Tea Time: Author Reveals Rose's Secrets

By Jonathan Harper

I knew of Michelle Tea before I knew her. It’s a slow process in becoming an icon, much less a literary icon. But Michelle Tea is one of these authors who have built a reputable library of intense and emotional storytelling using modern and youthful narrations. I do believe one day, my generation will look back on books like hers and hold them with nostalgia as a record of the thoughts, hopes, mistakes and ideals of this time. This success continues with her latest accomplishment, Rose of No Man’s Land.

With its manic and witty prose, readers experience a new found evolution of girlhood amongst the wreckage of pop culture burnouts in broke down America. Our tour guide is Trisha, a naïve and jaded fourteen year-old. Through her observations and sarcastic commentary, we are introduced to the bleak landscape of a town with little hope of prosperity and her disdain for her family: her hypochondriac mother, her mother’s grotesquely irresponsible and underemployed boyfriend and her sister, Kristy, a mall rat with grand ambitions of being a hair stylist and constantly filming her application for MTV’s The Real World. Amongst it all, Trisha narrates her reluctant ambiguity to the world around her, disinterested in it one minute and desperate to strike out against it the next.

Later, her sister will force her into employment in the most popular clothing store at the mall, Ohmygod!, which she is abruptly fired from, but meets her new-found counterpart: a punkish food court worker, Rose. Quickly, this new friendship offers Trisha an escape into a world that is both exciting and dangerous, where consequences are real and expectations rise and fall in moments. Rose herself is an anomaly for such a young character, a fifteen-year old kleptomaniac deviant, who will not only introduce Trisha to the more adult world of night-life, drugs, tattoos and sex, but will also become her lover. This being said, neither girl seems fully prepared for the choices they make, with their ‘live for the moment’ idealism.

While under the guise of a young adult novel, RONML should be well praised for its subtle maturity and brutal honesty. Vulgarity is used to set a tone without glorifying deviant behavior or drug use, nor parading as a morality tale. As for the romance aspects, there is something compelling in these young relationships and Trisha’s narrating offers intelligent insight for a character trying to find herself. Despite it all, we want to see Trisha and Rose grow and thrive together. Older readers will be fascinated by such young protagonists experimenting in such harsh adult environments; younger readers will experience such things from a safe distance and with enough knowledge to benefit from it. Rose of No Man’s Land is astonishing and melodramatic, a gorgeous portrayal of the corruption and reconfiguration of a young, lost soul trapped in Americana.

I caught up with Michelle after her reading at Lambda Rising Bookstore on April 20th. She is attentive and engaging with her readers. When it’s my turn, she is personable and chatty, the way I still remember from her last D.C.-area event.

JH: For all of us out in suburbia, who is Michelle Tea?

MT: Oh no! [laughs] I’m a writer. I’ve written primary memoir, but just finished my first novel. I’ve also edited anthologies and had my poetry collected in a volume called The Beautiful. And I also love to curate things so I’ve been a curator for literary events in San Francisco, where I live, but also in the form of national performance tours.

JH: So, you’re literary career began in the performance arena. When did Sister Spit get started?

MT: Sister Spit started in ’94 as a weekly open mic. At that point, spoken word/open mic nights were exploding in San Francisco. You could go to a different one every night of the week, but they were mostly dens of drunken male dudes who were reading mean poems about their girlfriends. It was a really intense environment that I really liked to go into and try to throw my weight around in and be the loud angry girl. But I knew a lot of the girls wouldn’t want to go into that environment to read their writing. So, I thought if we opened an all girl open mic, we would see all these new people come out and show their work. And it totally took off.

JH: Last year, you were promoting Rent Girl with D.C.’s Mother Tongue. Do you think performance venues like Sister Spit and Mother Tongue have helped shape your writing?

MT: Yes. The fact is, I didn’t come out of a writing program. I came into writing through open mic events in bars. I wrote for an audience that was primarily drunk and only had five minutes to capture their attention and make an impression. The Chelsea Whistle was the first book I worked on I trusted would be published as a book. The works that make up Valencia and my first book were all pieces that were written for performance and were grouped together for a book.

JH: What inspired RONML?

MT: A few things. I was definitely feeling like I had to write fiction. I was done with Rent Girl and I really felt like my next project couldn’t be another memoir, I couldn’t excavate my life one more time. So I had my little inspiration fillers, what story do I want to tell … I’m really interested in teen culture, the sense of alienation and striving to be apart of the world at the same time. Also, I had just visited Boston and went to this mall that I used to hang out at when I was a teenager. It was just so overwhelming being inside there and the mall was so over-stimulating, constant and insane and I thought, “I just really want to write about this mall.”

JH: Now RONML kind of mirrors your childhood memoir, The Chelsea Whistle. Both books feature very young protagonists who are dealing with an abandoned father, experimenting with sex and drugs. How much of RONML is from Chelsea Whistle?

MT: Well, it’s more like, what do Trish and I have in common? We both grew up in little towns, she in Mogsfield, Mass. and me in Chelsea. I didn’t do drugs until I was an adult. I also never hooked up with a girl until I was eighteen. When I was in high school, I smoked pot and I dropped acid like any good teenager did, but I didn’t do what they call “hard drugs” like Trish did, and I didn’t lose my virginity until I was significantly older. There’s always a sense of danger in what the hell’s going to happen when you grow up as a girl in a broke town. There’s a feeling that you’re being watched by guys and the guys aren’t being watched by anyone and you don’t know what can happen. So, I guess I could say that I’ve experienced Trisha’s landscape, but not the particulars of her situation. I could see how people could draw a parallel but since I know what it took to create everything, it doesn’t feel autobiographical.

JH: So, are you more of a Trisha or a Rose?

MT: I definitely feel like a Trisha, but I think there’s been times in my life where I’ve been someone else’s Rose. So, I think I’m a Trish with a “Rose Rising.”

JH: Since you work with so many adult themes in your memoirs, especially the topic of being a sex worker in Rent Girl, is this intended as a young adult novel?

MT: Not specifically for young adults, but young adults read my memoirs and I know they’re going to read this. I feel young adults who are readers read adult books as well as young adult titles, and a lot of adults still want to see what’s going on in young adult literature which gets edgier and edgier. There’s always great works coming out under the YA mantle.

JH: How do you think specifically a fourteen year old girl would take to this book?

MT: I think there’s all types of fourteen year old girls. I think if it’s a queer girl or a tomboy, or just a fourteen year old just deciding what type of girl she wants to be in the world, she would really relate to Trish. There’s lots of girls who grow up in towns like Mogsfield that would recognize that town or would want to hear what it’s like to live in a place like that. There’s lots of really sheltered girls who might think it’s unreal and scary.

JH: What’s next for Michelle Tea? Are we going to see Trish all grown up?

MT: I know! People have asked me if I’m going to write a sequel and I must say I’m very much attached to those two characters. I was so stressed out while writing the book, but it wasn’t until I was done that I realized “Oh God – I really like them and now they’re gone! I wish I had enjoyed them more while I was with them!” But I just finished a script for a comic book called Carrier that MacAdam/Cage is publishing as a graphic novel with illustrations by Laurenn McCubbin. It’s about a fourteen year old girl who turns into a pigeon and takes up residence in a squat in a fictional town which is ruled by biotech corporations and evil non-profits, populated by a bunch of mutated people from years of the biotech companies testing on humans and polluting the environment, so all this crazy stuff happens.

JH: So, now you have a political agenda in this next book.

MT: I always have a political agenda, Jonathan! [laughs] It’s just a lot bigger in comic book size! It’s been really fun working on it with Laurenn. I’ve also been working on a screen play that I’m hoping a director will attach to. Also I’m reviving Sister Spit as a tour in November with the publication Baby, Remember My Name: New Queer Girl Writing.

JH: For the next generation of young writers, what would you say to them?

MT: I would just say, just write your stuff and get it out there any way you can! Then good things will happen. It might take a decade, but good things will happen.