BROADLY, BLACK WAVE (2016) aligns with earlier Tea memoirs The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America and Valencia. The voice and ethos are the same as in those books, and the setting in the first part of the book is the San Francisco of Valencia but a few years later; the second and slightly longer section is set after a move to Los Angeles.
Black Wave leans into fiction somewhat more, I’m guessing, than the other two books. A few episodes seem more fanciful than actual, such as a passionate afternoon with movie star Matt Dillon, and the book sometimes signals its own fictiveness, as when Tea acknowledges, “In reality, Quinn and Michelle weren’t scheduled to meet one another for over a decade,” or when Tea notes that a character named Lu insisted upon being removed from the book after “a tremendous fight in front of the beverage table at a party.” But the fictiveness of Black Wave is most dramatically apparent when the world ends in 2001.
But then again, how fictional is that? It is true enough that after 9/11, it seemed that a great many things did actually end, never to return, that some things that had mattered a great deal seemed suddenly trivial, that things that had never demanded attention suddenly exploded into salience. It’s a genius move, actually. Tea captures more of the actual strangeness of the era with this surprising device than higher profile efforts by Jonathan Safran Foer and Don DeLillo managed.
I particularly wanted to read this because Maggie Nelson praised its representation of substance use problems in On Freedom. I second the motion. Tea does not romanticize her descent into dependence, for which this reader was grateful, but she does not wax lyrical about her getting sober, either, which is the particular temptation of books about that difficult process.
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