Michelle Tea’s memoir Valencia (Seal Press) dug right into its own here-and-now, a slice of world so hell-bent and true, resistance would have been tough: 1990s twentysomething San Francisco dyke culture. But anyone who knows love and lust and heartache could have been sucked into its soulful whirl.

Only very cursorily in Valencia did Tea allude to her family and her childhood, or to Chelsea, the working-class town that helped define her. In her new memoir, The Chelsea Whistle (Seal Press), she returns to her earliest escapades, traveling farther back in time than she did in her first book, 1998’s The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America (Semiotext(e)).

In setting, The Chelsea Whistle is more akin to Passionate Mistakes than to Valencia. Tea meets adolescence with confusion and strength, hangs out with the goths at the BPL, dances up a scene on Lansdowne Street, becomes a call girl in the Back Bay, and perceives her homosexuality in a Fenway apartment during one magical summer. Unlike Passionate Mistakes or Valencia, however, The Chelsea Whistle seeks to delve into and comprehend the details that accumulate in her life, and that leads her to a stark and lonely conclusion. Although the style is just as freewheeling, the stakes are higher, the effects more serious and lingering. She’s gone beyond exuberantly tracking affairs of the heart; here she dives straight into the scary grime of growing up in a place without hope, in a family with a sickness she struggles to keep hidden from herself.

It starts with a chapter called " Sicko, " where the neighborhood teems with (mostly) imagined malevolence: razors in Halloween apples, benign-looking guys whose dicks flop into view, acid-laced Mickey Mouse candies on the sidewalk. According to Tea’s mother, the world was booby-trapped with " Sickos, " who didn’t have horns on their heads. " They looked just like everyone, you couldn’t ever, ever know. " Little Michelle worries that she herself is a monster for making her younger sister Madeline play-act sex games involving The Dukes of Hazzard and Battlestar Galactica, even though she doesn’t know what sex actually is. Here Tea is honest and funny; she nails the ridiculousness of being a kid whose moral sensibility takes shape in a confusing world.

Tea’s years in Catholic schools did less to shape her morals than to turn her into a rebel in pouffed pink hair and a mini-skirt with a fondness for Lords of the New Church. Early on, she strives to understand people: how can asshole bully boys appreciate Pink Floyd’s The Wall? Why does everybody look down on blacks and Puerto Ricans, and when did being Italian get to be okay, even good? Who decided? She has a couple of fellow-rebel friends, but in the end she’s left alone to make sense of the world and her place in it. Her spirit bucks the desolation around her. " Chelsea is the kind of city where hope of improvement is thin and minimal . . . you spent most of your hope on maintaining, on things not getting any worse. "

Tea always maintains a certain distance and clearheaded self-awareness. Not until about 260 pages in does she get around to being gay, but that’s the way it happened: it took her a couple of decades, a few half-assed relationships with guys, and a killer case of girl lust to get there. And then she comes roaring out of the closet full speed, afflicted with a self-righteousness that she can reflect on in tones of subtle self-mockery.

The book builds to a family crisis involving the sisters’ affable pothead stepdad. For a long time they suspect that he’s been spying on them in the bathroom and in their bedrooms. It’s such a " sicko " idea, though, that Tea plays elaborate mind games with herself for years, trying to convince herself that she’s the pervert for inventing such thoughts. It’s a measure of her talent that she can sustain a mood of ambiguity: is she imagining these things or not? Through it all — through the whole book — she never characterizes a single person as less than human or undeserving of sympathy. Not even the true-blue sickos. And therein lies her strength and generosity.

On Saturday, September 21, Michelle Tea will join the Stromboli’s Island of Donkeys and Dolls Cabaret Tour at Hollywood KTV Bar, 41 Essex Street; call (617) 338-8283. On Sunday, September 22, at 3 p.m., she’ll read at the New Words Bookstore, 186 Hampshire Street in Cambridge; call (617) 876-5310. Then at 7 p.m. on Sunday, she’ll sign The Chelsea Whistle at the Chelsea City café, 173 Washington Avenue in Chelsea; call (617) 884-9887.