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Sites, 'Zines, Books, and Guides for [fierce] Women in General
Reviewed by Lisa Okey
The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruptions of One Girl in America, by
Michelle Tea from Semiotext(e)/Smart Art Press, $10
Passionate Mistakes charts the chaotic ups and downs of one earnest, wired,
Lookin'-for-love-in-all-the-wrong- places/goth/dyke/femme girl like a needle
on a Richter scale chart during a California quake. Michelle, the character
in this book, does not experience personal growth in the traditional sense
(like a huge epiphany about her life at the end of the book.) You do see her
grow as in morph throughout the book: from a goth girl trying to avoid
getting beat up by Boston skinheads, to a girl ditching her boyfriend and
wearing her pink girdle with matching bra to gay bars, to working as a whore
in sunny Tucson, Arizona. Tea writes in an engaging, tripping stream of consciousness style that reflects her on-stage spoken word princess persona as part of Sister Spit, the SF rag-tag team of female poets. In Passionate Mistakes, there is always some boozing taking place and always just enough money to buy it. There is a Jack Kerouac spirit to Tea's writing that I love. It makes me want to be reckless, drink too much, go on a trip to the next experience down the road. Tea, in her own funky way, actually illustrates the feminist maxim, "The personal is political." She is an anarchist; the product of 30 years of
feminism and her writing represents the angst of young misfit queer girls
and anyone else who doesn't fit in to society s prefab roles. In one scene in Passionate Mistakes, Michelle is having breakfast with Tania, a women she ditched her girlfriend to sleep with the night before, and the woman is talking about her life over coffee: "She was into marketing. She had gone to school for it, graduate school even, and she talked about different experiences she had with it, and I was completely lost, what the fuck is marketing? It sounded incredibly boring. I asked her to explain it, I think it had something to do with advertising, it certainly was corporate and I couldn't relate at all. I am an enemy of the entire notion of careers and as Tania continued to speak, I realized I was probably an enemy of Tania." I love Michelle Tea's punk sensibility and when I finished this chaotic memoir, I was left wanting more. Fortunately, Tea has another book, Valencia, which I'll review next week, from Seal Press.
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