experiences for her next book, which mainly means she drinks a lot and takes whatever drugs are offered to her. In the name of artistic experience, of course, she's not an addict or anything. Their hard drinking was a sort of lifestyle performance, like the artist who wore only red for a year, then only blue, then yellow. They were playing the parts of hardened females, embodying a sort of Hunter S. Thompson persona, a deeply feminist stance for a couple of girls to take. They were too self-aware to be alcoholics. Real alcoholics didn't know they could even be alcoholics, they just drank and drank and ruined their lives and didn't have any fun and were men.The first half of [Black Wave] follows Michelle and her compatriots as they carouse around the dying city. It's a self-destructive artist novel in the style of the many published during the nineties, from Suicide Blonde to The Story of Junk. I read a slew of them back then and the story remains the same, although the characters always believe they are forging new ground. The second half of the novel is an entirely different animal. Here, Michelle Tea makes the dystopian end-of-the-world theme explicit, while also going meta and becoming a novel about the writing of the novel, where what is happening in Michelle-the-character's life becomes a topic of debate. Tea also makes the decision to have Every Thing That Michelle Says Capitalized and has everyone else speak in italics. I had thought that I was fairly open to stylistic quirks, but this annoyed me to the point that I couldn't concentrate on what Tea was doing, or even what was going on in the story. With Black Wave, author Michelle Tea takes big risks. That they don't entirely work means that the book doesn't hold together the way it might had she played it safe. But I can't help but admire her courage.

[greeniezona · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Oh, Michelle Tea. We all knew there was zero chance I wouldn't buy this book, especially with the promise that Tea had finally written her long hinted at science fiction novel. Not that this big beautiful mess of a book is traditional science fiction. The first half if more like a fictionalized version of one of Tea's many memoirs, with some occasional "the earth is dying" mentions thrown in for background. In part two the book transforms. Michelle moves to Los Angeles, is writing a screenplay, and is also clearly now writing this book, and struggling with how to write the story when none of her exes want to be included in it, figuring out how to find other motivations for her actions when certain people have been written out, and struggling with how to make her story "universal," or at least relatable to the rich white (mostly straight) men who are the cultural gate keepers in L.A. (and everywhere). On top of all that, the end of the world is accelerating, and as people are figuring out how to deal with that, they begin to have psychic dreams connecting them with lovers that many of them then track down in waking life.

There are so many ideas here. Are all of them fully realized? I don't know. At a certain point my fondness for Tea pretty much wins over. I love her, and I love that she's taking these big risks. I love that there are a million apocalyptic stories in the world and this is like none of them.

[bravenewbks · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

February 22, 2017 –
31.0% "I seriously have learned more about buying and doing drugs from the first third of this book than from the rest of my life, I think."
February 24, 2017 –
81.0% "Not as charmed by the world-is-ending portion of this book."

I enjoyed the surprising simile and metaphor scattered throughout. Andy was on a lesbian soccer team. Michelle liked to watch her spike the ball with her head like an aggressive seal. … a fracture thin as a spider web had begun to climb the surface of their friendship. She kissed her like she’d been shipwrecked on an island, notching each stranded day onto a fallen coconut, slowly losing her mind. That last line in particular, feels like a poem I want to read further.

But mostly what I gleaned from this book is the power of description to make an unfamiliar feeling/scenario seem familiar. I’ve never done heroin, for instance, but this book made me feel like I understand a little of what it’s like. Or this: She was in the grips of a detached fascination. She wanted the images on the television to wear her down so she could truly feel whatever it felt like to truly feel what was happening. Surely this alarmed, rubbernecking interest was not what she should be feeling. She was supposed to be feeling something a few layers down, something authentic and meaningful. Michelle feared she was not having an authentic experience of the beginning of the end of the world. She was having a deeply authentic experience of inauthenticity. It’s an oblique way to communicate what a character is feeling about an otherwise inaccessible experience, in that most people have never experienced something they think is the literal end of the world. And yet the fact that Michelle is worried that her experience is inauthentic tells us so much about what kind of person Michelle is, what’s important to her and what she values and how the end of the world threatens that twice over, first by her own impending doom but secondly by threatening to happen without her even properly processing it.

This was a great book to read in close succession to [book:Moonglow|26795307] by [author:Michael Chabon|2715], since both have characters who share the author’s name, and both blur the line between memoir and fiction. Michelle in Black Wave is obviously facing some situations that don’t read true to life (the end of the world, for one), but she is also a writer who is finding it difficult to write a second book after a moderately successful first one, who muses at some length about the difficulties of being too honest in a memoir, particularly when friends and family object to being identifiably included. “Don’t you ever fucking write about me!” screams an ex immediately after a breakup. It’s easy to imagine that being a real-life experience translated into fiction, especially as Michelle talks about revising her book to replace a character that was central to the story. I Actually Wrote The Whole Book With Her In It. Our Whole Story. Eight Years.Five Hundred Pages… She Didn’t Want Me To Write About Her But Our Breakup Was So Shitty And Awful I Just Really Needed To Tell The Story. The capitalization of every word is how Michelle speaks. It’s effective insofar as it gives the character a unique voice in my head, but it gets old really fast to read it on the page.

All in all, I would say this book wasn't exactly to my taste, but I found it intriguing and worthwhile nonetheless. I particularly appreciate the preponderance of queer characters, who too often are a novelty in fiction.