Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class [Paperback]

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

Indie icon Michelle Tea--whose memoirThe Chelsea Whistledetails 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 Hern?ndez.Michelle Tea is the author of five memoirs:The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America,Valencia(now a film),The Chelsea Whistle(Seal Press),Rent GirlandHow to Grow Up(Penguin/Plume), currently in development with Amazon Studios. Her novels includeMermaid in Chelsea CreekandGirl at the Bottom of the Sea, part of a Young Adult fantasy trilogy published by McSweeneys, andRose of No Man's Land.Black Waveis a dystopic memoir-fiction hybrid. Forthcoming works includeCastle on the River Vistula, the final installment of the YA series, andModern Tarot, a tarot how-to and spell book published by Harper Elixir.

Tea is the curator of the Amethyst Editions imprint at Feminist Press. She founded the literary non-profit RADAR Productions and the international Sister Spit performance tours, and is the former editor of Sister Spit Books, an imprint of City Lights. She created Mutha Magazine, an online publication about real-life parenting. Her writing has appeared inHarper's, Cosmopolitan, The Believer, Marie Claire,n+1,lS.