We witness a bunch of girls hanging outside an INXS concert. Michelle leans out there smoking; she cannot paw forward and scream like the others. "I just could not toss myself into the context of those girls.... This had always been my curse in my desire to be a groupie, my refusal to become part of the shrieking mob." From this sullen opening, the book crackles forward in a skein of five stories. It's set mostly in the city of Boston and its suburbs, which are briefly lit by the movements of girls. The first chapter is a tale of girlfriends. Michelle meets a pair of dark twins at the INXS concert, twins whose affections seem almost climate-controlled. Initially, they court Michelle, full of enthusiasm and interest. Then, "Judith and Janet soon hated me again, a mysterious animosity continuing for about a year. I think it was '88 and they loved me again. It was summer..."

By the end of the chapter, the sisters leave Michelle's orbit for good. And Michelle sums one of them up like this: "And I know I wouldn't know her if I saw her." Gone. Brusqueness is an important node in Tea's chaotic system. Oblivion is punctuation, and momentum builds because this author is bursting with energy and doubt. The constant divulgence of names and places and events creates a panning effect in the narrative, and an overwhelming sense of decenteredness results, the author's chill edicts--"I wouldn't know her"--serving as a device to cue the reader to move on.

Michelle picks her next friend, Joez, who lives in Salem, because of her perfect makeup and her joblessness, and the fact that she takes poetry courses at the community college--just that. Michelle, in her own post-high school blur, nonetheless has a job and is ambivalently attached to a more conventional search for meaning. She admires Joez because "she just hit fast forward and skipped right over the segment of life I was currently mired in." And then we watch their ritual of the streets. Says Michelle:

I would ride the bus into Boston on Friday nights, alone with my book on my lap and all my weird makeup, black hair and black lipstick, and hopefully the bus riders of Chelsea Massachusetts would leave me alone but usually I would have to endure some kind of humiliation.... And would gaze out the window as we passed over the choppy harbor. And Joez would be there on the other side of the bridge, holding a plastic Tower Records bag packed with clothes for the weekend, books, a walkman for the train.... If it was really terrrible weather like snow or rain we would climb down into Haymarket Station and take the green line, but it was best when we walked. Climbing the slowly winding steps at Government Center where normal people ate lunch during the week but at night it was big and empty like a swimming pool with all the water drained out.... We were walking into a great drunken adventure. Past the rat-ridden alley that led to the Orpheum theater where bands we liked often played.... Down the street from the Orpheum was a teeny little liquor store that sold 2 for 1 bottles of wine and I would grab a couple by their slender necks, the dark red sloshing around inside, and we would walk across the street to the Boston Common.... If it was white and icy and the ugly naked trees were hung with lights we would take quick little steps, hurried in the cold but careful not to slip.

The path of this book is meandering and remarkable, like a party or an auto accident. The only preparation for the next turn of events is that a character dwindles in the excitement of the new scene, becoming less central. By the book's second chapter boys become the object and "Ian" appears. And quickly he is part of a plot to pick up girls. Girls lead to politics. There are quiet girlfriends and noisy, brash ones. And there are affairs, and graphic sexual descriptions.

Michelle winds up a sex worker--the book's most important girlfriend, Liz, brings her to that. There is a lot of sex in Passionate Mistakes, but it's less romantic than a walk. The point of sex here is not to excite but to exert one's power over shame. To claim one's imperviousness. Tea manages, heroically, to flatten (and reject) the vaunted power of women, to abandon our poufy roles of icon, muse and temptress--resistance, again.

Tea's wit and matter-of-factness about sex reminds me of a Karen Finley story. Standing on stage, her naked body smeared with chocolate, she smiled out at the audience and reportedly remarked--"This is what the fuss is all about?"

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