Today I would like to provide you with a recipe for success that will allow you to write this book and become a darling of the shiftless indie generation we all love and emulate. First, be born. Next, become angst-filled, smoke cigarettes, drink booze, date a man, date a woman, date a man and different women simultaneously, drink more, fuck quotation marks, break up with a man, delve into feminism, date a woman, realize that this woman is insane, continue to date her, become a prostitute, move a...

Hilarious, sad, very readable memoir about a queer babe growing up in Massachusetts.

Michelle Tea talks about growing up lower class in New England - being a goth teen, dating jerk dudes. The majority of the book is about being a lesbian and then later a prostitute, with a lot of focus on one particularly toxic relationship with a girlfriend.

more michelle tea. *shudder* this was the worst of the worst worst of the worst. as much as i have hated & detested every single one ofmichelle tea's books, this one was THE WORST. one of the top ten worst books i have ever read? possibly. it actually went out of print for quite some time, but was re-released after valencia proved to be fairly popular with a certain segment of readers. this is kind of like valencia, except even more boring, non-sensical, & painful to read. maybe there are some p...

An annoying lesbian hipster girl uses and abuses several girlfriends in a sort of On The Road style tale. While I enjoy Tea's prose style, I do not like her stagnant, shallow characters. Her books read more like snapshots than stories.

A bit like reading someone's diary. The early "goth highschool" parts were like reading a close friends' (or, yikes, my own). In that way, it was confessional to the point, at times, of being uncomfortable. Though I do have to say that I was intrigued by the "conversational" use of language. Her command of it is interesting and so I am tempted to look into more of her works. Initially picked this up do to the imprint being Semiotext(e) and so the content was a bit surprising (perhaps a bit of a

I think this book was very much 'of its time'.It was honest and captures, something. The prose was pacy and probably appeals to, someone. It just read a little shallow, a little nonsensical nonsense and not sensical nonsense, i.e. it was nonsense for the sake of nonsense that didn't point to any sense of non-nonsense in the nonsense, there was no sense of critique in the nonsense, no real feeling or expression of something, of anything that made any sense, and nonsense has to make sense if it wa...

In the afterword by Eileen Myles, Passionate Mistakes is described as "meandering." I think that describes the style pretty well - Passionate Mistakes takes the scenic route, meanders through Tea's coming of age narrative. She writes about her time as a prostitute, moving to Tucson. More stream-of-conscious than Tea's later work, so it was interesting to see how Tea's writing has evolved.

This is the second book of Michelle Tea's that I've read; I read Valencia a couple of years ago. This is her first book, far more raw, Boston instead of San Francisco, first kiss and first betrayal instead of Discovering Who You Really Are.What disappointment I had came from having the wrong expectations. This isn't a novel, and it isn't building to anything. If anything, one of the stories I really want to hear comes after the last page of the book: much as this snapshot of her youth is fascina...

The very best of Michelle Tea starts with her first work. Never has she been able to truly capture her ragtag, unedited, juicy, straight from memory to zine, writing style since this first book (well, "Valencia" is a close second). Stream of conscious never read so good or so well. Of course her sex work dirt is the best and most notorious writing--we all wonder what it might 'really' be like to sell ourselves for money. But prior to this experience, she writes an anthropologist worthy account o...

Apparently a lot of people hate this book. Although I tend to avoid any feminist work that emits the slightest odor of man-hate, I really enjoyed Michelle Tea's account of her young adulthood. It's honest without being obnoxious, and it doesn't reek of self-importance nor does it carry on in a "boo hoo" pretentious self-deprecating way. Her abundance of commas really irritated me at first, but when I realized an abundance of semicolons would be way worse, I got over it. Anyway, it's pretty key t...

I adore Michelle Tea. So much. This book offered great insight into her early years, but I do feel like she's become a better writer as the years have gone by.

The subject material is probably off-putting for some, a "Catcher in the Rye" type story of a young girl who explores heterosexuality, homosexuality, guerrilla feminism, prostitution, drugs, all of the things that might be a parent's nightmare. Toward the end, almost as an aside, you find out that she was possibly molested as a child (or not), grew up super poor with a mother who married a few times. It's not the driving force behind the angst-y behavior. And yet, at the end, you leave the book

Fast-paced, honest, very captivating

what i learned from this book... i guess i learned to think carefully before i make a michelle tea selection. i found this book at the library, with a bunch of "new" books (this being from 1998, obviously it was just new to that library), and since it was queer, seemed a bit edgy and not a mysterious/thrilling/historical bit of fiction, i grabbed it. plus, i could swear i'd read - and enjoyed - some of her work before, but after mostly reading this, i have to wonder if i was mistaken about the a...

san francisco's michelle tea is the most vital writer of her generation, one of the few people from our era they'll still be studying 100 years from now, and in this first full-length book of her career she shows just why so many people pay attention to what she has to say. dirty, shocking, subversive, with an embracing of a complex sexuality and lifestyle that needs no apologies, tea's work has a good chance of permanently changing your life after being exposed to it or at least getting you loo...

Eh. I've read better "shocking" sexual memoirs. At least Laura Palmer had better grammar. Now and again Ms. Tea has a bold turn of phrase or a humorous reflection that endeared her, but mostly I found this self-indulgent and boring. She strings out the vagaries of her frustrating relationship, then quits the book just as it was getting to the interesting part - when she gets her shit together and moves out to Cali.

Michelle Tea is now well-known for being a San Francisco based writer with works based on the city such as the infamous queer novel Valencia. However, Passionate Mistakes is from a much earlier time in Michelle Tea's life when she was a goth high school kid who lived in Chelsea, a suburb of Boston. It follows her through her teenage years and early twenties in Provincetown and ends with her move to Tucson, Arizona. This is Michelle's experience with growing up but it is also contrasted with the

3.5writing's super good, excited to read more by tea

I just read this book in one sitting, in a few hours, to review for the Feminist Review Blog. Once I write a proper review, I will post it.Here's the whole review:Beware! If you pick up this book, you may not be able to put it down!I read this book in one sitting, in a few hours on a Sunday evening. I hadn’t planned to read it all at once. I thought I would read a little, just get started, but the next thing I knew, it was 11pm (on a school night!) and I felt compelled to keep going until I comp...