Without a Net The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class

by Tea, Michelle

• ISBN13: 9781580051033
• ISBN10: 1580051030
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-02-06
• Publisher: Seal Press

Summary

An urgent testament to the trials of life for women living without a financial safety net

Indie icon Michelle Tea -- whose memoir The Chelsea Whistle details her own working-class roots in gritty Chelsea, Massachusetts -- shares these fierce, honest, tender essays written by women who can't go home to the suburbs when ends don't meet. When jobs are scarce and the money has dwindled, these writers have nowhere to go but below the poverty line. The writers offer their different stories not for sympathy or sadness, but an unvarnished portrait of how it was, is, and will be for generations of women growing up working class in America. These wide-ranging essays cover everything from selling blood for grocery money to the culture shock of "jumping" class. Contributors include Dorothy Allison, Bee Lavender, Eileen Myles, and Daisy Hernáez.

Author Biography

Michelle Tea is the author of The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America, the Lambda award–winning Valencia, and The Chelsea Whistle, and coeditor of Pills, Thrills, Chills, and Heartache. She lives in San Francisco.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Waiting	p. 1
The Poet and the Pauper	p. 7
Steal Away	p. 15
Farm Use	p. 21
Rain	p. 29
The Prison We Called Home	p. 33
A Catholic Leg	p. 41
My Father's Hands	p. 49
Winter Coat	p. 59
The Just-Add-Water Kennedys and Barbecue Bread Violence	p. 67
Filling	p. 75
Reverse	p. 79
My Memory and Witness	p. 85
Wings	p. 91
There are Holes in My Mandarin Dog Biscuit	p. 97
My Season of Paper Dresses	p. 103
What I Ate Where	p. 109
The Lower-Working-Class Narrative of a Black Chinese American Girl	p. 113
Blueprints and Handwires	p. 119
The Sound of Poverty	p. 127
Dirty Girl	p. 131
Dinner Talk	p. 141
It's Just Blood	p. 147
Ghetto Fabulous	p. 153
Getting Out	p. 161
My Mother was a Whore	p. 167
For Those Who Like to Dig	p. 175
Fighting	p. 185
Scholarship BA	p. 199
Something From Nothing	p. 207
Acknowledgments	p. 215
Contributor Biographies	p. 217
About the Editor	p. ä
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