Rent Girl

Rent Girl is a graphic novel and I do mean graphic.

Rent Girl has an autobiographical feeling to it which is bolstered by the publishers comment "A graphic and uncompromising autobiographical bender, the story of Tea's years as a prostitute...". The book itself doesn't actually say it is autobiographical but the details are so real, so sadly funny, that they ring true.

A young lesbian needs money and when her worldy older girlfriend reveals that she is a prostitute it looks like a chance. After all, this girlfriend is emotionally healthy. Isn't she? The life of an in-call or out-call prostitute has its benefits (money) but so many more things that speak against it. Reading it, I wondered if I was living this how I could even think while show more feeling all that tiredness and despair and lack of nourishing brain food. In and out of the business life goes on and across the country prostitution leads to drug dealing (though she is terrible at it).

If she is a victim, it is a victim of lassitude, of not knowing how to break out or of lacking the energy to get into the new way. And when she leaves sex work for "legitimate" jobs the constant beating down and humiliation for such small amounts of wages leer at her more than the johns. She wonders what is worse verbally abused or silently judged and concludes that is is silently judged but that judgement touches copy store minimum wage workers as much as it does tarty women at bars.

I laughed quite often while reading this book. One of my favorite (non-laughable) bits came at the beginning of the book: "she was of course revealing herself to be a liar, something neither of us understood at the time...it lodged a suspicion, a bit of doom, in my heart. A magnetized sliver of grimness that drew to it every lie Steph would tell, getting chunkier and heavier as time went on." This is exactly how it feels to realize someone you trust is a liar; even if you understand the lies and aren't on the recieving end of the ones you see/hear, the sliver grows.

A solid feeling look at sex work seen without the filter of victim or superhero. show less

Oh, Michelle Tea, how I love you... When I heard you were collaborating on a graphic novel, I nearly wet myself. Procuring this book somehow required two trips to the comic book store and two trips to the local feminist bookstore, but finally, I had this book in my hands, and it was all worth it. So yes, Michelle, maybe some of these stories were a little bit familiar. But really, as I’ve already read two of your memoirs and your collection of poetry, and you are still so young, I could hardly be dismayed. Plus, never before were your stories accompanied by such charming illustrations! And never before were all the stories of your experience with prostitution collected in one place.

I wish for you that this book will fly off of the show more shelves. Because, really, what could be more hip and edgy? A Graphic Novel About Lesbian Prostitutes! Every ”thinking” girl in her twenties should have a copy. I wish for you a huge promotional budget. Ads in Bitch and Bust and Jane, not to mention Out, Curve, and The Advocate. I wish for you a nationwide speaking tour. That you would come to my town and talk to girls and grrls and bois about owning their bodies. I wish for you to be carried high on the shoulders of my generation, which will suddenly realize that gender is not set in stone, taking joy in performing whatever gender they feel like at the moment until they finally find the home of their heart, not just the F or M on their driver’s license.

I wish for Oprah to call you on the phone, and for you to laugh yourself silly when you come home to
find her voice on the machine. I wish for people of my hometown of 1200 souls in Kansas to think of you fondly, and to remember with a touch of embarrassment the days that they were threatened by those whose sexual identities did not look like theirs. And in five years on your birthday, Congress will finally pass a law saying: you know what? discriminating on sexual orientation or identity is never okay. and anyone can marry anybody they want, and the government is finally going to take its big nose out of marriage forever because really, what business is it of theirs?

In short, I hope the whole world changes. And they all fall in love with you. show less

Tea candidly recounts her years as a young, broke lesbian in the sex trade in this absorbing, compellingly illustrated memoir. Intrigued by the large amounts of money and glam lifestyle of her wild girlfriend, Steph, Michelle decides to give prostitution a try. This is no exposé of the evils of the sex trade. Rather, Tea explores the range of emotions and experiences as a prostitute, from the allure of her first $700 trick, to her repulsion with the johns, to her struggle to establish boundaries both within and outside her profession. Her tone expertly describes the characters at their most self-indulgent, cruel, narcissistic and deluded with stark honesty and self-deprecating humor. She details the falling-outs, falling-in-love and show more realizations of a young woman seeking to define herself. For example, Tea details her many “no future tattoos,” mapping the path she took to reclaim her body (and self) from the aesthetic of prostitution while still denying the standards of mainstream culture. Like Lauren McCubbin’s tough, mysterious, scantily-clad women who stare unrelentingly from the page, Tea makes no attempt to translate her lifestyle, full of sex, drugs and astrology, into a digestible foray into subculture. And she does not apologize, either. Explicitly herself, she informs her reader, “I tell you this, like I tell you everything, not to excuse my behavior but to explain it.” show less

Michelle Tea is a born storyteller, and this story of a lesbian prostitute is written so conversationally that you feel like you're in her kitchen while she's making you lunch.

This is an awesome graphic memoir of Tea's experience doing sex work in Boston and San Francisco. Very real and at times quite horrifying. Her girlfriend seems to be abusive. I worried that she (Tea) was drinking too much. Seems like I should issue numerous trigger awards for trauma survivors. Sexual abuse, and a pervasive sense of constant danger.

I've wanted to read this for a really long time but only picked it up recently. Very text-heavy, but don't let that discourage you. The layout makes it work. A young lesbian in Boston becomes a prostitute. Autobiographical, confessional I guess. As Warren Ellis notes on the back cover, it's very real and real doesn't have to mean hopelessly depressing. The writing took a bit getting used to, as it's not terribly smooth (think stream of thought, but in a less polished way than Woolf and more decipherable than Joyce) and there are a lot of typos. But there's still something very compelling about her prose. Unlike most literature I've read about prostitution (non-fiction and fiction) it's not self-pitying or moralizing and it doesn't damn show more the sex industry for oppressing women or laud it for liberating them. Not all the characters are terribly sympathetic, but they're real people and real people sometimes have unsympathetic thoughts or do unsympathetic things. show less

I enjoyed the writing a great deal and was impressed that the "graphic" aspects of the novel did not override the plot and characters in the actual story. However, I was disappointed in the story as a whole. I found Tea's work as a sex worker extremely interesting, but as a narrator I found her to be whiny and often annoying. Though she courageously displayed her weaknesses as well as her strengths, I still could not help but want more from the characters whether it was development, background information, or some resolution. Being that it is a memoir, everything can't always be pleasantly resolved. However, every character eventually disappear without any acknowledgment that they had previously existed.

The story begins with great show more strength and interest as Tea describes her life as a lesbian sex worker in Boston. As her travels bring her to Provincetown and Tucson, the reader can feel that Tea is running out of steam (and so is her story). Her girlfriend, for the majority of the piece, is a self-centered and one-dimensional woman who introduces Tea to the world of prostitution. Along the way, the two meet up and live with various other sex workers and drug addicts. While the ride is rocky and the writing is smooth, the characters are emotionally limited and appear as caricatures.

www.iamliteraryaddicted.blogspot.com show less