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A review by halschrieve
Black Wave by Michelle Tea
4.0
Michelle Tea’s latest memoir mixes her classic style of raging, riotous calamity vignette with a lightly fictionalized apocalypse, a dissection of the fourth wall, and a last-minute sobriety that, for me at least, was sufficient to make this book into something greater than the sum of its parts.
After Tea wrote “How To Grow Up,” a surprisingly composed, blog-mom-ish exploration of what it means to teach at a college , have money for the first time, realize how dysfunctional past relationships you have had have been, and reckon with the mistakes you have made in the past , I didn’t know what to expect from further books. I had mixed feelings about How To Grow Up, because on one hand it is nice to see someone get their life together and feel good about themselves and not hurt others , but on the other hand Tea makes a somewhat hypocritical, chaotic and smug mentor—a little like being given life advice by a lady orc who has lived through a lot of things but whose take on existence is limited to a very narrow realm (for instance, Tea’s understanding of non-substance-related mental illness and trans people outside of lesbian culture is pretty restricted, and her reference points for working class culture are monolithically white, which makes her reputation as a seer of the gay zeitgeist complicated). I say this with a good measure of love and think similar critiques can be leveled at Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Sybil Lamb, Imogen Binnie, Sarah Schulman, etc etc.
Anyway, Black Wave is unique because it starts as one kind of Tea book , the voyeuristic disaster memoir, and then morphs into a more complex literary endeavor that is primarily centered on synthesizing all the shit Tea’s life and experiences have been about into some kind of vast coherent metaphor for the end of the world. She has frequent asides in which she reveals fictional affairs as fantasy or anachronism, reflects on her real life sobriety, and conducts long analyses of when her life changed and why based on past dysfunctional relationships. It is new, self aware, Michelle talking about an older, more whiskey-spittled edition. It is also about the way history , specifically queer history, gets made and told and retold and refracted .
I like Black Wave because as a trans queer teenager , whatever those words mean, I felt like I was living past the edge of an apocalypse that had traumatized every grown up I knew. I was aware that adults envied my amazing good fortune to step into adulthood in a supposedly less violent era (though my peers often suffered as much as Gen X in rural towns and cities alike, running away from abuse and into poverty, suffering assault and coercion, becoming addicted to a range of drugs because of desperation and inability to access more productive outlets). I was aware that all the grown ups I met were seriously fucked up in the head and had a range of narratives about how they had gotten that way. My life so far has been about unpacking the trauma of my immediate elders and figuring out how much is generational and historical and vast and how much is personal, specific , and lonely. By isolating her process and by turning questions of reliability into part of the narrative, Tea renders this effort to unpack visible. She isn’t a historian—she is an archive. But she works diligently for her own preservation and at the same time makes art that is engaging and exciting still.
I really like this book if that isn’t clear.
This book Really Really reminds me of I’ve Got A Time Bomb by Sybil Lamb, though the prose is more accessible and more studied and is written from a safer distance. I have to wonder if Tea knows Lamb’s work.
After Tea wrote “How To Grow Up,” a surprisingly composed, blog-mom-ish exploration of what it means to teach at a college , have money for the first time, realize how dysfunctional past relationships you have had have been, and reckon with the mistakes you have made in the past , I didn’t know what to expect from further books. I had mixed feelings about How To Grow Up, because on one hand it is nice to see someone get their life together and feel good about themselves and not hurt others , but on the other hand Tea makes a somewhat hypocritical, chaotic and smug mentor—a little like being given life advice by a lady orc who has lived through a lot of things but whose take on existence is limited to a very narrow realm (for instance, Tea’s understanding of non-substance-related mental illness and trans people outside of lesbian culture is pretty restricted, and her reference points for working class culture are monolithically white, which makes her reputation as a seer of the gay zeitgeist complicated). I say this with a good measure of love and think similar critiques can be leveled at Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Sybil Lamb, Imogen Binnie, Sarah Schulman, etc etc.
Anyway, Black Wave is unique because it starts as one kind of Tea book , the voyeuristic disaster memoir, and then morphs into a more complex literary endeavor that is primarily centered on synthesizing all the shit Tea’s life and experiences have been about into some kind of vast coherent metaphor for the end of the world. She has frequent asides in which she reveals fictional affairs as fantasy or anachronism, reflects on her real life sobriety, and conducts long analyses of when her life changed and why based on past dysfunctional relationships. It is new, self aware, Michelle talking about an older, more whiskey-spittled edition. It is also about the way history , specifically queer history, gets made and told and retold and refracted .
I like Black Wave because as a trans queer teenager , whatever those words mean, I felt like I was living past the edge of an apocalypse that had traumatized every grown up I knew. I was aware that adults envied my amazing good fortune to step into adulthood in a supposedly less violent era (though my peers often suffered as much as Gen X in rural towns and cities alike, running away from abuse and into poverty, suffering assault and coercion, becoming addicted to a range of drugs because of desperation and inability to access more productive outlets). I was aware that all the grown ups I met were seriously fucked up in the head and had a range of narratives about how they had gotten that way. My life so far has been about unpacking the trauma of my immediate elders and figuring out how much is generational and historical and vast and how much is personal, specific , and lonely. By isolating her process and by turning questions of reliability into part of the narrative, Tea renders this effort to unpack visible. She isn’t a historian—she is an archive. But she works diligently for her own preservation and at the same time makes art that is engaging and exciting still.
I really like this book if that isn’t clear.
This book Really Really reminds me of I’ve Got A Time Bomb by Sybil Lamb, though the prose is more accessible and more studied and is written from a safer distance. I have to wonder if Tea knows Lamb’s work.