On our shelves

In These Times staff members have been passing around Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class, a recent collection of essays edited by spoken-word artist and author Michelle Tea. Like other books in the Seal Press series "Live Girls," Without a Net offers unvarnished and revealing stories from both famous and fresh contributors on often-ignored facets of women's lives. In her introduction, Tea writes about encountering working-class novel The Outsiders as a young reader--how it both spoke to her experience and left her wanting more. "I can feel the influence of S.E. Hinton's Ponyboy on my own words, and in the spirit of the story I want to tell," she writes, "the story of growing up a girl on the margins of the world…how it marks you for your whole life." Tea also expresses her disgust at stories written by and for the middle-class that frame working class experiences as tragedies or morality tales. "I like to imagine that our lives are dazzling athletic feats," she writes, "our survival graceful and artistic. It's a romantic way of looking at it, but you can't fault me for wanting to highlight our strengths, the brilliant flare of our collective defiance." It is that sense of commonality which elevates this sometimes uneven collection. Read a few entries, and shared themes begin to emerge: the draining search for often-sketchy and inept healthcare; the pains of bad teeth, inappropriate clothing, grinding underemployment. The importance of cynical humor. And food, lots on food--wanting it, stealing it, hating what's available, longing for meals long gone. Poet Diane Di Prima contributes a short piece on such feasts in the mid-'50s, titled "What I Ate Where." Violence lurks throughout the book, too, surfacing brilliantly in Bee Lavender's essay, "Fighting." Readers also shouldn't miss entries by In These Times contributors Dorothy Allison and Daisy Hernández. Tea is known for her edgy novels and personal narratives, many of which revolve around lesbian and transsexual subcultures in San Francisco. This influence is apparent in her selection of writers here, a surprising number of whom tell stories about their struggles with both class and gender issues. Check her Web site to learn more about the myriad of recent projects she's worked on, including co-editing pills, thrills, chills, and heartache: Adventures in the First Person and Best Lesbian Erotica 2004.