Like Phoebe Gloeckner's Diary of a Teenage Girl, Michelle Tea's Rent Girl is an illustrated novel about a young dyke's adventures in and out of the sex industry on both the East and West Coasts. A side story to Tea's other novels, The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America and Valencia, this book explores in depth her ambivalence to the sex industry, which she found to be an exciting outlaw occupation one minute and a traumatic existential nightmare the next.