Valencia (Paperback)

Michelle Tea

A fast-paced account of one year in San Francisco's underground scene, filled with sex, drugs and the never-ending search for true love.

The 25th anniversary edition of Michelle Tea's classic coming of age memoir - now with a foreword by Maggie Nelson, award-winning author of The Argonauts

'One of the few truly life changing books I've encountered' Torrey Peters, bestselling author of Detransition, Baby

Fleeing Tucson and her troublesome on-and-off ex-girlfriend, Michelle lands in queer San Francisco's riotous underbelly, stumbling through her early twenties in a haze of nightlife, drug adventures, scams and a string of hookups, break-ups and make-ups. As butches and dykes spin in and out of her orbit, she considers the force and casual cruelty of their desires and her own. Heady, beer-sticky and brimming with life, Valencia is a sharply observed and piercingly funny chronicle of a year lived close to the bone.

'If you want to know how dangerous and great and awful it is to be a girl, you'll scarf Valencia right up' Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls

'Michelle Tea is an intoxicating writer, delivering sentences that land with the snap and force of a punch' Guardian

Publication date: 05/06/2025

£10.99

ISBN: 9781805226819

Imprint: Serpent's Tail

Subject: Biography & Memoir, Fiction, Serpent's Tail Classics

Foreword by: Maggie Nelson

Valencia (Ebook)

Michelle Tea

Preorder from

A fast-paced account of one year in San Francisco's underground scene, filled with sex, drugs and the never-ending search for true love.

The 25th anniversary edition of Michelle Tea's classic coming of age memoir - now with a foreword by Maggie Nelson, award-winning author of The Argonauts

'One of the few truly life changing books I've encountered' Torrey Peters, bestselling author of Detransition, Baby

Fleeing Tucson and her troublesome on-and-off ex-girlfriend, Michelle lands in queer San Francisco's riotous underbelly, stumbling through her early twenties in a haze of nightlife, drug adventures, scams and a string of hookups, break-ups and make-ups. As butches and dykes spin in and out of her orbit, she considers the force and casual cruelty of their desires and her own. Heady, beer-sticky and brimming with life, Valencia is a sharply observed and piercingly funny chronicle of a year lived close to the bone.

'If you want to know how dangerous and great and awful it is to be a girl, you'll scarf Valencia right up' Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls

'Michelle Tea is an intoxicating writer, delivering sentences that land with the snap and force of a punch' Guardian

Publication date: 05/06/2025

£9.99

ISBN: 9781805226826

Imprint: Serpent's Tail

Subject: Biography & Memoir, Fiction, Serpent's Tail Classics

Foreword by: Maggie Nelson

Michelle Tea

Michelle Tea