by Michelle Tea
$18.00
Softcover
331 pages
8.25 x 5.25 inches
ISBN-10: 1580052398
ISBN-13: 9781580052399
Publisher: Seal Press
In this gritty, confessional memoir, Michelle Tea takes the reader back to the city of her childhood: Chelsea, Massachusetts -- a place where time and hope are spent on things not getting any worse. Tea's girlhood is shaped by the rough fabric of the neighborhood and by its characters -- the soft vulnerability of her sister Madeline and her quietly brutal Polish father; the doddering, sometimes violent nuns of Our Lady of Assumption; Marisol Lewis from the projects by the creek; and Johnna Latrotta, the tough-as-nails Italian dance-school teacher who offered a slim chance for escape to every young Chelsea girl in tulle and tap shoes. Told in Tea's trademark loose-tongued, lyrical style, this memoir both celebrates and annihilates one girl's tightrope walk out of a working-class slum and the lessons she carries with her. With wry humor and a hard-fought wisdom, Tea limns the extravagant peril of a dramatic adolescence with the private, catastrophic secret harbored within the walls of her family's home -- a secret that threatens to destroy her family forever.
“Tea's memoir of growing up poor and white on the East Coast in the 1970s and '80s begins with her playing at being dead with her cousin and sister. Death and a sort of stagnant life in death were pretty much what this aging, "graffitied" working-class suburb of Boston had to offer its inhabitants. Tea's formative years aren't unusual, given her class background or the time. Her parents are divorced, and soon after their separation, her father, whose upbringing has left him completely unprepared to relate to his wife and daughters, deserts the family. Tea's biography is her attempt to explore the truth of her childhood, including incest. What makes it remarkable is her flair for description and her ability to recall vividly the indignities of her childhood. Tea has written a powerful and useful narrative for other incest survivors.” - Booklist
