How to Grow Up

November 10, 2014
Tea has written memoirs (e.g., The Chelsea Whistle) about what it’s like to be “born broke, or weird, into tricky families and unsafe towns,” and now comes this tough, quirky volume from the “trembling hard-won perch of adulthood.” The story begins with Tea, age 37 in San Francisco, newly free of a ne’er-do-well ex-boyfriend and sober after nearly killing herself with drugs and alcohol, but living in a group house with “drug-addled 20-somethings cavorting naked through the hallways.” After deciding she would be a wreck if she turned 40 in that house, she claws her way out: first, she gets a job teaching writing, which she abandons to visit Paris; next, she finds a boyfriend who appears civilized but proves to be cruel; finally, she rents an apartment of her own, makes enough money to safely indulge in a $900 leather hoodie, and gets married to a happy woman. Tea’s memoir begins as a narrative, then becomes more of an essay collection. Chapters survey her personalized spirituality (“The Baddest Buddhist”) and her self-care through food (“Eat Me”). The overall feel is of a lecture delivered in the language of self-help: are you “walking on eggshells” in your relationship? This is messy, like Tea’s story, but the narrator is charming and dogged enough to make readers glad that both they and she stuck it out. Agent: Lindsay Edgecombe, Levine Greenberg Literary Agency.

November 1, 2014
A memoir about how sobriety helped a recovering alcoholic belatedly become an adult.Title aside, this isn't a how-to book but more of a cautionary tale. As Tea (Valencia, 2008, etc.) writes, "I am someone whose path to adulthood is not a clear A to B, a straight line through life. My life is more like A, B, back to A, but it's a different A this time, and now B looks so different from my time back at A-and whoa, here's C, what a trip! I'm a grown-up!" It's a life that has encompassed marriage to a woman after a life of often passionate, frequently misguided relationships with much younger men; of finding a place of her own after living in party houses; of teaching writing in college though she never graduated; of earning a living through writing and speaking that she once did almost for free. And of prostitution, phone sex, meth and heroin-though she treads lightly in this book on those areas. She writes, as she says, with "the dark domestic humor of a satanic Erma Bombeck," and this is thematic territory that others have explored before her. As the memoir plays chronological hopscotch, some chapters might have fared better as stand-alone essays (particularly "How to Break Up," which comes after she has settled down, married and her breakups are presumably behind her), and some of the concepts seem a little forced ("Hail the breakover, a breakup-inspired makeover"), but generally, the personality of her writing carries readers through. There's also an inspirational quality to the way a life that once seemed so wayward (even to the author) has worked out so well. An engaging and often darkly funny memoir. Life begins at 40 for the author, who got a late start on adulthood and had a wild time getting there.

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Starred review from June 1, 2015

As memoirist Tea (Valencia) approaches age 40, she decides it's time to leave the maggot-infested refrigerator in her rundown communal house in San Francisco's Mission District and move into a place of her own. Acknowledging an arrested development resulting from years of alcoholism and addiction, she stumbles toward adulthood with the new clarity of sobriety. Along the way, she dates and breaks up with men and women, repeats affirmations for money, prays to Stevie Nicks, and slouches her way to that elusive life stage we call adulthood. VERDICT Tea's charming and self-effacing humor makes this a delightful read for those who are on their own path to adulthood or fully developed adults who want to remind themselves of how far they've come. (Do those people exist?) [See Memoir, 12/16/14; ow.ly/MBEsA.]--ES

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2015
Author-editor Tea is wacky, bravely wild, bisexual, inventive, and a good writer (e.g., Rose of No Man's Land, 2006). She never finished college, yet she made it and made it on her own, her own way. Her newest, chatty memoir details how she shoplifted, drank, drugged, and 12-stepped her way to being a grown-up, and it's a delightful, uplifting roller-coaster ride of a book. Things that get others down (poverty, homelessness, insects in the communal refrigerator) simply spur her good-naturedly, questingly onward. To say she is an inspiration doesn't quite workher path is too brambly and unusual for many to treadyet her book is full of the kinds of stories that will just make readers feel good (and feel like persevering as well). Find a place that reminds you that the world is so much bigger than your heart and whoever broke it this time around. Tea finds love, that she can pay the bills, and thatholy smokeshe's written the book you're reading now! An optimistic, funny, advice-filled look at an unusual life being lived to the hilt.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)