Michelle Tea on The Heart’s History

Michelle Tea and I go way back. Or at least we should. We both grew up in Chelsea, Massachusetts, a sad little town just north of Boston, which Michelle immortalized in her wonderful memoir, The Chelsea Whistle. We didn’t know each other back in Chelsea, but met several years later, once we had both settled in San Francisco.

Michelle, of course, has become a literary star with such works as Rose of No Man’s Land and the Lambda Award-winning Valencia. So, of course, she was one of the first people I thought of when it came to requesting advance reviews of The Heart’s History. Here’s her take:

“Lewis DeSimone is a great writer. His prose is thoughtful, deep, layered and real. His characters are living. It’s about love and sex and AIDS, about human connection and the ultimate unknowability of another person. It’s about the slow assimilation of a larger gay culture that used to be more angry and badass. It’s a really good book written by a very skilled author.”

Coming from one of the most “bad-ass” writers I know, that’s a real compliment.