As I’m sure I’ve mentioned previously, it sometimes takes me a while to read books I own, especially when there are shiny new library books available. This book was a Christmas gift from 2019; my now-fiancé saw this pre-wrapped surprise book at Book Culture and got it for me because he knew I liked Maggie Nelson and Eileen Myles; I opened it and was delighted because I’d already wanted to read Black Wave but hadn’t yet. Well: it took me over a year, but now I have read it, and it is excellent, and I look forward to re-reading it at some point, because it’s one of those books where I wanted to know what would happen next so I maybe read some of the more description-heavy sections more speedily than I might have.
When the book starts it’s 1999 and its protagonist, Michelle, is living in San Francisco, which is rapidly gentrifying, though Michelle is poor and queer and very much a denizen of “old” San Francisco. Meanwhile, we learn early on that the planet is in very bad shape: in the first ten pages there are references to pollution, smog, ‘killer sun”, and “SARS masks”; later there are mentions of heat and “heavy rains” and “black mold festering in the walls.” But Michelle has her own issues to deal with. She smokes crack (once), drinks (a lot) and does heroin (for a while); she messes up a relationship with a kind older woman and starts dating a teenager (she’s 27) and drinks (I know I said that already, but there is a lot of drinking). After one particularly rough morning when she realizes she’s “certain, finally, that her life was out of control”, Michelle wonders if she should move to LA, where her brother Kyle lives.
Michelle then does move to LA, where she thinks maybe she’ll write a screenplay but actually ends up living in a depressing apartment and drinking a lot and working in a used book/record store, which is fine-ish except the drinking is really excessive. She keeps thinking maybe she’ll stop and then telling herself she’s being too extreme; she then tells herself she’ll just have a glass of wine, but then, always, she drinks the whole bottle. And then Michelle gets a phone call from her brother, telling her the world is going to end, at which point the rest of the book is basically Michelle’s experience of the time leading up to the apocalypse, a time in which the world, not unexpectedly, goes even crazier than it already was.
All of that’s a whole lot going on, and I haven’t even talked about the metafictional elements, where it becomes clear that Michelle is writing her story/this story, a story that “Is Part True And Part False”; there are references to Michelle doing things with one character, or alone, and then corrections and clarifications saying she “really” did those things with a different character, had a whole different LA experience in a relationship that has now ended. So the character Michelle tries to figure out how to tell her story, how other people fit into it, how to write about people who may not want to be written about. The character Michelle, like the author Michelle Tea, has written memoirs; the character Michelle thinks at one point “that if people didn’t like the way they looked in her book then they should have behaved differently.” At one point, when the character Michelle says that in her book “The World Is Going To End,” another character notes that “It’s like a metaphor for the end of love.” Which it is, though the way the book ends makes it feel like it’s not about the end of love so much as the presence of love, even in the midst of everything ending: some connection, some spark.
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