"It’s my nature and my natural instinct to be completely transparent about my life," says US author Michelle Tea. "I don’t feel any sort of shame about anything I’ve done so it doesn’t occur to me to not talk about it." Tea’s first two memoirs, The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America and Valencia, follow her through hookups and relationships, temp jobs and sex work, and through myriad drunken nights in San Francisco, Boston and Tucson.
This month Tea appears at Toronto’s Writing Outside the Margins, a one-day festival of queer literary arts presented by Xtra, also featuring readings from the creator and star of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, John Cameron Mitchell, and Canadian MC, spoken-word performer and singer Kinnie Starr.
Tea’s books provide much-needed proof that it’s not just middle-class male intellectuals who can meander across America making love and poetry and relying upon a combination of their wits and luck to get by. But as she gets older Tea’s writing and her life are changing.
"I’m sitting against my wall completely hemmed in by boxes," says Tea on the phone from San Francisco where she has just finished moving house. "Yesterday I spent like $150 on this do-it-yourself put-it-together clothing rack, and it fell on me and I broke three parts of it. I just rigged up this crazy busted rack using a pole and a bike rack, it’s totally going to collapse on me. You have to lean on these particular skills when you’re moving and I don’t have them. I don’t have real-world skills."
